While smoking on my back porch,
I noticed a pale furry form out of the corner of my eye slowly rounding the corner of my house,
lumbering its way towards me,
unknowingly.

An oppossum (or is it "a oppossum," seeing as the O is silent?)

(I once had a nightmare about a(n) oppossum in which I had just woken up from a nightmare, (which is to say, I woke up from a nightmare within a nightmare,) then caught my breath as I lay in my bed, trying to calm down so that I could fall back to sleep. Only, before I could, and in the customary post-nightmare way of scanning the room for monsters before even attempting to go back to sleep, I noticed a pale furry form on my bedroom windowsill.

Freaked out by this, I stood straight up on my bed, brandishing the blanket as an impromptu defensive weapon.
The possum on the windowsill panicked at this sudden and unexpected commotion, and in reaction hissed something fierce and bared its fangs at me.

Then, moving in the kind of fast/slow motion way that only ever seems to happen in dreams, the thing leapt from my window to my bed and started biting into my ankle.
Deeply biting.
To the bone.
I felt my ankle flesh being torn away and my bed was quickly soaked with blood.
That's when I woke up for real,
with a scream lodged in my throat.)

(This nightmare had occured a few days after I'd witnessed one of my friends violently murdering an possum in his backyard a few nights prior.

A great big giant of a kid, this friend, with a massive head and an inclination towards violence (especially when he'd been drinking,) and he'd justified the Opusssum ****** preemptively as being for the sake of the safety of his daughter, who often plays in this backyard, or something along those lines.

A chase had then ensued, with this kid holding a car-jack handle in his hand as a weapon. How it ended was like this:
After spotting his elusive quarry along the fence, he hurled the jack handle end-over-end directly at its head. It connected.

The result was gruesome;
The only species of marsupial native to North America lying on its side with its head caved in and pinkish brain matter coming out of its snout, but it was the leg that made the scene the most gruesome.

It twitched violently, as if it was still trying to run away, and the force with which this one leg twitched caused the whole body to shift with it, causing more brain stuff to slide out of its nose with each useless kick.

The look on its face was indescribable.

Transfixed as I was by it,
the death throes of this small animal whose only crime was crawling through the wrong yard at the wrong time,
I was quickly pulled out of it by a loud scream from a short distance behind me.

A scream from the mouth of a little girl who had also (unknowingly to the rest of us) witnessed the scene. The daughter of the man who had slayed the beast,
in order to protect her from it,
and yet here she was,
weeping uncontrollably.)

And so but when I saw this oppossum coming towards me tonight, getting uncomfortably close to my ankle, and before even really realizing what it was about it that had caused such a fright,
I turned and hightailed it in the other direction.

Looking over my shoulder as I did so,
I noticed that the oppossum had done the same.