Apartment Oracle

There's an article taped to our refrigerator. The headline screams ten things you should have before age twenty-five. We taped it to the fridge two years ago, when the last of us in the apartment turned twenty-five and we realized we had nothing to show for ourselves. It's pretty standard: ten thousand dollars in savings a starter home a 401k Some other stuff, too, but it's not important. What's important is what we've taped up beside it: a list of our own. It's titled ten things 4B has that successful people don't. Top of the list is, of course, the oracle opossum. We found him in the dumpster last year when Ricki was throwing out the garbage. Ricki thought he was stuck and tried to rescue him, but the damn thing scooted out of there so fast that Ricki wound up falling in. It took all three of the rest of us to pull him out. We even had to call Evan from work, and Haley said she was never taking the trash out again. She still hasn't. Haley is a woman of her word. The week day it was my turn and the possum was back, hanging out on the pile of garbage like a king on his throne. I had a sack of chicken bones— Ricki worked at KFC at the time and brought home food for us sometimes, so we always had chicken bones on garbage day. I thought "here goes nothing," and tossed a handful to the little guy. I thought he must be desperate if he was hanging around here, as broke as everyone in these apartments was. There wasn't even any good trash to pick through, not like the apartments near the yoga studio I worked at. That would have been the end of it, I think, except the next day, Evan found a pile of chicken bones outside our door with our names carved into them. I've never heard Haley scream louder, not even when we had to pull Ricki out of the dumpster. We thought it was some kind of threat, except Ricki was dumb enough to pick one up and it had a message on the back. "Get that mole checked out, Evan." one bone said in serpentine script. "What mole?" Ricki asked, turning the bone over in his hand like it might answer if he harassed it enough. "I have this weird one on my left shoulder," Evan shrugged. He was really taking this bone thing in stride. "I've been meaning to get that looked at." Six days later, Evan had his mole removed. That might have been the end of it, an ominous warning from a mysterious but benevolent force, if it hadn't happened again. And again. Every time we threw away a bag of chicken bones, we received a mysterious and vaguely threatening message the next day, carved right into the bones. "Haley, your boyfriend is cheating on you." "Layla," (that's me), "your tire will go flat next Wednesday." "Evan, ask your boss for a raise." We weren't sure if the last one was an omen or just some strange advice, but we took it anyway. Evan got a raise. He could've moved out, but he didn't. We still got bone-warnings every Wednesday. One day Haley had enough and bought one of those doorbells, the ones with the cameras. "We're going to find out who is doing this," she said. "It's sweet of them, but it's unsettling and the hallway has smelled like old chicken for months. The neighbors are going to complain." The neighbors didn't complain, and nothing showed up on the camera. No one was stalking out our apartment, not even the weird guy from 5B who had a crush on Ricki and thought they were meant to be together, even though Ricki had been in a long distance relationship since high school and was planning to move to Kansas for the guy— and anyone who wants to move to Kansas has to be serious about someone. That Wednesday, though, we saw it. Dragging a pile of chicken bones towards our apartment, shuffling down the hallway like he owned the place, was the damn possum from the dumpster. He paused for a minute outside our door, lay the bones down reverently, and waddled away. His tail swung as he walked. "Hey Haley," Ricki asked while we watched the video. "Do you think the possum is a god? Like the one in that office's supply closet downtown?" Haley had followed that story religiously when it broke. She was friends with Erin the Intern, mouthpiece of the cubicle god, through a friend of a friend. They had a lot of thoughts about religion these days, and we all had to listen to them when Erin came over and she and Haley got drunk off tequila and cried about the universe on the couch. On the couch! Right in the middle of the apartment. Haley would know about gods. Haley watched the video again and again. "I'm calling Erin," she said. Erin showed up with tequila, like it was a Friday night and not a Wednesday morning. She and Haley watched the video. "It's not a god," Erin said, like there was no room for argument. There wasn't. "What is it, then?" Evan asked, sinking down on the couch beside the girls. Erin rolled her eyes, like it was obvious, like we were stupid. "It's an oracle," she said. We nodded. Of course it was an oracle. News got out, eventually, like it always does. One of the cleaning ladies found the pile of bones and fainted right on the carpet. Haley got it on video, and that went viral right with the news about the garbage oracle. It died out pretty quickly, of course. There's always something stranger happening, somewhere, than anything that happens to us. We made a bit in ad revenue on YouTube from the doorbell videos, and Haley and Erin got to be interviewed by the newspaper. Three days later, a giraffe at the zoo in San Francisco was discovered to be getting messages from somewhere in Andromeda, and that really overshadowed the whole opossum that can tell the future thing. We could move out now, all of us, and not just Ricki. Ricki moved to Kansas and Chase, the guy from 5b who was in love with him, moved into his old room. It's fine now. Chase got a boyfriend. We're all happy. We buy chicken just for the opossum, just in case Erin was wrong and it is a god. You can never be too safe these days. Especially these days— the bones say to drive safe tomorrow. You just never know what's going to happen.