Cameron Darc

Opossum

Something’s alive, white, on the ground near her feet.

The opossum is a baby. He walks across the stones too close to the woman to be aware of her presence.

She sits alone in the dark at a white plastic picnic table nursing a half-empty beer. The moon is almost full.

The opossum noses the ground. The ground is as unfamiliar to him as the moon. It’s covered in the kind of gray oval stones that hurt children’s bare feet to walk on.

He sees her legs. His eyes turn up to her face, deep black, unreflecting—“What are you?”—then he’s blind drunk, afraid. He gets the shakes. He doesn’t try to escape. He’s undecided. She waits. Neither moves. The woman lets her cigarette burn to her fingers. A column of ash drops to the ground. They’re captive to each other.

When the woman encounters danger, she too freezes. She waits for the other to act. Fear fills her throat. No sound escapes. Her spine curls under. Her hips tuck inward. Her lower half numbs, disconnected from the feet. Her shoulders are wings. She floats over her own body.

Now the animal’s strangeness, his whiteness against the night, casts away any friendship she had with the yard. She is an alien unto herself.

An adult opossum knows how to make herself into a corpse. Her mouth hangs open and her tongue lolls out. She releases a smell. It’s an immediate, thoughtless response. Like fainting, an intelligent automatism.

Now the woman digs her phone out of her pocket. She holds the device in front of her face. There is the blurry white smudge in the middle of the dark screen.

The flash breaks the spell that turned the opossum to stone. He turns his eyes, his head, and finally his body away from the woman. He waddles away from her. He does this in slow motion. She watches his long tail disappear behind her garage.

She pads forward, in her slippers. She makes her footfalls light as deer hooves in snow. She abandons her beer, her pack of cigarettes, her house.

Question: Why are all fairytales the same?

They’re all about death.

Question: How do insects know the difference between death and stillness?

When life flees from human bodies, they look like cardboard. Roadkill looks like rotting meat. The opossum is one of the few mammals to eat roadkill and that is why, scrounging the highways, the opossum sometimes becomes roadkill itself.

Question: Why did the opossum want the world dark?

He feeds at night, which means he is connected to dreams, your dreams.

When the woman was still a child, she read about talking animals and princesses and cannibal witches and children left in the woods to starve. She was bored—or not bored exactly, desultory. She didn’t yet know the full meaning of the word for the feeling that would define her life. She had understood death at two years old (she thought she’d already died herself, probably more than once), and didn’t see the point of learning more about it. She didn’t believe in rescue. She didn’t admire strength, nor weakness. She admired rocks and stones. She admired the moon, rising behind the sun at four o’clock, following her on her bicycle everywhere, laughing at the trees and houses and the men who designed curves in the road, skirting obstacles, always chasing her, just behind in the nearest gap, fast as a train or a car or as her legs could peddle or a hill could roll her downward, air licking at her face and lifting her hair.

Desultory. Rotting. On the third of July, the woman felt the shape of a thousand jackknives exploding in her chest and out of her mouth and eyes. Nothing could calm the dread.

When a human meets an opossum at the edge of the forest, the human is in crisis. This meeting is an invitation. She must find the path, or her soul will murder her. Now, or her soul will summon a bus to smash her. Tomorrow she will walk into a bus. Maybe a deranged pickup. It doesn’t matter.

Together woman and opossum edge a line of blue recycling bins, heading toward the lot where teenagers shoot beer bottles and make out all night. The lot leads to a small forest. The opossum slicks toward it, a worm of light. The woman ducks under a clearing between five trees. Cigarette butts and crushed beer cans litter the floor. Branches cling to her bathrobe, catching it, pulling the fabric, threads untethering like an endless ball of wool. She follows the opossum deeper, where the path, she remembers, is a breeding ground for fungus, the forest floor overgrown with rotting logs sprouting chanterelle and white and yellow lace. Her feet abandon their slippers in the wet ground. A stone pierces her bare heel and lightning shoots up her calf. Right—five toes spread and fumble blind, reaching for roots—then left. Her palms pet tree bodies, strangers in the dark, and her face scrapes against a thick, broken bough.

Before the woman met the opossum, she had lunch with her father. Her father was dying in a hospital. He needed someone to rub his hands with cream and smooth his lips with Vaseline. His breath smelled terrible, and he needed someone to brush his teeth.

In the hospital room, in his motorized bed, behind the glass of his watery eyes, his voice came from an exhausted place. He called to her, “Daughter?” She rubbed her father’s cold hands with cold cream. She left her body. She flew away. Her hands were not her hands.

She believed the parentheses between life and death—that second or hour—was the realest part of human life. Her father was a defenseless animal lying prostrate in bed: this was the other side of frenzied activity, the other side of distraction.

The air in the hospital put her half to sleep. She fed her father rice pudding. Small cold spoonfuls of pudding. He leered at the tiny plastic tub. She loved how much pleasure he took in the pudding. Life narrowed to something you could spoon. Dry lips marooned to a body, a hand touching metal touching mouth, cold sweetness on a dry tongue, down a red throat.

Through the wall she heard a shoe bomb explode in a train station in Brussels. In here, she thought, people are dying slow, while out there, they’re dying fast. Her father glanced sidelong out the window. The trees stood alert. A drop of saliva stained his cracked bottom lip. She lifted the spoon again. His eyes came back to her. Her hand dipped the spoon into the plastic pot, airplained goo into his mouth. A before-language groan of pleasure escaped from him as he swallowed.

“And how are we doing today?” The pretty nurse carried in a tray.

The woman waited for the nurse to leave before dumping the gelatinous omelet into the toilet. It slid whole off the tray. “If you ate this, you’d die,” she said.

Question: Why would the omelet kill the father?

The woman believed that if you wanted to die, if you’d begun to see death as a deliverance and life as a humiliating trial, eating anything unappealing, even one faded, browning lettuce leaf, would deplete all your remaining energy. You must, in those moments, devour only that which gives you pleasure. Nothing else. Food must be vacuous and pointless, like that primordial memory, that lunch without food, the lover’s body. Food that tastes of cardboard, pure fibrous nourishment is the same as death. Anything without beauty, without inconvenience and incongruity, without the possibility of hangover or sugar high or stomachache or a poisoning, that’s death, waxy and plastic. Life cannot exist without cavities.

In college, when the woman was a girl, she dove into her own mind like a glove or a grave. “Suicidal depression with unspecified psychotic features,” a white coat eventually wrote in a notepad. Her biggest fear was that her father was dead. She stopped sleeping, eating, shitting for the most part, talking, brushing her teeth, and showering. Night swallowed day. She peed in empty yogurt containers by her boyfriend’s bed. He was forty-five, had three credit cards, and was away for three months, shooting a movie in China.

Eventually the girl woke to her boyfriend’s confused sobbing. His showpiece apartment was ravaged by his favorite pet. Perhaps that’s too cruel, perhaps he did love her and was terrified. Perhaps he didn’t know what to do. He dragged her outside to find a hairdresser who would cut the knots from her matted hair.

They walked for blocks and blocks. He gripped one of her hands to pull her forward. It was a sunny afternoon and the light hit her eyes hard. Her boyfriend wore an expensive brown leather jacket and black jeans. She wore pajamas.

They arrived in front of a glittery rectangle of windows and mirrors. Her boyfriend dropped her hand, pressed a credit card into it. “Take care of her,” he told the woman at the front desk. Then he popped his earphones in and turned around. She watched his back disappear. If he’s calling a psych ward, she thought, I’ll jump off his balcony.

The hairdresser had warm eyes and a long curly beard. He gestured to a chair. She sat. She watched him look at her. Then she watched him leave.

When the hairdresser came back, he thrust a white paper bag into her hands.

“Eat,” he said.

He took out his shears.

The bag smelled like butter. The girl listened to a ringing in the pads of her fingers. Her tongue whetted. She dug into the bag. Hot dough encrusted with hard sugar. Her fingers shook. She ripped the dough with her teeth. Sugar stung the insides of her cheeks. Hot burnt crust scraped the roof of her mouth and the top of her throat. The scissors snapped around her ears. She couldn’t swallow, so she pointed to the sink.

“Water?” He asked.

The hairdresser handed her a plastic cup. She drank. She licked her fingers clean. Her long hair was gone in the mirror. It stuck to the shiny black gown around her shoulders. It carpeted the floor in brown curtains. She looked back at the mirror. The face had empty eyes. Sand filled the corners.

“Fuck, drink, sometimes eat,” the hairdresser said to the colorless face, “Not a reason to live but the only way out.”

The girl listened as the face nodded at the hairdresser. This was the first kindness.

After that she survived. She dug into stranger bodies. Stared down strange backs to nowhere.

If you have ever seen a bird fly into a closed window you know she looks dead. You will notice how shock freezes her body. She lies unmoving, her eyes shuttered slits, her breathing imperceptible. In this state, she will not react to your touch, she will not react to a hulking human bearing down on her, lifting her into a box, and placing her in the cool dark shade. The shock can last minutes or an hour. If not too badly hurt, she will eventually recover her senses and hop out.

The yellow warbler, up close, has little whisker-like hairs near her beak. Only injured, shocked, and lying dormant does she allow you to see her face that close.

When there is no possibility of escape, the deer freezes. Before her predator begins tearing her open alive. This is the kindness of nature. The deer does not witness those last seconds in the state of sensory agitation we call consciousness. The woman protects fallen birds in boxes because she worries that insects will crawl on them, attracted to their stillness, wanting to swallow the wetness of their eyes.

What does the woman know? What has she buried? She’s buried a lot. There are little boxes of birds all over the garden. In each box is a memory. And those memories are still alive, waiting to wake up and start squawking and singing and to hop out. They’re all different colors and species.  They all could kill her.

If she reopens a box, by accident, she is in a movie. Even now, the movie can suddenly start, making her leave her body. This morning, she left her body as she walked around the track behind the high school. The ground shook and the green turf waved and the rain smelled. She used to call this dread. Now she doesn't know what to call it. What does one call blind fear that drives you into white rooms that exist only inside your head?

Twenty minutes of forest. Then the interstate cuts through. Empty except the crooked lights of one oblivious drunk and a little further, a headless racoon. The opossum stops. He raises his head, sniffs the air, then his hands, eerie little paws and pads stretching out, pink like children’s fingers. Exhaust and white light spray from the drunk’s car as it swerves incontinently around a corner. They face each other between two busted lamp poles, her bent forward, him on hind legs.

“Where’s your mother?” she asks.

He stares at her.

She says, “I am going to lose my father and I am going to fail at losing him.”

Question: How do torture victims survive?

By conjuring the loved one’s face.

If you cannot conjure a single face, can you survive?

The baby opossum has the voice of an old man:

“You buried yourself.

Find the girl you buried and dig her out.

She’s ready for you now.

The old crone has rotted away to bones.

Her skull that once kissed you is hollow.

Nothing’s there for you anymore.

Go.”

“But I’m afraid.”

“You are afraid as you should be,” the opossum says.

I’m afraid as I should be, the woman thinks, I must humiliate myself. I must humble myself. I must kneel in the mud and dig. She whispers, “I will lose someone and I will not survive losing them.”

“You are afraid that you will survive it.”

The woman shudders. The baby opossum continues:

“There’s nothing back there. The unlived life is not a life.

The world is not only night.

It’s day.

Now be quiet. If you feel you might trip, crawl.

Use your hands.”

The woman falls to her knees and crawls. Crawling feels better. She likes the mud under her fingernails. Her spine was sore from carrying the weight of her head. She wails, she howls, loud and cloying. Bats skydive through trees. The moon trembles with her voice. She hears cicadas, crickets, and a thousand unrecognizable creatures slithering, scuffling, singing in the dark. She hears faraway frogs hiccup in the night.

An image, detached from time:

She is a child. She rescues a mother cat and three kittens from an abandoned house. The mother’s milk has dried up because of starvation. The child doesn’t know what to feed the kittens–they are still too small. But the cat allows the kittens to gnaw her nipples. She allows them to suck her dry breasts for days, despite the pain. She just lies there on a blanket on the linoleum floor near the radiator under the washing machine and opens herself. Eventually her milk returns. She allows the kittens to gnaw her until her body produces what they need. The child watches the wormy kittens grow playful, fat, and furry. A loophole opens in the floor, and the child falls into a world where order reigns over chaos.

The woman crawls across the asphalt highway and her knees drag and bleed. On the other side, the woman knuckles rotting wood and leaves. Her knees smash into cold ground, dragging her calves forward. The tie around her bathrobe comes undone. It trails behind. She follows the opossum’s long bald tail, they are going deeper and the woods are becoming wetter, damp, sweating like an old gravestone in the august sun. Soon she’s close enough to bite the end of the opossum’s tail. She inhales opossum smell. Sweet, like overripe apples and urine. A bat flaps by her ear, she is no longer afraid of bats, no longer afraid of them living in her hair.

The wood opens like an infinity pool. Ahead stands the mansion from her childhood nightmares. Its windows make vertical pools of light in the darkness. Her heartbeat thrums in her ears.

The nightmares are always the same. In the nightmares the child follows her father around a large, white, airy house, with balustrades and stairs and lots of light. Father and child call out to each other, but the child loses the father. She wanders, listless, around the endless house until she arrives at a kitchen. She discovers a pit in the floor. An old woman lies in the pit. The pit woman calls the child. The child climbs into the pit to help her. The child is inside the pit, but the old woman is already dead, has been dead all along. The child’s hands slip on the sides of the pit, trying to claw out. Dry dirt like sand falls on her face and dress. The dead woman wraps her arms around the child. The dead woman’s arms are bones with flaps of skin hanging off. The child cries. No one will ever find her. (No one ever found the old woman who fell in the pit.) Some nights the child is certain she will die, and she is resigned to it. Others, she wakes up screaming but no sound comes out.

Opossum closes in on their destination. He opens the mansion’s glass iron door with a push of his head. She smells her mother’s perfume. Lemon verbena and an undercurrent of urine. A bright vestibule leads to a long white corridor and stairs garlanded with fairy lights that spiral into darkness. Her father’s mountainous collection of science fiction paperbacks totters from the ceiling. Too bad the books are crawling with bugs.

Opossum stains the marble tiles with mud. Her teddy bear slips in one of the puddles. She runs to the bear and tucks him under her arm.

“What is that smell?” Wet dog but more pungent. “Opossum is that you? Please change for dinner. Mother will be angry.”

Opossum becomes a noble gray wolf. The wolf crawls downstairs on gigantic paws. His claws clack on the tile like mother’s heels. The woman knows, deep in the emptiest part of her soul, where he’s headed.

A single halogen bulb swings from a wire, illuminating shelves of canned beans and bottled oils and sweet jarred summer fruit. A pit swallows the floor. The wolf growls. There’s something in the pit. (Mother used to dig her fingernails into daughter’s arm until daughter cried and hid.)

What is a pit? What is a bottom?

What is a bloom?

Red florets of blood on a child’s arm. She imagines the desert flower, the fish with its aquacine intelligence, the prairie dog lifting its head from its hole. She imagines rage, a scream for days.

In the hospital that morning, her father broke through a daydream, lucid in her ear: “Do you believe in the afterlife?”

“I believe in aliens.”

The afterlife was real because her soul turned into a bat and flew out the window, fell to the ground, became a gnarled stick.

“Dad, if your soul could go anywhere…” (Why did you leave me alone with your insane wife? Will I die when you die? Why did you leave me alone?)

“Where would it go?”

 “Mars.”

“Why?”

He sucked in oxygen. “You said anywhere.”

When the father closed his eyes again, the daughter escaped for a cigarette. A skeleton in slippers followed her out the sliding doors of the hospice branch.

“You can stay in there only so long before they shut your body down. Take my hand.” 

The old woman’s hand was soft and cold. 

“What is there to see in this parking lot?” 

The old woman had cataract eyes behind a milk blanket. Oatmeal dried down the front of her hospital gown tied backwards. Her hair was shorn like a small boy’s. There was a scar the shape of a hook on her temple. The young woman lit her cigarette.

“Some trees over there, some dog shit, a Range Rover, the sky.”

The old woman smiled in pain. She looked, for a moment, like the young woman’s mother looked, when she was young and beautiful and dressed for a night out.

“Here,” the old woman said. The loophole opened in the parking lot and the old woman walked toward it.

“How?” 

The old woman lifted a finger to her lips and shook her blind head.

“Are you gonna tattle on me?” she asked, crouching down near the hole, dropping her legs into the blue liquid light.

The parking lot smelled of apples going brown in the orchard, breast milk, and opossum tail, and the young woman shivered. She wouldn’t.

Baby hairs around a child’s forehead pick up the woman’s breath as she leans over the pit. Her spine elongates. She spreads her fingers. They look like pianist fingers. The wolf pushes his large nose against the woman’s ass, shoving her forward. The scent of fresh peaches mingles with the stench of overripe peaches. The old crone lies in the pit in the ground, whispering into the baby’s ear. “I am the old woman,” she tells the wolf. “The old woman is wrapped inside me. The old woman can’t leave the pit. She’s the voice that tells me to die.”

Opossum/wolf knows a place where the child will be safe. The woman lifts the sleeping child into her arms and climbs on his back.

Wolf brings the woman and the sleeping child to a small clearing with mossy rocks and a pond. The woman lays the child on a flat-topped rock. The moon laughs down on them, emptily, like it’s very tired. The woman gathers dried leaves and covers the shivering child. She stands naked and watches the child stir and her spine prickles with cold. She bends over the child’s ear, “Hello, my love,” she whispers, “Good morning my hope, my joy, my day.”

The child opens her eyes. The child’s mouth is a doll size version of the woman’s mouth. The child begins to speak, in a daze, “I like the opossum, I know him, I know mud, liquid, soft decay, I went down there, with the old witch, it was not quite as dark as the dream, and Papa was close, but it didn't matter as he wouldn't notice me anymore, the hole was deep and I was behind a barrier and no one could hear me crying and so I was quiet.”

Question: Why do little girls play dead?

The pretty nurse brought a bouquet of bright pink lilies into her father’s room. The woman sat cross legged on the floor and read her childhood diary aloud to her father. Lilies bathed the air with their obscene perfume.

“Listen to this,” she read, “Mad, mad, mad. I'm mad, I'm insane, I'm going mad.”

Her father was unconscious, but she imagined he said, “Mad also means angry.”

“What?”

“Lots of children can't voice their anger,” he continued. “Little girls are taught to be sweet and obedient and never angry.”

“Go on.”

“Madness can seem safer than anger… You can be angry at me.”

A ghost of her stood then, climbed onto the cot with her father, traced his dry mouth with her wet fingers.

“This isn’t correct,” her father whispered.

“You are dying.”

He said nothing to that. No, she imagined he said, “You’re wrong about life. Life isn’t the moment before death. Life is an incongruity, a handicap, a divine prerogative.”

She imagined taking his skeletal jaw in her hands and kissing him. She imagined the end of the fairytale, the witch burning in an oven, the child freed, reaching for her father’s hand again and finding it, being led out of the wet forest, an angry little girl, kicking at fallen apples in her path, smelling sweetness and rot, led into a clearing, where wildflowers grew uncontrollably, a beauty feast for her hungry eyes, and she imagined surrendering completely. Tiny and grateful. One moment your life is a stone in you, the next, a star.

She imagined her father saying, “And you’re wrong about one other thing. Fairytales aren’t about death.”

Her father opened his eyes. He was vulnerable, a baby animal, and she was shaking. She lost whatever familiarity she had with the hospital room. He held her in his eyes, an unknown. Tears like cat’s eye marbles rolled down his face. The loophole swallowed the pungent lilies, the deafening electric light, the waiting room television, the pretty nurse, the people dying fast and slow.

“Then what are they about?”

Wind licking your face, the rush of the hill you roll down, the moon rising behind the sun at four o’clock, a bat diving to the cry of a girl streaking through dusk. Staring down strange backs to nowhere. An opossum’s tail. A lone silver glove hanging from a tree. A spoon of rice pudding. A bird hopping out of a box, alive. A child with a song in her mouth.