A death

On returning from work this evening, I found a small corpse on the patio behind my apartment building. For nearly a year I've lived in Petaluma, a town of fifty-six thousand that straddles Highway 101 thirty miles north of the Golden Gate. I work for a publisher of calendars and what-have-you on the far side of town and ride my bike to and fro. When I wheel into the gravel of the parking area behind the three-story converted house the neighborhood cats eye me and stretch, stalking off. Today only the silver was about and we are not on friendly terms. He ignored me. I parked my bike where it would block the woman who lives upstairs from claiming an extra space (she does this when her lover comes to call; both own large vehicles) and walked over to the patio area that leads to my back door. There, at the base of one of the posts that supports the upstairs balcony, lay the dead animal. I had never seen it before but I knew its parents: this was the offspring of the pathetic possum who blundered into my bedroom five days ago just before sunup. I see the possums from time to time, and hear one almost nightly, the sound it makes while eating the cat food left on the patio terrifically loud. The cats want to be the possums' friend, and the youngest cat, the black one, eases right up to it, is ignored. The dead possum lay on its side, its pink tail only slightly curled at the very tip, its white fur fresh and soft, its mouth only very slightly agape, revealing tiny sharp teeth. I wondered whether it had been killed by one of the two cats who sleep on my bed and the idea angered me, but seeing no wounds and refusing to draw any conclusions from a single feline hair on the dead possum's lip, I became far more interested in the body of the animal than in the identity of its murderer. Only a possum's ears have any claim to beauty, and a young possum has translucent, spotted ears not entirely unlike the petal of the Romneya coulteri that bloomed today outside my window. I buried the possum, hacking through the thin concrete skin poured over the parking area, making a small, deep hole between the handsomest of the trees, carrying the small, soft, limp body on a clean sheet of newspaper and setting it gently in the bottom of its grave, then hurriedly raking the dirt and stones over it.