Dear motorist

Dear motorist (I can’t bring myself to call you “human”),
I’m sure this won’t even cause you pause for thought, let alone regret, but it makes me feel better to write it.

Tonight we had a few minutes of magic: my parents and I stood in the cool summer evening on their Fairway verge, by the side of my car, and mused over career crises and family health worries and financial issues and all those mundane concerns that keep me awake at night. I was feeling the weight of the worry and my thoughts were heavy and resigned, and I could hardly believe it when I saw it- just a few feet from us, in the low branch of the small street tree, a pixie face silhouetted against the backlight of Broadway Fair shopping centre.

She was a possum, big ears quivering in the noise of the busy suburban street, and she perched at waist height in the small peppermint, ducking her head coyly between the branches as though eavesdropping on our conversation. After my surprised exclamation, we fell silent and just watched her for a few moment as she curled herself around the tree and peered back at us. She had climbed, while we talked, to the peppermint via an overhanging tree stretching darkly above us and reaching back to the roof of my parents’ house.

“Oh!” my mother said, “we thought we had a possum!”, and we reminisced about the visiting possums of my childhood, of night time roof scrabbling, chopped fruit offerings and glowing eyes in the torchbeams of eager kids on summer evenings. Our possum obliged by edging down the tree trunk towards us, leaning out precariously with her claws scraping on the peppermint bark, and I marvelled at how pink her nose twitched in the darkness, the shine of the streetlights in her eyes, the bristle of her tail. As my father was dispatched to the kitchen for a piece of apple, my heart was charmed, lifted from the concerns of a few minutes earlier and I imagined a time in the near future when I might stand here on this suburban street with my own child and share the curious company, the unexpected joy, the pure magic of this wild creature come to meet us.

As we stood enjoying the moment, I became aware of the headlights approaching from behind, the rising roar of a car in a hurry (as they always are) down Fairway. “Stand still, oh, don’t run now,” the whispered entreat, and in the clichéd slowing of time, we watched our little possum scurry down the base of the peppermint tree, across the kerb, onto the bitumen. I don’t remember if there were words to my prayer, but I know I prayed for the speed of the possum, the separation of the wheels, the preservation of this rare fleeting moment of joy. And it all ended with a crunch that I felt in my gut like a blow, nausea welling up with disbelief.

The car braked briefly after impact but did not stop- I suppose their shopping or dinner or evening TV was more important than the fate of a small pixie-faced possum who ended her curious life cradled in my hands, her chest crushed, her soft fur adrift, her warm pink paws curled and cooling in defeat.

She was just a possum, and I’m so glad, as I’m sure you are, that she didn’t dent or scratch or mark your car. But I have to admit that it’s not just the resonating sound of that impact, but the thought of bringing my child into your sort of “society”, that makes me sick to my stomach.