Louise dragged an old roller luggage bag diagonally across a vacant lot scattered with chunks of crushed asphalt, the bag jerking and twisting as she went. She was unfazed by the jagged terrain poking into her thinly protected feet. Louise was mostly torso. She had no neck and pencil-thin limbs which gave her the appearance of a killer whale walking on stilts. Crude, faded tattoos covered her arms. Her cousin bought a tattoo gun on Craigslist once and needed practice. She figured what the hell. Her standard clothing was a tight tank top, running shorts, and flip flops. In the winter she’d add a flannel shirt.
Louise was making a bee-line for the dollar store, part of her weekly routine. She had little use for sidewalks, roads, crosswalks, or pathways. When she saw where she wanted to go, she went. Jaywalking across four lanes of highway and into the empty run-off moat that surrounded the strip mall’s parking lot, Louise jerked her suitcase through some prickly perimeter shrubs designed to discourage the very thing she was doing. She at last reached the dollar store, leaving her roller bag at the counter as she had been asked to do in the past. What was she going to do, shoplift a few dollars of crap? Why do these underpaid lunkheads even care? Whatever. At least they take a little pride in their work. Louise shuffled through the aisles, picked up various tchotchkes, considered them, and put them back on the shelf. In the kitchen section, the appliances seemed impossible crappy and prone to immediate ignition, if they even carried current. The food aisle featured canned, bagged and boxed foods far beyond their “fresh by” dates, and with an unknowable shelf life. Then to her delight, she came across a crunchy improbability—boxes of Cap’n Crunch Choco Crunch flavored cereal. It had been discontinued years ago, and was a mix of regular Cap’n Crunch mixed with Milk Duds. Part of a balanced breakfast. The gum-shredding sugar shards of Cap’n Crunch mixed with the chocolate gooiness of the duds yielded a blissful mix of high fructose corn syrup and chocolate. Almost as good as the cereal was the milk left behind. It was essentially chocolate milk with limp bits of the Cap’n’s golden foodstuff. Louise carried a stack of boxes to the counter, paid and filled up her suitcase. She returned home on her same beeline route.
***
Louise lived in a large Tudor-style mansion on one of the two prestigious streets in town. The house was over a century old and Louise had a team of gardeners and contractors that kept it in pristine condition. She never carried a key to the front door, instead entering through the unlocked kitchen door in the back. Louise had made her money in the early days of the Internet by buying up domain names. At the time, she worked at an airport magazine and candy shop and overheard some corporate computer types talking about domain names as they flipped through magazines. Louise taught herself how to look up the potential domain names and buy them. She went through every magazine in her shop, writing the name of every company she could find. In the end she owned over two hundred domain names for companies like Nestle, Boeing, Wendy’s, and Adidas just to name a few. She offered to sell them to the companies, and some initially tried to sue or otherwise threaten her. In the end they all paid. She made the ones who were nasty about it pay extra. This was just business after all, they didn’t have to be dicks about. As she was accumulating her fortune selling the domain names, Louise kept her job at the airport due to its proximity to excellent financial tips. Because she was invisible to most people, appearing as just some blob behind the counter, she heard everything. One day a skinny nerd with haystack hair bought some gum and a Forbes magazine and started chatting with her. Nothing significant, but he actually saw her, regarded her, and they had a nice talk. When she asked him what he did he said he ran a computer company in Seattle. He was such a nice man she decided to invest money in his company. Her Microsoft stock grew her fortune even more.
***
Louise made her way through the kitchen door and called out, “Jerri! Sherri! Carrie! Mary! Terri! Perri! Wilma! Come get your dinner!” Louise locked all but one of the cereal boxes in a cabinet. She portioned the box into seven bowls lined up along the floor. The clicking of claws grew louder as her pets woke and made their way to the kitchen from all corners of the house. They were all females. As usual, Jerri appeared first. She was never far from food. Her black button eyes were wide in her long, white face, her mouth slightly open and panting with excitement. She wobbled along the wooden floor, her hairless tail aloft as she curled it from side to side. Jerri was a possum, as were all Louise’s pets. Soon, they were all lined up at their bowls, muching away on the Cap’n Crunch, grunting with delight. Louise had added goat milk and by the end they all had chocolaty beards, gleefully grooming each other with their little hands. With everyone well fed, it was time to do some hunting.
***
Louise acquired her first possum by accident when she nursed an injured one back to health. She named her Jerri. That possum recruited other females, and Louise had them all had spayed. No unplanned pregnancies in this house! Seven possums was plenty for anyone and she’d seen the horror online of how rapidly they reproduced if given the chance. She kept them inside, where they were content to roam the mansion. Surprisingly clean once housebroken, Louise discovered how easily they learned to use the toilet lifting and lowering the lid, using an appropriate amount of toilet paper, and flushing the handle. That was when the idea of sending them treasure hunting occurred to her. She worried they might grow listless if they were left to simply lounge about the house all day, so she trained them to wear a GPS tracker set to a target. When they were close to their target, they would pick up the scent of the concentrated possum musk Louise had planted in the house. She bought it on Craigslist. How the hell anybody collected, let alone distilled the stuff, was beyond her. But Capitalism always found a way. She attended real estate open houses in order to swab the musk on some object of interest. For some reason, she liked to collect other people’s worthless knickknacks. She always had, and used to get in trouble for it.
***
As a child, she accumulated a pile of baubles she stole from the homes of relatives and other children. When her mother found it, Louise was beaten and made to burn the collection in a trashcan in the backyard. Her mother didn’t want to face the shame of her kleptomaniac child by returning all the stolen items, hence the bonfire. After that, her mother rarely spoke to her. She would feed her as she did her other children, but no special treats, no birthday cakes, no gifts for Christmas. She set her food out like she was feeding an unwanted dog. Some would weaken from the strain, the longing for their mother’s love, but Louise became more independent. She found that she did not need anyone to make her way in the world and was happy to move out before she finished high school. That’s when she got the airport job and started listening to the business men and women who sauntered through her store. She didn’t care that they didn’t regard her, and saw her as the extension of the card machine they swiped and poked to buy magazines and candy for their flights to someplace. She listened well, learned about domain names, and then about Microsoft. Because the work was rewarding, she remained at the job after she became wealthy, and then wealthier still. But with the advent of smart phones, people barely spoke. Instead drifting through the narrow aisles flipping through feeds or checking e-mail. Louise decided to retire to her mansion and become a recluse. It was then she met her first possum.
***
Once trained, the possums went about their tasks with alacrity. Not only because they would receive a special treat of pepperoni upon their return, but Louise thought she noted in them a sense of pride from doing a job well. They usually entered target homes through a dog or cat door, but sometimes had to improvise, working their way through an attic or dryer vent. Were they malicious and of a mind to, possums could easily overrun humanity. Fortunately they are benign creatures with no desire for revolution.
On this particular night Louise was sending Carrie. The GPS was fitted and she took her outside, pointing her in the general direction of the target. The possum wore headgear with a night vision camera and microphone so Louise could monitor all the action. Carrie quickly tottered off, guided by the pings on the GPS and found the target a few blocks away. Walking the perimeter she honed in on the musky scent and looked for an entry point. She pulled at a board skirting the front porch and slipped into the crawlspace. Sniffing her way to the scent, she popped up through a floor vent, cautiously listening for any signs of humans or pets. The TV was playing the menu loop of the movie “Paul Blart Mall Cop” but there was no sound. She crept into the room, scanning for signs of life and heard deep breathing on the couch. A middle-aged man was asleep with his rescue pit bull snoring next to him. Mary followed the possum scent to a side table and easily grabbed a ceramic mouse, stashing it in her pouch. She left the way she came but as she was about to exit under the porch Carrie caught another scent. Carrie wobbled back under the house beneath the kitchen. Louise couldn’t see much on camera, just a pile of dirt that looked like all the other piles of dirt under the house. She could hear footsteps on the floor above, and the clicking of the dogs nails as it sniffed at the floor trying to find Carrie. She left immediately, got out and ran back to Louise.
As Carrie happily gnawed on a chunk pepperoni, Louise felt around in her pouch for the mouse. She found it, but felt something else. It was stiff and rough like a stick wrapped in crepe paper. The unknow object was a dried-out finger with the wedding band still attached. It looked like a hot dog that had been left on a convenience store’s heated rollers well past its eat by date.
“Good girl, Carrie,” Louise told her possum, as she handed her a second portion of pepperoni. Louise put the ceramic mouse in the china hutch where she kept all the other treasures and put the finger in a locked drawer where she kept all the other remains the possums brought home.