A few nights later I went outside and the possum was lying on a tree branch that hung near the back door. Its eyes turned red in the porch light.

I looked around for a stick but couldn’t find one. The possum lay on the branch, watching me. Possums have a neat trick when confronted with danger, and that is to play dead, lying completely still, usually curled up on their backs with their feet in the air.

This possum was not playing dead. I didn’t know whether to find something to attack it with or try to scare it away by flapping my arms and saying “go away,” so I just sat down on the back porch steps and lit a cigarette. Upstairs, my daughters’ light went out. I blew smoke at the possum. It didn’t move.

I finished my cigarette and went back inside, but I couldn’t focus on the movie I had been watching, as I was now thinking of the possum lying on the branch. I didn’t know if possums could jump or climb like squirrels, but I imagined it leaping from the branch to the roof of our house, where it could walk to the window of my daughters’ second-story room and peer in at them sleeping with the covers over their heads to protect them from monsters.

We live in the middle of the city, but often see wild animals. Raccoons slink around to forage through trash cans. Black widows nest in my smoker, my grill, and near the dryer vent outside the house. I have seen deer crossing the busy street near my house, and cranes drinking from the stream.

I have never lived in a house with a possum. In some places, people catch them and eat them, barbecued, or grilled. The tail, in some cultures, is a delicacy. When I suggested we capture and eat the possum, my wife patted me on the chest.

“Go right ahead,” she said.

Later, in bed, I saw her looking at me out of the corner of her eye, wondering, perhaps, if she had married the kind of person who would execute and them devour a possum, with or without sauce.

My friend Julie, who lives a few blocks away, told me she was grading papers one night with the door propped open so her cat could go in and out. When she looked up, a baby possum was crawling across her floor. She took a picture and posted it on Facebook. I told her about my possum. We speculated as to whether or not there was an ongoing possum invasion of our neighborhood.

Last year, squirrels almost killed our cable guy. My internet was not working, and I could not look at Youtube videos or research tuberculosis or see pictures of possums posted on Facebook or any of the other things I do to keep from working, to keep from venturing out into the real world, where real problems exist and terrible things sometimes happen, so I called the cable company.

The next day one of their service men showed up. I explained the problem. He went out back to check the cable box, and when he started unscrewing the bolt holding it closed, power surged through the box. From inside the house, we heard popping noises.

The cable guy cursed and jumped back from the box, shaking his hand. He hadn’t been touching the bolt, but the nearness of his hand had shocked him anyway. He said, “That damn near killed me.”

He peered at the cable box from a distance. The electric meter on the house had stopped spinning, and all the power to the house was off. The singed smell of electrical wires drifted out from the house.