I parked the car after the school run and took the core of the apple I’d been eating to the guinea pigs on my way past. There, at end of the cage, lay a potato-shaped lump.  

“Oh no,” I said as I knelt to confirm what I already knew, that Nutmeg, the matriarch of our pig family, had died. 

“What?” grunted my fourteen-year-old son as he slumped past on his way to the house.

“Nutmeg has died.”

“Oh,” he said, his voice rising to betray his teenage apathy. 

He wavered a moment, glancing toward the cage, then turned and continued his slouch toward the house, blue school bag slung over his shoulder.

I buried her under the tea tree beside the graves of her two children, Storm and Gumnut. Her body was still warm as I cradled it into her final resting place. I had buried her children quickly, wanting to get the gruesome task over and done with, but with Nutmeg I lingered, crouching by the hole to stroke her silky, brown coat and say my silent goodbye.  

It wasn’t just that she was my favourite, though she was, unashamedly, my favourite. It was that her death signified more than the end of her life, it was the end our life as a family with guinea pigs. I knew that her husband, Flash, the sole survivor, would have to be rehomed, unless I could borrow a companion pig to help him to see out his days.

Guinea pigs are social creatures. They have been known to die from solitary confinement. In some places it is illegal to have only one. I’d long worried about what to do with the last remaining, but I never expected it to be Flash, the frail old patriarch with a slow stride and a cataract, who’d outlive his wife and children. 

My son was eight when we got Nutmeg and Flash. Nick was a good age to take on the responsibility of pet ownership. A good age to use pets to learn about the birds and the bees. I grappled with the questionable ethics of backyard breeding, before deciding to allow them to have at least a litter, and to use it as a learning experience.

Before the litter was even born, we’d developed a habit of sitting for long periods by the cage. It was meditative, watching them bustle about, up and down the ramp, through the plastic tunnel, in and out of the blue igloo. Via google we learnt that the hilarious growling whole-body vibrate Flash did when near Nutmeg is called rumble-strutting, and it indicates affection. We learnt that the eccentric sudden leap accompanied by a mid-air twist was called popcorning, and it indicates happiness. I felt a vicarious surge of joy every time they popcorned. 

When the first litter was born, Nutmeg came into her own as a mother, guiding her four babies down the ramp and chatting to them, constantly, with encouraging squeaks, while they bopped along behind her with a chorus of chirpy peeps. 

“Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy…” I joked to Nick as we watched them. 

It was easy to make up words for them. They were constantly chirruping, peeping and making a hysterical high-pitched scream, called ‘wheeking,’ whenever we walked into the backyard, that Nick and I translated as, “Feed us!! Feed us!!” 

Flash was also frequently rumble-strutting at Nutmeg, even after two litters and the ‘snip, snip’ operation. 

“Hey there, pretty lady,” I imagined him saying with a low drawl as he sidled up alongside her, vibrating.  

They were a dream couple. They raised two litters of healthy babies and got to keep one from each.  During the pandemic, they got an extension on their home. Nick, aged ten, spent hours building them mazes and miniature playground equipment from scrap wood, though Flash always preferred his blue igloo, humping it along on his back like a turtle in a way that made us laugh. 

Years later, as I was feeding them their hand-picked grass, a job that had long been my sole responsibility, Flash humped his igloo along to reach the stalks, and I pointed it out to Nick, aged fourteen, as he headed towards the car.

“Flash is being a turtle.”

“Huh,” he grunted, barely achieving a syllable. 

“Nothing.”

When the second daughter died, I told Nick we’d lost another pig as I made dinner. He’d just returned from his girlfriend’s house, and I expected a monosyllabic reply, but he made actual eye contact with me as he gasped, “Not Nutmeg?” 

“No,” I said, resisting the urge to hug him. “Not Nutmeg.”

When Nutmeg did die, I arranged for Flash to move in with my friend’s pig, who was coincidently also recently bereaved, having lost her sister to a dog attack. It seemed like fate. I sent Nick, who was at his girlfriend’s house, a video captioned Flash meeting Luna.  

I imagined him watching the clip of Flash rumble-strutting up to his new woman. My phone beeped. I read his reply. 

Nice. 

*

Alexandra O’Sullivan lives in Regional Victoria, Australia. She writes fiction, creative non-fiction, articles and reviews. Her work has appeared in publications such as Westerly, Meanjin and The Big Issue Fiction Edition. She works as a high school English teacher and was recently included in the anthology Teacher, teacher published by Affirm Press. Her current work-in-progress is an anthology of interconnected school stories. Instagram: @alexandraosullivan84