Week 10

Crafton Boulevard, Crafton, PA

“It’s the curse of the Dead Opossum on Crafton Boulevard,” Mark had said to me one night while at 11:30 p.m. he was driving me home from work. I had looked over at him from the passenger’s side seat and felt concerned, wondered if I had pushed him too far by asking him to pick me when I could have been a nice person, when I could have looked up the bus schedule, when I could have taken the two buses, and when I could have gotten home past 2 a.m.

Mark calls where he lives “Crapton.” The people drive on his road like they’re going to die and this is the place they’re going to, so they think they might as well do it on a road they’re familiar with.

At first I didn’t know what opossum Mark was referring to, but then I remembered seeing the dead one not more than 20 feet down the road from his apartment. It was a big hunk of a thing, its fur the only thing moving as cars zoomed past the two curves in the road. 

I felt bad as we had passed the dead animal in the daylight, dried blood scraped across the asphalt; it reminded me of how whenever I pick my skin too deep and minutes or hours later realized it had bleed badly and smeared on me and then it dried a deep red brown. 

The opossum’s pink intestines nearby the rest of its body; you could almost mistake it for blood, but blood doesn’t clump that badly after death.

I felt bad for the thing. Normally I wouldn’t care. I’d think, good, one less furry beast I have to fear in the dark of night; but you’d think that my being the owner of three smaller, equally tailed rodents would make me more sympathetic, more of a bleeding heart to see a member of their supposed animal family die. (I find later that opossums are marsupials; rats are “rodents.”)

Normally I wouldn’t, but seeing it during the day, thinking about its possible opossum babies, now more likely than before to die before the real warmth of spring, I realized how awful it was.

A day ago, on my way to my internship, I see another dead opossum, not even a mile away, on the other side of the road. His white-furred face and closed eyes are the first things I see  when I round the curve. I feel an awful pit in my stomach.

March 21st 7:30 p.m.

I am on the flatbed of Mark’s truck, once an RV and now stripped down to bare frame in the back. I sit on the deck boards that he lined up, screwed to the metal frame, and made a sad platform out of. I tell him we need to put a sign in the back window that reads, “Honk if you love eyesores.”

Cars pass, slowing down before the curve and also so drivers can turn their heads and watch my back against the road and watch Mark work on his vehicle.

Birds are all atwitter around us. It’s slightly cold, not cold enough for me to see my breath but cold enough, apparently this morning, for it to have snowed; yet not warm enough for it to stay past two hours or so.

As Mark works to unscrew one specific board, an addition on top of the other boards, the only way I am guessing he could transport it, I skip over to the one window my eyes can reach (considering my short height) of the abandoned house. The blinds are drawn, and all I can see are the shapes of door frames, other windows. I am afraid if I keep looking I might find someone in there, as Mark has been hinting at these last couple of weeks.

Mark sings to himself, improvising lyrics to the tune of Yeah Yeah Yeah’s “Y Control,” the last song we listened to on the way home.

I hear a couple coming up a path that runs parallel to Crafton Boulevard; I wonder if what they’re walking on is a trail. I have seen many joggers, many reluctant dog parents in pajamas follow behind their eager pets. I can’t tell if it’s purposefully made for that, as some of the trees that separate the path from the road are spray painted with a green dot on them. Some have a orange/pink plastic flag on them. I wonder if they’re just going to bulldoze it down and make the road wider.

I turn to look at the couple. They’ve walked to the end and are coming back around. They’re two men actually. One spits.

I think about opossums and how they are spelled so oddly, how I meant to look them up in the library and couldn’t find them on Wikipedia because I spelled it as “possum.” I wondered as I sat there getting frustrated with the Internet why I was only getting results for large marsupials in Australia.

The Australian ones have taken cute pictures, their babies on their backs, their eyes large and frozen. Once I have the correct spelling, I watch a video of a “tamed” opossum cuddled up in blankets on someone’s windowsill, watch how he is given a strawberry and, jaws wide and teeth marvelous and many, simply chomps it down, switching it from one side to the other.

It’s kind of cute. Except that jaw scares me. 

My rats, in my biased opinion, are much more cute when they eat; they hold their food in their two front paws (“so human-like,” Mark said when he watched them eat) and nibble. They have only four teeth (two upper and two lower) that are constantly growing, which is why they gnaw constantly. I don’t think marsupials have the same problem. (Fun fact: the name “rodent” is derived from the Latin verb “rodere,” or “gnawing.”)

Opossums also have opposable thumbs, which if rats had -- we as a human race would be in trouble and might as well get used to rats. I personally would be delighted. 

Opossums that we are familiar with are common opossums (Didelphis marsupialis) and are found also in North, Central, and South America; the opossums we are familiar with are also called Virginia opossums and were considered a distinct species (or Dipdelphis virginiana).

I also am intrigued by the origin of the name: “opossum” comes from the early 17th century Virginia Algonquian word “opassom,” derived from “op” (meaning “white”) and “assom” (meaning “dog”). Which is funny as most dictionaries describe opossums as “cat-sized.”

Mark asks me to help him in the basement with holding wood as he cuts it. The saw keeps kicking back because I don’t know how to keep the long five foot board still. I think Mark is frustrated with me.

It’s dark outside now when we come back out. Only Mark whistles a tune, probably Cat Stevens. The birds are quiet, the only chirp a distant one. I strain to hear some animal presence, some animal something, but the cars that pass, while not frequent, nevertheless pass when the previous car, its engine and tire noise almost fading to nothing, are almost out of earshot.

I look up at the face of the house, the door and its awning I consider an open mouth waiting for visiters and the windows two frozen eyeballs, and watch the flicker of car lights against it. It must be lonely to be an empty house.

I think of the house I grew up in in Jackson, New Jersey. I think about how I visited it after I had moved into several other houses, none as equally loved as my childhood home. I think about the condemned papers on its door, how one of my friends peeled the screen door open and declared we could go in.

I think about these things too much.

I look at this abandoned house in front of me and try to image the spirit of the structure. It must be forlorn. When I moved into the Squirrel Hill apartment, I thought it would be like the house in New Jersey, an old place I wanted to pour myself into and fix and let know was loved.

I realize how fragile and naive those ideas are. Sometimes I am sure that is what my poems are like. Sometimes I am sure that is not what my writing is like. Sometimes I am sure it doesn’t matter what my writing is like. 

Sometimes I am sure I know what it is to write. Sometimes I think too much about rodents and perhaps not enough about marsupials. Especially those in Mark’s backyard.