When we were kids, my brother had a gerbil that constantly got out of its cage. I suspect now my brother was letting it out on purpose. He didn’t like keeping it caged, but was afraid to let it go for fear it would get outside and one of our dogs would eat it. This might seem a strange fear, but we had once seen a dog eat a mouse. Our father raised hunting dogs, and in our old barn we found a tiny little mouse shivering in a corner of one of the empty stalls. My father sicced the dog on it, and the dog snapped and swallowed the mouse. It was so small it must have been a baby, and when my brother and I began to cry, our father told us that mice were filthy creatures that carried all kinds of diseases, but my brother and I hated him a little and for a long time afterward the image of the mouse huddled in fright, then gone, stuck sharp in our minds.

…sometimes our minds become irrational when thinking about protecting our children, and locking the door did not satisfy me.

When the gerbil got loose, we would be watching TV in the living room and see it streak across the floor. My mother would scream and climb up on the couch, then yell at my brother to catch it. We would spend the next few hours chasing it around the house, until finally one of us dropped a shoebox on top of it and scooped it back into the cage.

Sometimes, when it got out, the gerbil crawled into the walls of the house. We could hear it running and chewing and scratching. We would come home from school to find little piles of sawdust below holes in the baseboards where it had made a new home. One night, half-asleep, it jumped on me, and I woke screaming. Not long after that my step-father put out mouse-traps, and we never saw the gerbil again.

I was thinking of the gerbil while I tried to sleep, afraid I would wake with a possum sitting on my chest. Or that possums could climb through the walls like the gerbil did, and somehow reach the second floor, where it would stalk across the floor toward my sleeping daughters, its eyes red in the nightlight. To prevent such a thing from happening, I locked the back door, then went to bed. But sometimes our minds become irrational when thinking about protecting our children, and locking the door did not satisfy me. I knew there was no way to fill in the space between the walls with concrete, at least not this late at night, but after a little while I did get up and throw the deadbolt.

I was sure I could hear it crawling beneath the house. Before going outside I began to look for it, and once when it was crawling around the back yard, but far enough away as to constitute no threat, I called my daughters downstairs and we eased the back door open to watch it.

The first time she saw the possum, my younger daughter asked if it was a badger.

“No,” I said. “Remember, just now, when I said ‘Hey, come look at the possum’?”

They were standing bent over, the older looking over the younger’s shoulder, both of them peering at the possum ten feet away.

“How do you know it’s not a badger?” My younger daughter was ten or eleven at the time, and wanted everything to be magical, or at least out of the ordinary. I had thought a possum in the back yard would be not-ordinary enough, but apparently I was wrong. As I often am.

“Because it’s not,” I said.

“But how do you know?”

“Because a badger would have charged us and eaten us by now.”

The both looked at me, attempting to ascertain if I were lying or not, finally deciding I was. But they scooted back inside a bit. We watched it as it crept around.

“It’s so cute,” my younger daughter said.

“It could be rabid,” I told her. “Or hungry. Starving enough to eat a human. Don’t ever touch it, or get near it, or look at it.”

“We’re looking at it now,” she pointed out.

“You know what I mean,” I told her.

“Almost never,” she said, and I contemplated throwing her to the hungry, rabid possum.