He turned around to face the room. Ten sets of eyes. Nine of the ten were pink. They were not feline and the squeal did not belong to Brice. The squeal was a whine with vermin punctuation. The squeal became a snarl and the snarl became a whining choir. Hell was a cacophony. There were nine pairs of eyes trained on Brice and by now Brice could make out the color of their skin through the sparse and wiry threads of wiry hair. They were the color of dead things that sometimes go bump. They were angry. Opossums looked at him with angry eyes and they licked their lips and he imagined those lips and where they had been the night before. All over him. Their noses in his armpits, snuffling under and around his weight, indiscriminate the mouths nipped, feeding on meat. Brice could see their teeth. One opossum scratched its neck with a little mousey hand. Its nose was a dirty brown. He could see its fingers. Nails.

Chicken bones were scattered across his bedroom floor.

Brice walked back down the street towards the diner; before he got anywhere, he began to cry.