I wake in the bright dark.

Outside my window, my neighbor is in a battle of attrition. He is throwing fireworks into the tree we share, whose roots sprawl across the property line. There is a possum in its branches somewhere, invisible except in the spray of sparks that make its pelt glow in colors. My neighbor wants the possum out. I think he wants it dead. I don’t, but he hasn’t asked me. Instead, he’s chucking flares at it. At my window, at me.

He’s an old man, bent under some weight, and maybe that weight is the sharp-faced woman living across the street from us. She used to be my neighbor’s wife. The guy up the hill told me, idling his ATV waiting for his kids to be dropped off, that it’d been a messy divorce, a messy marriage before that. And now she lives over there, across the gravel with her new husband, and their two Great Danes, who bark at my neighbor when they see him because they never really see him much.

My neighbor has a wall of firewood enclosing the back half of his property. He parks his truck in the yard. This isn’t a neighborhood where that matters or anyone cares. It’s an unincorporated community. So when my neighbor ended up with a bloody lip and my other neighbor out cold and his wife screaming in the dusk, no cops showed up. The woman across the way had to heave her husband into their lifted truck, but she couldn’t do it. It was too high, his bulk too much for her. She just collapsed with him against the side of the truck, crying and panting with her tongue halfway out of her mouth.

So the old man crossed the gravel again to maneuver his ex-wife’s husband into the truck, so she could take him to the hospital forty-five minutes away. Old sinew still taut under his pleated pale skin. And after, he just sat on the fire-cracked stump in his yard and watched her drive away, and then at the stars that pricked the dark. I don’t think she thanked him. Maybe there wasn’t much to thank him for.

I wonder if he’s throwing flares at his possum-faced wife tonight, or she just made him realize he didn’t want anyone near him anymore, not even possums. But that wall is full of life, in every season. He’s built thousands of little homes for every little thing that needs to stay warm, reproduce, and die. Out here, that’s everything. He’ll be defending his property for eternity. 

I don’t say anything. I never do. I love possums, those little scrunched ghosts gnashing ticks in their teeth, and I feel badly that this one is being shock-and-awed to death in the tree outside my window. I’m brown as the trees out here, though, the only one who is. And there’s no point anyway; no one would come if I called.