THE NEW GOVERNMENT.

PART 2

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The evening after such, the little girl came by to the shoemaker's shop after she was released from school and done with her homework, eager to visit her new friend. She hopped down the sidewalk and swung open the door once she had approached the building at the end of the street corner. Ding!

The ringing bell indicated that she had entered the shoe shop with excitement. That excitement was quickly satisfied when the little girl saw the opossum in the middle of one of the shoe racks, sitting on one of her grandfather's old scarves and drinking water out of a pink collapsible bowl. The small critter gazed up at the little girl with love and care in its eyes after taking a long sip of water, nearly choking on it. The girl reached up to pick it up and cradle it like her own child, but when she grabbed at it, something surprising was revealed. There was more than one oppossum on that scarf.

"PopPop! Look!" she called out to her grandfather. "My friend had babies!"

Within seconds on the exclamation, the shoemaker rushed over to his granddaughter to witness whatever was making such a fuss. Wouldn't he know it, there were three other little opossums crouched behind the bigger one.

"Oh my!" he said. "It did have babies! I guess you have more friends now!"

The little girl was so radiating with joy over this new discovery. She gathered all of the critters up in her arms and stroked them all gently. None of them were feral or ferocious in any way, surprisingly. And most importantly, the little girl now had more company.

Apparently, this wasn't the only time it happened. Slowly over time, the little girl who came by to visit just about every day kept finding more and more opossums around the workshop. Before long, this girl and the shoemaker had collected a total of seventeen opossums–and neither of them knew what to do with so many.

"Sweetheart, there are too many opossums in this workshop!" the shoemaker said to his granddaughter. "I hate to break it to you, but we need to release some of them. The pen I made for them is getting full!"

The older man stared down at his quick creation of several wooden boards nailed together to form a ring, that of which was now filled with small gray rodent-looking marsupials. He stroked his white beard as he thought of what he could possible do. After some thought, he decided to just go with his initial thought. He gently grabbed at some of the opossums and slowly started putting them into a nearby shoebox that was sitting on his workbench. Once there were only one of them left (he made sure that it was the original opossum that his granddaughter had first brought to the storefront; he was very caring like that and may or may not have grown attached to it, too), he picked up the box and lowered it down to his granddaughter's eye level. He let her see the group of opossums before he would dump them out back into the wilderness of the city.

The little girl waved at the opossums after reaching into the box and petting a few of them. "Goodbye, little friends," she said, sad that it had to come to this.

After she had bidded her last farewells, the shoemaker carried the box to the door and pushed it open. Now outside in the cold night, he tipped the box over onto the sidewalk, letting the little critters scurry away. "Go! Shoo!" he said, waving them off. And that was the end of that.

Or so he thought.