The first time I saw the possum I screamed like a girl and ran back inside. I had just stepped out for a midnight smoke, and when I opened the back door, the possum was heading for the hole under the back porch steps and under the house, where, I would later learn, it lived. We both paused mid-step. Its little possum eyes stared at me. Then I screamed and it squealed. I shot back inside the house and slammed the door and the possum shot under the stairs and into the hollow space beneath our house.

“What was that?” my wife said from the other room.

“Possum,” I calmly informed her.

“Possum?” she said. I could hear her turning pages in her book. I knew it would be one of those books with a bare-chested man on the front, looming over a half-dressed woman. Either that or an alliterative detective novel whose author has either three names or two initials. It would not be a book about possums, which I decided I needed, as my mind had begun to consider rabies, and my two daughters sleeping upstairs.

Then I screamed and it squealed. I shot back inside the house and slammed the door and the possum shot under the stairs…

“Possum,” I confirmed.

“Was it cute?” she said.

I rolled my eyes, then realized she couldn’t see me. “Cute is not a word I would have thought of first,” I told her.

I spent the next few hours, until dawn or so, peering out the window, or smoking with the door slightly open. Before my wife went to bed she yelled from the bedroom, asking if I was smoking in the house. She doesn’t like me smoking, and I am strictly forbidden from doing so in the house, but this was different.

“There’s a possum out there,” I said.

“Give it a cigarette,” she said. Her light went out. Our two daughters were already alseep upstairs, so I decided to sleep on the couch near the back door — in case the possum tried to crawl under the door or force it open — although I didn’t actually sleep until my wife and children were awake the next morning, after dawn had convinced me the possum wasn’t going to sneak in the back door and kill us in our sleep.

A few days later I saw the possum again. I had forgotten about it, and wandered outside. It was sitting a few feet away. It began hissing at me. I didn’t quite scream, but I did run inside, slamming the door after me.

“What’re you doing?” my wife said, and “Possum,” I replied.

“Again?”

“It’s looking for something,” I told her, then realized it was true. I watched it wander around the back yard. There is something unnerving about a possum — the hairless tail, the beady eyes. After a while it went under the house. All night, I thought I could hear it.

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.

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.

“Call the power company,” he said, still rubbing his hand. He left shaking his head.

Inside the house, the smell of electrical smoke hung thick. A gray haze drifted through the house.

When the power guys got there and looked things over they told me squirrels had chewed through the electrical wires that grounded the house, and the power had been grounded through the cable box. When the cable guy had tried to unscrew the bolt, the power tried to surge through him.

They spent a few hours on a cold Sunday afternoon running new lines to the house, trimming tree limbs, and cursing squirrels.

“Squirrels will chew through anything,” the older of the two told me. He wore a brown coverall and a green hat. His hair was white beneath the hat, and his hands were large and red, with big knuckles. “Fucking tree rats,” he said, as if a squirrel had once injured a family member or bitten a small child in his neighborhood.

I did not consider shooting the possum. After initially scaring me, it had not done anything other than wander around the back yard on certain nights, pulling itself slowly through the grass, running away if I scared it.

“Are you sure it wasn’t a possum?” I said.

They looked at me as if I were daft.

“Possums don’t do anything,” the younger one said, looking at me from atop a ladder leaned against the side of the house, his hands full of wires. “Maybe shit under your house.” He went back to stringing wire. “It was a squirrel.”

“It’s always a squirrel,” the older one said. He cracked his knuckles. I thought of arthritis. “I’ve seen them chew through live wires. They eat the protective covering on the wires, then, sometimes, chew the wire itself to file their teeth.”

“How do I keep them from doing it again?” I asked.

The older one looked around, as if to see if anyone else was listening.

“I’d kill every last one of them,” he said. “Shoot the fuckers in the head, if I were you.”

I did not consider shooting the possum. After initially scaring me, it had not done anything other than wander around the back yard on certain nights, pulling itself slowly through the grass, running away if I scared it. I was still not used to having a wild animal living in the crawl spaces beneath the house, but as long as it didn’t come up the basement stairs and somehow open the door, I thought I could live with it.

I considered naming it, but did not know what an appropriate name for a possum would be: Cornelius? Napoleon? Nitroglycerin?

My daughters never named our cat. When we first got her they kicked names around for a few days, throwing out Princess and Fluffy and Beauregard, shooting down my offers of Attila and Cheesefries and Agamemnon. We finally settled on Kitty, which was what we had been calling her since we got her, and which satisfied me because I like the movie “Big Jake” where John Wayne has a dog named “Dog.”

One night I woke to find Kitty clawing and scratching at the door, her back up, making that weird growl-whine noise cats make when they are mad or scared or both. I turned on the porch light and looked out to see the possum sitting on the porch steps. Kitty had turned feral, spitting and scratching, her eyes as wild as I have ever seen them, and I wondered then how cats are any different from possums or squirrels or raccoons, other than the thousands of years of domestication, which then led me to wonder about our fear of small furry things that do not belong to the cat family. Why will we feed a stray cat but not a stray possum? And why, when I see a stray cat in the neighborhood, I do not think first of rabies, as I do with possums, and raccoons, and squirrels, although, as I have pointed out, squirrels do not necessarily need rabies to kill the cable guy.

My younger daughter saw me peering out the window one night and came and joined me. I put my arm around her as we watched the possum sniff around the back yard.

After a few minutes she said, “Can we catch it?”

“No. It might have rabies. Even if it doesn’t, it might bite.”

She watched for a few more minutes. “It looks lonely.”

I could feel the thin bones of her shoulders beneath my arm, her heart beating in her frail chest. “It’s not lonely. It’s a possum.”

She looked at me, her eyes the same color as mine. “Possums don’t get lonely?”

A strand of hair had fallen from where she hooked it behind her ears. “They’re animals.”

“So are we,” she said, and I was forced to agree, but kept my thoughts to myself. I would argue that since we wear pants we get to be more important than lower creatures, but that may be my animal-prejudice rearing up. Also, does wearing pants mean we do not get lonely? Or that creatures without them don’t as well?

In the six years we have lived in this house, our back yard has grown smaller. When we first moved, it was the size of a gas station or a dance floor. There is a small hill behind the house, and bamboo grows on the side of the hill. I like the Asian feeling, so over the years I have let the bamboo slowly and steadily march down the hill. I am also lazy when it comes to yard work, and each time I mow the back yard, I mow a little bit less, allowing the bamboo shoots and kudzu to creep a little further in, so now the back yard is about the size of a college dorm room. The kudzu adds a Southern feel, which mixes with the bamboo so that the back yard seems both Asian and Southern. I am thinking of adding a koi pond but stocking it with catfish, or crappie.

My wife spends much less time thinking about the possum than I do. My daughters are the same way. After the first time I showed the possum to them, they became uninterested.

There is a thin strip of trees that run behind our house, and all down the block. It is not much, but a tiny divider between houses, so that in the spring and summer, when the leaves are full on the trees, we can’t see the houses behind us. I grew up in rural Arkansas, and the trees in the back yard screening me from other houses are welcome.

I suppose they are welcome to the possum too. I know wild animals adapt easily to life in the city, but began to wonder if cutting down all the trees and bush-hogging the back yard would make the possum feel unwanted.

My wife spends much less time thinking about the possum than I do. My daughters are the same way. After the first time I showed the possum to them, they became uninterested. I would see it in the back yard and rush to tell them.

“Is it the possum again?” my older said.

“No,” I told her. “It’s a giant rabbit wrecking havoc around the neighborhood, eating small children.”

She rolled her eyes and went back to doing homework.

“We’ve seen it,” my younger daughter said, equally non-excited. She was curled on the couch reading, and she is hard to talk to when she is reading, reluctant to pull herself out of the world she has entered.

“But it’s cute,” I reminded her. “Remember?”

She didn’t look up. “You said it had rabies.”

“Might,” I said. “Might have rabies. But it doesn’t.”

She read for a moment, then marked her spot with a finger. “How do you know?”

“If it had rabies, it would have eaten you,” I said.

She put her face back in her book. “It would have eaten you first,” she said, to which I could not argue.

I came home from the bar late one night and went out back to smoke. I was sitting in my smoking chair when I saw the possum’s head peek out from under the stairs. It creeped halfway out of the hole, and sat there. I’d had seven or eight too many drinks, but I swear it was looking at me, waiting for something. After a while it backed into the hole beneath the stairs and disappeared. I saw its tail as it turned around, and then it was gone.

“What do you want?” I said, but it did not answer. I am not sure if it was because it did not want to talk about it, or if it did not want to talk to someone who might not remember the conversation in the morning.

A few months after I first saw the possum I went down into the basement to empty the drainage bucket. Our basement is unfinished. The hot water heater stands in the middle of the room. The basement walls are cinderblock, usually sweating, and you can see into the crawl spaces under the house. Spiderwebs hang everywhere, and huge cicadas with armored carapaces and bulbous eyes and knees that bend the wrong way cling to the sweating walls.

We don’t go down there often. But water seeps in sometimes after a hard rain. Our landlords have been trying to fix the problem, and so started a plumbing system made of PVC pipe to channel the water into a drain in the concrete floor, but when I went down it had not been finished yet, and there was only a short length of pipe coming through a hole in the wall. When it rained, water came through the pipe and into a collecting bucket, which I had to empty after every rain.

The basement smelled of must and damp, as it always does, but the smell seemed thicker, heavier. I stood in the middle of the small room and looked up under the house for where the possum hid at night, then wondered what I would do if I actually found it, and decided that getting out of the basement would be the best course of action.

I imagined the mother possum, circling the house night after night, wondering where her children had gone. I think maybe she was looking for help, someone to get them out, because she could not, but I don’t know if possums think that way.

When I went to pick up the bucket I saw the little possums floating in it. They must have crawled through the pipe when the weather turned cold two weeks ago, and fallen into the bucket. I stood there trying to remember when it last rained, trying to calculate when I first saw the mother possum wandering around in the back yard as if she were looking for something.

Their bodies had bloated in the water. The surface was slick with oil secreted from their carcasses. Their eyes were open. They were tiny things, each smaller than a mouse, floating in the foul-smelling water.

I imagined the mother possum, circling the house night after night, wondering where her children had gone. I think maybe she was looking for help, someone to get them out, because she could not, but I don’t know if possums think that way. Did she watch the water rising, her brood trying to stay afloat? I don’t know. Somewhere above me, my children were climbing into bed, or just waking up, or brushing their teeth or getting dressed or watching TV or a thousand other things they do up there, unaware of all the dangers their parents see lurking in the world.

I didn’t tell my wife about the possum, or the babies bloated and drowned in the bucket. I didn’t want her to think of them down there, or of the mother circling our back yard night after night, looking for them. Knowing about it would make her sad, so I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want her to be the one who went upstairs a dozen times every night to check on our daughters and make sure nothing had come up the stairs after them or they hadn’t somehow slipped into something we could not get them out of.

I do it, and let her sleep.