roadkill.

so, it was last night, i don't know about you, but my area had a blackout. i'm driving with my family in the car, all the streetlights are out, the houses, everything is pitch black, except for two steady streams of light, one white, the other red, the lights on the cars going down the road. all of a sudden, up ahead, cars start swerving left and right, pulling into the opposite lane. my mum starts telling me to slow down slow down my dad's saying look out my brothers want to know what's happening and i'm starting to lean on the breaks with my heart pumping faster and faster and the steady stream of red is breaking the way a river parts around a rock. finally, the car ahead pulls over and i'm next in line.

for a split second time stops, and sitting in front of me in the blindness of my headlights is a possum, crouched on the road, staring right into the windshield with one black eye. for a while i can only stare as it sits down, looking at me, it's got blood and saliva slipping from its broken jaw, and worse still, i can see deep red curtains of blood falling from its eyes, like it's crying.

i pull over to the side of the road and stay with the car while my family piles out to go save it. i'm sitting there watching the whole scene unfold in the rear view mirror. the cars have stopped moving for a while, and the headlights have created this great kind of circle of light amidst this enormous blackness, as if this is the only moment in that exists in the whole world. everyone's starting to gather around it, they're all staring with their hands on their mouths the way you do.

but the possum doesn't move. it still sits there, bleeding gently onto the road, staring straight ahead, body hunched forward, as if it's still waiting to be hit. and i guess that's the point of this story, just that image. this broken, dying possum, sitting with its missing eye and its trembling body, still waiting for the car to hit it, even as it disappears as two points of red into the blackness.