“Do you think it’s dead…?” I worriedly asked my best friend Faith. She shrugged nonchalantly, clearly unconcerned with the dead opossum lying lifeless in the middle of the road. I love encountering seemingly dead carcasses on the scariest night of the year, it totally helps my chronically high blood pressure.
“You should check,” Faith suggested.
“You should check,” I shot back.
“You should check,” she returned.
“No, you should check,” I insisted.
Finally, after five minutes of back and forth arguing, Faith finally agreed to be the one to check on the body. Gingerly stepping around the fallen foliage covering the road with her large combat boots, she knelt down, her keys falling in the process, with a stick and tapped the body once, twice. She sighed, clearly exasperated with my shenanigans and yelled, “it’s not–” she began, then a shadow darted past her and before she could process, her keys, which were vulnerably lying on the ground, were snatched up by the not-so-dead opossum.
Turns out that opossums can play dead and are actually fully awake during their dramatic scenes, we learned after searching it up on Google. In hindsight, we should’ve done that or called Animal Control first, but no, and now we were stuck in the middle of nowhere frantically searching through the ominous woods for Faith’s stolen car keys. The sun was beginning to set on the horizon, and after a good 10 minutes of searching, we had no leads.
“It’s getting dark,” Faith so insightfully remarked. I rolled my eyes and turned on the flashlight feature on my phone, marching further along the forest pathway. As the sun disappeared behind the mountains, Faith and my bickering increased substantially.
“Your boots are so loud,” I complained.
“Your mouth is louder,” retorted Faith.
Finally, after 15 minutes of walking, we reached an abandoned shack lit only by the moon.
“That’s not creepy at all,” Faith said sarcastically.
“Well, since this whole fiasco is your fault…” I started, “you should be the one who goes into the shack where a murder is totally not hiding in,” I decided. To my surprise, Faith quickly agreed.
Hiding behind a tree, I watched as my best friend slowly crept her way into the rickety shack. I started to feel bad, my guilt overcoming my common sense, so I followed behind her, wooden boards creaking under my weight.
When I stepped inside the doorway, Faith held her keys triumphantly in her hands, dusting off the dirt and grime from the silver metal.
“You found it!” I exclaimed. She smiled and we started down the stairs. Then, all of the sudden, we heard this atrocious sound. It sounded like wailing and we noticed droplets of water leading up to the cabin. Faith and I turned toward each other, made eye contact, and ran.We sprinted all the way to the car, panting and feeling a rush of adrenaline coursing through our veins. Faith unlocked the car swiftly, I hopped into the passenger seat, and we took off toward the road. “I hate possums,” Faith remarked. “Me too,” I asserted.