The narrator is a health care aide who cares for a disabled woman (Betty) as best as possible and tends to her many hamsters, including Brutus, with the ultimate compassion.
It seems that Betty’s real confidant and friend is not the hamster she obsesses over in the story, but the young man who cleans out the hamster cages, cooks her meals, and buries her once-beloved rodents in the backyard.
This story originally appeared in Fleas on the Dog Online in 2020.
Mark Tulin is a poet, short story writer, and author residing in Ventura. He also has time to take pictures of the quirky people and strange objects he finds on Southern California's beaches.
Gordon Lawrie (author and editor of Friday Flash Fiction) writes, “Tulin’s skill lies in raising his central characters above everything that surrounds them.”
Mark had appeared in Fiction on the Web, smokebox, Vita Brevis Press, The Literary Hatchet, Amethyst Review, Friday Flash Fiction, The Daily Drunk, and podcasts and anthologies. His books include Magical Yogis, Awkward Grace, and The Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories.
Keep up to date on all of Mark Tulin’s stories, poetry, and books at:
Photo © Mark Tulin
Music (faded in and out) from Comming Back by Loco Lobo under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Story Radio Podcast
A monthly podcast dedicated to celebrating the literary short story and all things bookish. Bite-size short fiction for writers and readers everywhere. Listen to a short story or interview on the 1st of each month at 12:00am.
Hosted by Tabitha Potts and Martin Nathan open to established, new and emerging writers in the English language. Always free to submit.
We are a small organisation run by volunteer writers and producers (Tabitha Potts and Martin Nathan) hoping to benefit the writing community.
Our eventual aim is to be self-funding and to pay our writers and actors for each short story we produce.
Visit our Patreon if you would like to support our work and access exclusive content.
Send us your stories
Visit the Submissions page on our website
Or contact Tabitha Potts at [email protected]
About us
Tabitha Potts is a writer living in East London. She has had several short stories published in print and online and short-listed for various awards, most recently the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize. In a previous life, she was a BBC Radio Drama producer.
Read more at http://www.tabithapotts.com.
Martin Nathan has worked as a labourer, showman, pancake chef, fire technician, and a railway engineer. His short fiction has been published by Tangent Press, HCE and Grist and his poetry has appeared in Finished Creatures, Erbacce and Aesthetica. His novel – A Place of Safety is published by Salt Publishing.
Website: http://www.martinnathan.co.uk
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Please do consider supporting us - we produce all our audio fiction as volunteers but would love to be able to pay our writers and actors.
