Mission Impossumable

I got home from painting class around 9:15 on Thursday night, slow and sleepy.  It had been a long day prior to class, so I was not the most alert or quick on the uptake.  That's why it took a couple of minutes and several passes between the house and the car unloading my stuff before I realized what was clearly in my field of view the whole time.  Perched upon the power line running the back line of our yard was an interloper.  An operative! A clandestine agent bent on some secret reconnaissance!  It had frozen in place hoping (and almost succeeding in that hope) that I would not observe his skulking silhouette.  A spy!  A spook!  A mole!  (OK, maybe not a mole in the strict sense of the word...)  Clearly an undercover asset of considerable skill, he employed the famed death-freeze which would have been entirely convincing, were rigor mortis not quite so incompatible with tight-rope walking.

I sensed a challenge had been issued.  I'm not exactly sure how I sensed this, but I knew nevertheless that, had there been a gauntlet high upon the wire, it would have been thrown down on the roof of garage for me to have to pick up the next day.  One shady creature of the night had identified another and there wasn't room in town for the both of us.  I fixed on him for a half hour or so with my bleary end-of-the-day-glare, and he watched me back through eyes clouded with faux-death.  Neither budged.  For all our immobility, our stares were piercing and violent.  We locked and held.  And no one flinched.  Well, not at first...  OK, do you know how boring it can get playing a stare-down game with a possum?  Finally I realized that I have more that I want to accomplish in life than being Alpha-dog to a marsupial, so I caved and went inside.  As I closed the front door I'm convinced I heard a self-satisfied hissing chuckle and in that brief moment I reconsidered whether all my other life ambitions really shouldn't have been sacrified to teach the little rat a lesson.