Cul De Sac
Michael Hansen

He's just making a left off of Henderson onto Spring Street when Trisha lets out with a yell, sitting next to him there in the passenger seat.

"Oh!" she yells.  "Oh, Jason!" 

Jason glances away from the road ahead and over at Trisha.   She has the back of her hand pressed up to her mouth like she wants to take a bite out of it.  She's facing him, staring wide-eyed back over her shoulder at the strip mall parking lot they'd just passed.  "What?" Jason asks, his voice as soft as he can force it to be.

"Oh, Jason, we've got to stop!  There's something hurt back there - we've got to go back!"

Jason lets out a sigh and pulls up to the curb.  The worn springs squeal beneath his bulk as he turns stiffly in his seat to look back.  He can see something small and furry humped up on the asphalt, right next to a bus stop.  It isn't moving.  Jason hangs a U-turn and drives back into the parking lot.

It's an opossum, fat and gray, with a dry pool of dark blood by its head.  It still isn't moving.  Jason gets out of the car and walks slowly up to it, Trisha’s eyes on his back urging him forward.   A boy and girl are sitting with their mom over at the bus stop bench, watching him and the possum with all the curiosity of a couple of cabbage patch dolls.  Their eyes look like two holes poked in dough.  The boy has his finger stuck up his nose; he looks to Jason like he's trying to jam it in all the way up to the third knuckle.

Jason wrenches his eyes away, unable to look at the boy anymore.   Instead he stares down at the possum, unseeing for a moment.  He thinks of Steve, his son.  Steve would have been all over the possum, trying to help, asking questions and getting in the way.  Before the fall, that is.

The possum is clearly dead, probably smacked by a car.  Even in death, it looks somehow feral and primeval, prehistoric.   Stiff matted fur juts out in ruffled rows of spikes from its bloated stomach.  It's tail is a naked scaly snake; Jason almost expects it to hiss and slither away on its own.  The snout is pointed and conical, the mouth grinning as if at some amusing secret, and filled with rows of sharp, uncompromising teeth - it's glued to the asphalt by the pool of it's own coagulated blood.  The glazed beady eyes look through Jason and beyond him into the empty sky, at nothing - the eyes are twin faded red jewels, the color of wounds.

"Is it all right?" Trisha calls from behind him, safe inside the car.

"No, baby," Jason says without turning.  He hears an intake of breath, and the beginning of a sob, quickly choked off.  He doesn't look at her as he walks back to the trunk.  For the thousandth time he wonders what Trisha had been doing instead of watching Steve, what had shrieked through her mind when she first saw Steve's tiny body through the kitchen window, crumpled at the base of that ancient man-killer oak.  Had her heart whooped and lurched in her breast?  Part of him hoped so - a part of himself he didn't like very much.

Jason opens the trunk.  He remembers there's a burlap sack in there somewhere, and he rummages around through all the rest of the junk until he finds it.  He fishes it out and shuts the trunk hard.

He stands over the dead possum and prods it once with the toe of his work boot, takes a quick step back.  No response.  With a grimace of distaste Jason bends over to grab the serpentine tail - and then something moves on the pavement, right next to the body.

It's Day-Glo pink, the size of his little finger -- at first Jason thinks it's some freak maggot, grown impossibly huge on possum guts.  It looks wrong, like something from a bad acid trip, it's way too big - just looking at it makes him feel queasy.  He involuntarily bends closer for a better look, and he sees that it's a baby, a tiny little baby possum.  He vaguely remembers from somewhere that opossums are marsupials, that their young are born prematurely, and finish developing in the mother's pouch.  He pictures the mother possum, murdered by a passing car, and her baby inside her, still suckling away at her dead tit.  The tit growing cold, mama's milk stopping - and the baby making its tiny desperate odyssey out of the pouch, into the motherless world.  As he watches, the naked little grub writhes on the searing hot asphalt, baked by the merciless sun above - its eyes are mere dark unseeing bulbs, barely visible under the thin unbroken skin of its future eyelids, now never to open.

Jason rockets to his feet and glares off into the distance.   Is there a number he can call, some expert that could save it?  No - no salvation for this little jot of agony.

"What is it?  What's wrong?" Trisha quavers from the car.

Without thinking, Jason turns his head and roars, "Get off my ASS, will you?"  Glaring over his shoulder he sees Trisha's face, blurred behind the windshield; she recoils as if struck by his words, her face crumpling like a paper bag.  Immediately he regrets his outburst.  God, he thinks, I'm an asshole. An asshole.

"I'm sorry baby," he says, his voice soft again.  He squints to see her as she hides behind the sun's glare bouncing off the glass.  "It's nothing." 

He turns back to the work at hand.  Without giving himself time to think Jason brings his foot down on the tiny piece of squirming flesh and grinds it to paste, fast and hard.  He holds the bag open on the ground and kicks the scraps into it, then rubs his sole clean on the burlap, like he'd rubbed his hands clean after tossing earth into Steve's grave.

He grabs the mother's tail and straightens; she dangles from his hand at arm's length.  She doesn't come to life, doesn't snarl and rip at his flesh like a power jigsaw on speed; her tail is cool and stiff, like a dead branch.  Jason shakes the burlap sack open with his other hand then drops the little corpse into the sack, along with her smear of a baby, and Steve, and the whole cocksucking world.  Plop!

A bus chuffs up just then, and groans to a halt at the stop.   The playpen babies and their mother stump onboard as Jason walks up to the trashcan by the bench.  None of them look back at him.  The flap on the trash can shrieks in rusty protest as he pushes it open.  A sodden thump as he dropped the sack in, like the thump when Steve fell to earth.  Then another shriek as the flap swings shut over the load of dead meat.  Jason walks back to the car, endlessly wiping his hand on his pants leg.

Jason opens the car door and eases his butt inside.  The old sprung seat squeals once more beneath his weight.   Trisha's staring straight ahead, her jaw set, mouth a straight tight line.  Jason sighs and looked down at his big scarred hands.  He reaches over and pats Trisha's leg a few times, then stops and lets his hand rest on her thigh.  "It didn't feel a thing, baby," he says softly.  "Never knew what hit it."  Like Steve, he thinks, going back again for the millionth time to the inescapable memory of that day.

Jason remembers kneeling beneath the oak tree, and Steve saying again and again: "I can't feel anything, Daddy.  I can't feel anything!"  He remembers Steve's piping little boy voice rising toward hysteria, his eyes widening in dawning comprehension as he looked down at his own unresponsive body, snapped and broken in the fall.  Jason remembers the wind sighing musically through the branches overhead, and his big hands reaching for Steve's throat as if of their own volition, and squeezing harder and harder until the horror left his son's eyes forever.

He's still watching Trisha as his private mental videotape finishes its latest performance: Trisha's jaw quivers and she leans toward him, her hand seeking his.  Jason closes his eyes as they lean against each other holding hands.  She's all he has now - they were partners in pain.

After a few moments, Jason starts the car and they drive off into the rest of their life.

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