Remember the demonic squirrel-eating opossums? I found one of them. It won’t be eating any more squirrels. It had, and I mean this literally, been ripped limb from limb. Not to mention head from body. This was a hefty beast. I was kind of alarmed.

I’ve been watching a lot of Buffy, so I suspected the work of monsters or mutants or demons.

I was burying the opossum remnants when a neighbor came strolling by. I was just dropping the head into a hole and covering it over. The legs and torso were still in a pile waiting to go into their respective holes.

The neighbor asked why I was burying the parts separately.

“Well isn’t it obvious? I don’t want it rising from the dead and causing mayhem.”

He responded with a long silence. I think he also took a step back.

After a lengthy silence in which it was clear he was never going to catch on that I was kidding, I explained to him that the ground was too hard and it was easier to dig a series of smaller holes than to dig one large one.

Then he laughed nervously and continued his walk, but when he left he didn’t just turn and walk away, he did a sort of shuffling sideways-backing-away type walk until he was about 50 yards away, then he turned and walked quickly.

Tonight when I got home there was a fox passing through the yard. Foxes are known opossum slayers, so maybe we don’t have demons, after all.