For Jeff

“Check this out, man,” said Rich, as

he and his best friend Toby entered the
garage. They carried their beers to the
work counter, where a long piece of thick
pipe rested.
“What’s that, dude?” Toby inquired,
motioning to the black pipe.
“That’s my blow dart gun,” Rich
replied, picking up the long object. “You
can shoot some shit down with this, dude.”
“What do you shoot, dude?” Toby
sipped his beer.
“You mean what do you shoot out, or
what do you shoot at?” Rich sipped back.
“Well,” Toby shrugged. “Both,
I guess.”
Rich set the pipe down and reached
into a drawer, withdrawing three pointed
contraptions, which he handed to Toby.
Toby studied the darts: three thick,
shiny nails with tails made of electrical
tape, which wrapped around their heads
and formed a neat cone behind them.
They looked quite aerodynamic.
“As for what you shoot them at,” Rich
paused, considering. “Well, whatever the
fuck you want to shoot I guess.”

51
 Toby handed the darts back to Rich,
and turned his attention back to his beer,
which he drank from thoroughly.
“Here, check it out,” Rich said, as he
picked the weapon back up and walked
out of the open garage door.
Toby followed him down the drive-
way into the warm night, looking up at
the tiny sliver of sunlight that cracked
through the impending darkness. In
this scant light, Toby’s eyes struggled
to adjust, and when they did, he
noticed something sliding across the
top of the wall across the street. As he
walked closer, he clarified that it was a
possum scurrying through the night.
Rich saw it too, and exclaimed, “Yeah!
Perfect timing!”
Toby caught up to Rich in the middle
of the street, and they stood side by side
watching the marsupial as it glided across
the wall. Then, the creature stopped, sens-
ing them. It cocked its head to the street
as if surveying the territory.
“They can’t see very good, but they
sense movement, so go slow,” explained
Rich, as he tiptoed closer to the possum,
lining up his shot.
As Toby followed, and they drew
closer, he looked into the eyes of the crea-
ture. Its black hollow optics seemed to be
directly aimed at them, but the possum
did not move as they approached. Toby
guessed that it did not sense them, or the
animal did not think they were a threat.
Rich stopped a few feet from the possum
and slowly raised his blower into firing posi-
tion. He loaded a nail dart in the chamber of
the gun, and put the device to his mouth.
Still, the beast did not stir on the wall, either
unaware of its fate, or not fearing it.
As Rich blew into the end of the pipe,
the dart whirred from the barrel, speed-
ing toward the unyielding possum. The
animal jerked its head as the tip of the nail
plunged into its neck. It arched its back
up unsteadily a few times, then toppled
off the edge of the wall, landing loudly on
the sidewalk. Rich strode over to the
rodent, now lying on its side.
Toby approached the possum slowly,
and immediately felt pity for the creature.
52
The possum was still moving, slowly
flailing its feet desperately into the air.
The movement gradually slowed as Toby
stepped up to it and examined the suffer-
ing animal at his feet. He looked into its
eyes, which looked more like ebony mar-
bles in the dim streetlight, and the slight
sparkle within the darkness seemed to
plead with him for help. Even when the
creature’s flapping legs finally stopped
their sad dance, there was the same empty
life in those eyes looking up at him.
“Dude, I feel kind of bad,” said Toby,
glancing over at Rich next to him.
“Yeah, that was kind of too much,
huh?” agreed Rich. He walked away,
retrieving his beer where he had left it in
the street.
Toby considered this for a moment.
“Aw, fuck it, dude. Possums are pretty
much worthless animals. I mean, what
purpose do possums serve anyway?”
“Yeah, seriously, dude,” harmonized
Rich. “All they do is steal cat food, and
make dogs bark.”
“Yeah, dude,” continued Toby.
“They’re pretty much just big
fucking rats.”
They both laughed, and each took a
big swallow of their respective beers.
“Still,” mused Toby, “that was kind of
fucked up, dude.”
“Yeah, well, it’s dead now,” snapped
Rich. “You can try giving it mouth to
mouth if you want. Fucking hippie.”
“Fuck you, bitch,” Toby cut back.
“That is your name, right? Bitch?”
Both laughed, and made their way
back up the driveway for a round of pool,
merrily forgetting the deceased possum
on the sidewalk across the street.
And after a few more beers, neither
one of them even noticed when the ani-
mal carcass was quietly dragged into the
night and out of memory.
•••
Rich awoke suddenly that night. His
head was groggy from the beers earlier
that evening, and he hesitated to open his
eyes, feeling a dizziness overcoming him.
The room swayed just a little, and there
was a sickness in Rich’s stomach that he
feared might overtake him.
He was scared to move at all, in fact, and
that’s when he realized that he couldn’t.
Rich was confused for a moment,
wondering if the alcohol was immobiliz-
ing him, but through his drunken, half-
awake stupor, he felt something else. A
slight tingling sensation on his skin ran
across his entire body, and he sensed
something:
Prickly?
That’s when Rich decided to let his
drunken eyes begin to flitter their way
open. As his vision dizzily adjusted to the
darkness, he tried to focus on the ceiling,
hoping it would stop moving. He slowly
lifted his head, the only part of his body
that he could move, and he attempted to
study himself. His eyes refused to focus
however, and it was hard to determine
anything through the darkness of his
room, but for a moment he chuckled,
because he thought he saw something
staring back at him through the dim, and
it kind of looked like....
He laughed again, letting his head
rest back down on the pillow, then made
another attempt at movement. He lifted
his head once more, and gradually his
eyes began to adjust to their intoxication
and the darkness.
And then, Rich did not want to chuck-
le anymore, because as he struggled for
coherence, his eyes attempted to tell his
mind that there was a possum standing
on his chest, its snout inches from his
face, with a pair of black beads glaring
directly at him. Slowly, he registered this
twisted reality, and it was the last jolt his
body needed to induce vomiting. He
gagged, and when his mouth opened, he
felt the animal’s snout fill the hole, form-
ing a solid wall, which stopped his vomit
on its way up his throat.
As he began to suffocate on the bile,
he quickly became aware that the warmth
that enveloped him in his bed was not his
blanket, because the softness became
hundreds of little finger nails skittering
across his body. It was they who held him
down, the dozens of possums that stood
on him, their weight hindering his weak
movements. He felt their long prickly
tails slither across him as the beasts scur-
ried on him playfully.
He could not breathe to scream, still
choking on his own vomit and the snout
down his throat, but that was when the
pain began. As endless tiny teeth began
their systematic chewing, Rich became
acquainted with an agony more intense
than any he had ever experienced. He felt
every part of his body disappear: each of
his fingers as they were slowly ravaged off
at the knuckles, all of his toes, his ears, and
his penis, which several of the marsupials
maliciously gnawed at. Rich was still
unable to move, held down by several of
the creatures who were not chewing, but
he twitched as best as he could, his muf-
fled screams trapped in his throat with his
vomit. Tears began to flow heavily out of
his wide open screaming eyes, and then
those, too, were chewed through by the
deceptively piercing teeth. As Rich’s last
breaths stuttered from his body, he felt the
possums invade their final target. Several
began to chew into his stomach, and his
last realization before his inevitable death
was that the creatures were feistily
disemboweling him.
•••
Toby sat up in his bed quickly, then
cursed himself for doing so. His head was
pounding and the next morning’s hang-
over had already begun to settle in. His
mouth was dry and chapped, and he
shook through his haze long enough to
realize that he desperately needed a glass
of water. He convinced himself to his feet,
and carefully carried himself down the
hall to the bathroom.
He filled a glass from the sink, and
retrieved two aspirin from his medicine
cabinet, pounding them down greedily.
He muttered “fuck it” to himself, and
retrieved two more, swallowing those
with equal zest.
He carried the glass back to his bed-
room, and it was quickly shattered when
53
Toby entered the room and noticed what
he had failed to see in bed. The sight
almost knocked him over, and his hand
quickly forgot about the glass, which top-
pled to the hardwood floor.
In the corner of Toby’s room, Rich
hung from a ceiling beam. Closer inspec-
tion revealed that it was not rope that
held him swaying gently, but his own
large intestine, which was lovingly
wrapped around his throat. His chest cav-
ity was torn open, and his organs unfold-
ed in a grisly tendril that almost reached
the floor, the gory insides still connected
by various tissues. Neither the blood that
covered what was left of the body, nor the
large pool of it on the floor below the
swaying corpse, was nearly as sickening
to Toby as the meticulous deconstruction
of humanity that had shed the fluid.
Rich’s severed fingers and toes were
spread merrily across the floor, and as
Toby staggered back into the opposite
corner of his room, shaking with heavy
breaths, he felt some squish beneath his
feet. He looked into the eyes of his friend
and saw the same glaring, empty, black
pits that he had seen on the possum earli-
er that evening, and the eyeballs that once
filled them were floating in the pool
beneath Rich’s hanging body.
As Toby began to shriek, a cry that
echoed agony, fear, and horror, he slunk
to the floor in the corner, unable to take
his eyes off the terrible sight. Only then,
sitting on the floor, could he see the
bloodstains that dotted the lower sec-
tion of wall behind Rich’s body. Then,
disbelief entered the tone of his scream-
ing when he realized that the crude
smears formed a clear pattern. He
struggled to comprehend how the
markings had been formed, but the
swirls of blood on the wall comprised
two clearly visible words:

worthless animals

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