The first time I spotted the raccoon, he was peering up from the storm-drain ladder with a pair of safety goggles cut from a Sprite bottle. The DIY lenses were fogged, and the rubber band holding them together looked like it had once bundled organic asparagus.
“Technically you’re trespassing,” I said, sweeping my flashlight across his black-and-white mask. The beam caught his pupils, two glowing orbs suspended in the darkness of the storm drain.
“Technically,” he replied, scratching his belly, “I pay rent to Marvin.”
“Marvin’s been dead three months.”
His whiskers twitched. “That would explain the unanswered checks.”
All around him, an improvised lab glowed: cigarette-lighter Bunsen burners, baby-bottle beakers, and blue crystals cooling on strips of aluminum.
“I’m Sylvia Goldstein, the new HOA manager,” I told him. “And that”—I circled the operation with the beam—“is absolutely outside community guidelines.”
He pushed the goggles to his forehead and sighed. “I’ve got three kits to feed. Since the council locked the dumpsters, the trash game’s been brutal.”
Any reasonable adult would have called animal control. Instead I heard myself ask, “ Is it good? ”
“Best in Fort Worth. I studied chemistry at TCU before the… incident.”
“What incident?”
“They found out the adjunct was a raccoon. Tenure committee panicked.”
I sat on the curb, letting my feet hover above the trickle in the drain. “My husband ran off with our couples therapist last week.”
“That’s rough,” he said, ears flattening.
We listened to a sprinkler sputter two streets over.
“I can’t let you cook here,” I finally admitted.
He nodded and began sliding apparatus into a child’s lunchbox plastered with peeling superheroes.
Behind him was a photo of three kit-sized raccoons in matching goggles and a female raccoon wearing a twist-tie necklace.
“There’s an old shed behind my place,” I heard myself say. “It’s dry, and no cameras. Needs some wiring, though.”
He tilted his head, studying me. “I’d need power.”
“ I know a guy. ”
Two weeks later, when Mrs. Patel from Neighborhood Watch asked why my electric bill had doubled, I told her I’d taken up pottery. She dropped off a bag of clay the next day, delighted by my ‘creative turn.’
I guess sometimes the strangest friendships begin with a flashlight beam, in a storm drain you never meant to climb into, while you’re just doing your job.