Possum in the Garbage

He was a surprise of white: his teeth like knives, his face a triangle of albino dislike. I had seen him before, on our back porch, where my father sometimes left watermelon rinds, and he dipped his tongue into them, his skin glowing beneath our lights, like some four-legged relative of the moon. I knew him as a citizen of the night: a fainting, ghostly presence with a tail so naked it was embarrassed to drag behind him. But that morning, terrified and violent, he was different: a hissing fury at the bottom of the garbage can, a vampire bathed in light.