He had read somewhere that all of them in the continental United States are "O'possum." Supposedly the term "possum" referred to their Australian deviant breed: the ones with the pouches. It was a thing he had read but not accepted.

The possum that was now in front of him was opened up like a dynamite-fingered toddler's Christmas package. Everything that it had carried around inside of it had been shaken by his automobile's front fender, then exuberantly freed by the vehicle's undercarriage.

He was giving its body a shaky spotlight with a flashlight he located under the McDonald's wrappers and St. Louis souvenirs in his back seat. Twenty feet further down the road his car vacantly fired its own lumens into the tree-silhouettes that lived around the road's blacktop surface. The car had scattered a trail of meat crumbs between itself and the impact and he had followed these back to the possum carcass.

He stood on the road's soft shoulder and tried to figure out if he was obligated to do anything further. His thoughts were never as precise as his ability to doubt them. He seemed to vaguely remember that there was some road cleanup agency that one was supposed to call, but he was almost certain they only cared about deer-sizable animals.

His flashlight caught something reflective amongst the visceral mess and bounced part of its beams back into his left eye. He squinted and saw a right angle of metal protruding from what remained of the thing's torso. He positioned the flashlight in the roadside gravel so that it remained pointed at the thing and stepped into the grass to find a twig.

His hands sifted through the grass, displacing dew, pebbles, what might have been a slug, and saturated leaves, then one of his index fingers touched a small cylinder of bark. He grabbed the stick and brought it back to the corpse.

After some clumsy prodding and dragging, with the stick serving sometimes as a hook and other times as a lever, the metal object slid into the light. It appeared to be a thin rectangle-shape, which framed a sheet of glass. The glass itself was smeared with runny red, but he thought he could see an image underneath it.

He reached back into the grass and retrieved a fist-full of soggy leaves. He then squatted down next to the object and scrape-polished the physical distractions away. When he was finished cleaning the glass, he saw beneath it a photograph of the individual he had driven to St. Louis to visit.

He climbed back into his car, rotated it one-hundred and eighty degrees in the empty road, and accelerated out of sight.