Roadkill

It’s dark when you get on your bike outside of the lab and head for home. It was dark in the morning when you arrived. If your little subbasement desk space had any windows, you’d have seen the sun rise and fall. But you didn't. All you saw today was your little monitor and your code running, and now the world outside looks exactly the same.

Today, you read three academic papers and understood about half of each. You wrote approximately two paragraphs of your dissertation. You tried to get your simulations to run properly, and you’ll find out tomorrow if they did. You spent a lot of time on Reddit in between.  And it’s not like this isn’t where you want to be! You still want to be an academic someday—not like all your burnt-out peers or the industry dropouts—but there just wasn’t anything that really needed to happen today. There’s nothing that could’ve gotten done today that can’t get done tomorrow or next week or the week after. It’s been like this for months and maybe even years. Years of days that feel like weeks, and weeks that go by like seconds, and you wish you could squeeze something more out of all that time that’s just going.

So you bike back to the other side of campus, toward graduate student housing. You pedal. Cars swerve to pass you. There are big grand brick buildings with clingy plants growing all over them and streetlights just starting to flicker on, but it all just sorta blurs. You’re going home.

Up in the intersection ahead, there’s something in the middle of the street, lit up under a streetlight. A little lump. It could be clothes or a bit of tire, but when you get closer, it’s a possum. A dead one. There’s blood in its fur and in the tire marks on either side of its body. Its head is dented, and little pink bits hang out of its skull. You have to look away. This thing is dead dead, and not just faking it.

A car honks behind you, and you look back, and the driver has both hands up, and he mouths something. Maybe it’s “What are you doing?” This guy has places to be, and come to think of it, so do you. No more time for roadkill rubbernecking. You haven’t had dinner yet, and this day is not over.

So you pedal. The bike chain whirs. You fly toward the outskirts of campus. Large maintained lawns slowly disappear, and buildings turn from well-spaced brick to downright Soviet high-rises, and you are almost home. 

The University called these buildings “efficiency apartments” in the move-in pamphlet, and efficient yours is. Three hundred square feet, split between you and your roommate. You have a dresser you found on Craigslist. You have a university-supplied twin mattress, bedframe, and desk. They even graced you with a little kitchenette. You and your roommate share pots and pans and a single kitchen knife from Target that the two of you split the cost of years ago. 

You throw your bike frame over your shoulder and lug it up the stairwell. You are almost home, and this is your time now. Finally. This could be time for dinner. You have meal-prepped spaghetti waiting for you in the fridge. All you’ll need to do is turn on the microwave. Or work could continue, and you could finish digesting those papers, and you could get something accomplished today. But when you set your bag down and switch into sweats, you do not do any of that. You slump onto your bed. You pull out your phone and pull up Reddit. And you scroll through video after video, image after image. There are cats scrunching into small spaces and strongly worded tweets and “candid” videos where everyone seems to be very aware of the camera.

But none of that’s doing it for you. So instead, you go up to the search bar, and you type in “possum.” Your shoulders tense when the results load. The first post is a picture from an account called OGPossumFacts. Did you know that little possum kids cling to their mama’s back, and that’s how they all travel around? You click on the account and there are more pictures. More possum facts. Their body temperature is too low for rabies! This should interest you. This should be like fun-fact central, but you can’t shake that first fact. Those big-eyed fuzzy little possum kids, clinging to their mother’s back, and what would happen to them when that mother was hit by a car? Would they go flying and scatter and splatter against whatever surface they collided with? Would they hold on too tightly and get crushed by the same car that took out their mother?

One of your eyes gets a little blurry, and this is so stupid, like it’s one hundred percent hypothetical, and there are definitely better things you could be doing with your time. But you’re still scrolling! Next is an image of a little possum face next to a kangaroo. Did you know that possums are the only marsupials north of Mexico? You did not know that. Apparently, when they’re really young, they basically live in the mama possum’s pouch, and it is warm and safe and generally pretty cozy there. All these little possum siblings, cuddled up in the pouch, drinking milk, living the life.

But now there’s an even more horrible situation to imagine: one moment, these little possum babies could be cozy and safe, and then there’s an impact, a flash, and then they’re trapped inside their dead mother’s pouch in the middle of the road until they either starve or another car takes them out, and that’s up there on the most gruesome ways to die. It’s enough to get you off Reddit and Googling “can you rescue baby possums from a dead mother’s pouch,” and there are videos! There are videos online and this must be a thing. You hover over the video and see a preview of a guy with a knife performing what looks like a mini surgery to get them out of the pouch, and that’s enough for you. You can figure out how to do it later. Right now, you just need to get there and keep them from getting hit by another car. You can worry about how to make the incision later.

Reasons not to do this start popping up in your head. You don’t even know if there were baby possums in the pouch, let alone living ones. The possum could’ve been there for hours. You could catch some weird non-rabies marsupial disease from them. But there are risks to everything, and you’re already off Reddit and standing up, and you’ll be plenty careful.

So you go to the kitchenette and grab the shared knife. But you don’t want to be some mega-creep walking around campus with a knife out. So you grab the whole knife block, and the knife is a little wobbly in there, so you pull out some Saran Wrap and wind it around the whole thing, end over end, until it’s just one secured ball of plastic. You squeeze it into your backpack, but a corner of the block juts into your back, and you try rearranging really quickly, and when you pull the straps back on, it’s poking you in a different spot, and that’s just not going to work. You’ll have to carry the knife bundle instead, and that should mean no bike either. So you tuck the package underneath your arm like an oversized football, and you begin to run. 

You go down the stairwell of your high-rise, and your footsteps echo and slap as you go, and there’s probably some neighbor who isn’t too pleased about that, but there’s no time. There are little possum babies that could be turned to roadkill at any moment. You push out the door. And you are running. Back toward main campus. You suck in air, and there’s no way you can get enough through your nostrils and so you start to huff through your mouth. 

You’re sprinting. Every single step and breath you feel and move and your heart pumps and you’re going. Back under trees and streetlights and toward the intersection, and there’s that little lump in the middle of the road. The asphalt is still smeared red, and you skid to a stop by it and drop the plastic bundle to the ground and tear it open and grab the knife. And you look at the heap of the possum carcass, and you don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re so in it now. 

You can’t see the possum pouch, but the thing’s whole body is all twisted in the middle of the street, and you don’t know a thing about possum anatomy in the first place, and you’re not about to start watching the video here in the middle of this intersection. So you try to recall as best as you can from the highlights you skimmed earlier, and you take the knife and push it into the possum’s abdomen. There’s more resistance than you expected, and you have to really tug on the knife to make a cut. You give it a hard pull. 

And then everything just sort of slops out. It’s like the thickest noodles in meat sauce you’ve ever seen. And it spills out in slow motion, and there’s a little puff of steam, and you gag from the smell and the sight. You poke around with the knife a little bit, just moving things around in there, shifting little attached bits, but you don’t know what you’re looking at. You sure aren’t seeing any mini possums though. You take a little step back and look at the situation. And maybe this possum didn’t have a pouch. And with clearer eyes, maybe this isn’t even a female possum. For one thing, there’s a little nubby possum penis at the base of its torso.

You stand there. You want to cry, and not because of the dead possum. If anything, this situation is better than you imagined. There were no mini possums harmed at all. Maybe you should be celebrating! But when you look down at the knife, there is marsupial blood splattered just about everywhere. All over your shirt cuffs and your hands and underneath your fingernails. And it is dark and cold, and you don’t know why you’re there anymore. For a few minutes, you really thought you were doing something. You really thought you could do something. But you weren’t and you couldn’t. 

And here you are. This possum is dead dead dead, and it is ugly and twisted and torn and you have only made it more so. You have spread its blood further and spilled out its internal organs and for what? For what? A little tear forms in your eye. You keep standing there until you hear a car in the distance, and that snaps you out of it, because you’re in the intersection with this bloody knife in your hands and this like very amateurly dissected possum carcass still steaming in the street, and that can’t be the best look.  

And you don’t know what to do, other than to just get out of there before this situation gets any worse or weirder. So you slip the bloody knife back into the block and grab what’s left of the Saran Wrap and rebundle the kitchen set as quickly as you can, and you take off again, even faster now.

If you thought you were in it before, boy are you in it now. Every other step, your neck swivels back to check if Campus Safety or some ground crew is running after you, and your heart pounds and pounds and pounds and you breathe and breathe and breathe. The whole world is in focus. The big campus trees that have been there for decades. The funny flickering streetlights on this side of campus. Chalk on the sidewalks advertising campus protests. All the buildings in the distance with windows lit up, libraries and academic halls and dormitories with lights on inside, and all sorts of little student lives within.

And you go. You just keep running. You feel every breath, every huff of air. There’s your high-rise apartment and its sheer walls of concrete. You don’t know what you’ll tell your roommate about the knife or the block, and that’s so not important right now.

Your heart is pounding when you’re back in the stairwell, and the door slams shut behind you but you’re still running. You spring up the stairs and you feel your breath and you get to your floor and get inside and throw the whole bundle into the trash, and it lands with a squish in all your standard garbage. You’ll need to get a new knife, and a new knife block. But for now, you want to wash your hands. You stand there and scrub. Your fingernails dig into your palms. The water turns red as it runs off your skin. It is warm, and it gives off steam in the sink.

Your stomach grumbles. You still haven’t eaten dinner, but the thought of meal-prepped spaghetti makes you almost retch.

So you give yourself time. You sit down and your whole body buzzes and you can’t stop thinking about this. How stupid this all was. How dangerous it could have been. How in another world, there could be a campus newspaper article about you tomorrow: “Deranged PhD Student Mutilates Possum.” And your heart is still pumping, pumping away. How long were you even out there? Five minutes? Ten? It was so stupid! You were so stupid!

But for a moment there, you really felt like you could do something. You were in it, for that whole moment, and it felt like it mattered. Until it didn’t. You glance out the window. It’s dark outside, of course, and it’s pretty dim inside too. And you sit and you think and think and you keep thinking and you keep sitting. And eventually, you pull your phone back out. But this time, you don’t go to Reddit. You Google “animal volunteering near me,” and the light from the phone’s screen shines up on your face.

About the Author

Jack Whaler is a writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a graduate of the UCLA Extension Certificate Program in Creative Writing. His work has previously appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review and A Thin Slice of Anxiety.