Doug Ramspeck Possessor She wanted a child so found a possum skull. The loamy smell of the cypress swamp rebuked her. Day shrouded into night.  Soon her body felt heavier than stone, and the skull possessed her.  It was her birthright, her occultation.  There was a story in the bottomlands that spirits—smaller than pomace flies—rode in the incorporeal pouches of the possum.  She ran her fingers along the dead rows of teeth.   All was overture. Her husband claimed that as a boy he killed a cottonmouth with a limb from a black tupelo, but when he tossed the limb into the brackish water it roiled into life and muscled off.  At night the cricket frogs sound like stones flung one against the other.  She rises from bed and holds the skull against her as her husband sleeps. It will not suckle.  It presses close and will not let her go.

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