Thing that went thud in the night
Every morning when I leave to go to work is the same: I open the door to the garage, unlock the car, walk around behind it to get to the front door (because I park it all the way to the front), and get into it. This is all in dark surroundings, save for the little bits of sun rays sneaking through the garage door edges; it's enough for me to know where the car is and avoid the trash can. Well, a couple of days ago, as I was walking around the car, I noticed a shadow on the ground. I walked over it, thinking it was a lint bunny that fell off the trash can. However, as I got inside my car, I thought better of it: lint bunnies from the dryer would not get that big. I grabbed the garage door opener, got out of the car, and stared at the thing as I opened the garage door for some light. Even before the room got brighter, I had already started recognizing a face and a muzzle...
On my garage floor was a opossum.
I was surprised, because I hadn't seen one up close before. It was white, about a foot long, and it was curled up on its side. Its eyes were closed and its mouth slightly opened. I didn't touch it, but since it didn't react when I walked over it or when the garage door opened, I figured it was dead. And that's when I felt a bit of nausea and repulsion. There's a dead rat-like animal on the floor! I quickly went back inside and told my mom about it. She didn't recognize the name, and when she went to look at it, she had the same reaction I did.
Since trash day was still a couple of days away, we got a zip lock bag and a shovel, and as she was getting ready to shovel it off the floor, I suddenly thought: opossums play dead! However, before I could say anything, the opossum was shoveled up without reaction (apparently already stiff). It was placed in the zip lock bag, sealed up and dropped in the trash can.
It was quite the creepy experience, mainly because it was so unexpected. My mom figured it got in because the garage door had been left open for some time the evening prior. Anyways, I finally posted about it today because my mom and I were discussing names for it in Mexico, and she suddenly said it had a cute face, which surprised me; then again, it was not a full-sized opossum, so that's probably why...
FYI, in Spanish the main name for it is tlacuache, from the Nahuatl word tlacuatzin. It can also be called zarigüeya, which originates from the Portuguese sarigue. Oddly enough, as I was researching the word origins, I found another possible name for it, zorra mochilera, which means backpacking fox (???)