1853, THE YEAR JESUS WAS BORN

Selphie and Squall were sitting on Selphie's mother's bed by the kitchen. Squall was picking at hairs on the bedspread and tossing them onto the scratchy brown carpet; Selphie was watching fruitless dance around, their 2-week-old paper plates fodder stolen away and thrown into a distant dumpster. It was humid and Selphie's palms were sweating. She spoke,

"You know, they normally try to kick attempted-suicide patients out of the hospital as soon as possible because they don't want lawsuits. But my mom wouldn't stop instigating shit, like trying and succeeding to get other patients to find her stuff to kill herself with when the nurses weren't looking. She was only supposed to be in there for a few days for observation, but she kept getting more hurt and her therapist is making them transfer her, so she's stuck there for weeks."

Squall didn't look at her, but asked, slightly morbidly, "What did she do?"

Selphie looked at them very strangely and said "Um, I already told you?"

Squall answered in monotone, "I mean to get into the hospital n the first place."

"She swallowed most of a 600-tablet bottle of ibuprofen and a bunch of thumbtacks. Ibuprofen won't kill you, but it will make your stomach dissolve itself. It is extremely painful. Obviously the tacks didn't help.

"It burned like hell, so she called an ambulance.

"They were just going to have her go in for daily appointments to make sure that the tacks weren't embedding in her intestines after they made her swallow charcoal for the ibuprofen, but obviously it didn't work out that way." Her cowardice and search for pleasure have left me abandoned.

Squall didn't say anything more, but that was more their personality than actual speechlessness. After a few minutes, Selphie started to get off the bd to start on the bathroom. With her first step on the floor, an opossum's foot, mimicking her own, emerged from beneath the bed. Another step, another foot, now accompanied by a pointy possum head. After the past few weeks, Selphie was a bid dead, so she just stared in horror. Squall let out a little strangled scream.

The possum looked Selphie straight in the eyes and fucking smiled. Have you ever seen an opossum's mouth? Yeah. It was so horrifying that Selphie immediately hoped that this was some kind of terrible dream, especially when the damn thing started laughing.

"You should smooth down the hole in the floor under the bed if you want me to let you live here too," it said with some freakish accent created by vocal chords not made for human speech.

Squall resumed their strangled scream, which was ok because Selphie knew that they didn't like animals, or humans. or books, or tomatoes. God how Squall hated tomatoes.

("If you spend all your time at the library in winter, what do you do?" she had asked once. "Read?"

"Haha,"— Squall actually said "haha", they rarely laughed for real— "That's a good one.")

Anyway, Selphie had owned a monstrously large golden hamster once, so she could do this.

"This is my house, asshole," she said.

That's how you interact with animals.

"Someone created a nice dark home and abandoned it. I wanted it, so it became mine, like the air in my lungs and the bugs in the breeze. I snap them up to survive, and this pleases me," said the possum.

With the thing's poetry, Squall got up and speed walked into Selphie's room. (Mom was kind enough to sleep in the kitchen space and allow Selphie her own room.)

"This is my house. I've lived here for 12 years. You can't just take it from me. I pay the rent!" Sort of.

"I eat the brown mice with little white bellies that filch your bread, and I feast upon the slugs that mark your path. Why do I anger you so?"

"Your teeth, they frighten me. Your bristly fur disgusts me."

"Touch my pelt: it is soft. I kill cottonmouths, my teeth must be sharp. I will not bite you. The things which you fear are invented by you."

Selphie remembered something she had once said to Squall. "I admire all life that lives where we think it shouldn't.

"Do you think a possum's fur is soft? Does it bathe? Does it easily become ill? I worry for [this idea of] it. Does it have to defend its home from raccoon and their ilk?"

Squall had said, "I don't know. Answer your own questions."

And now Selphie realized she was a hypocrite, an awful, terrible hypocrite. She scorned those which she admired, she ran from her mother's betrayal, and she had left her friend who had helped her to face her fears to cower in her room alone. She looked for the opossum, and saw that it was drinking from her tap. She no longer cared, and entered her room to soothe.

It was pretty futile, but often presence means more than words. Squall was looking at the alarm clock that had fallen from Selphie's TV, and they glanced her way as she entered.

"Will you allow it to thrive here?" Squall asked.

"Would you like to live here?" Selphie asked instead. "Like, not under my house, but somewhere were you don't have to hide your car from cruel cops as you sleep, and somewhere were a shower is readily available?"

"I know you pick up strays because of your good heart," said Squall, "but giving to others will not protect you."

Selphie didn't answer. You may hide beneath your thick skin and claws, she thought, but they do not help you live to eat anything but the worms you dig up.