Early in the conversation, I remembered a line from the movie Watchmen. Rorschach, a good guy, is incarcerated and surrounded by a group of bad guys, many of whom were put in prison because of him. They sense an opportunity for retribution but when they attempt to injure him, he turns the tables and retaliates swiftly and violently. He then snarls, “None of you understand. I’m not locked up in here with YOU. You’re locked up in here with ME.”
That’s how I felt about the conversation I was in. I had initiated it but I was trapped. There was no escape from it. When I saw her step out of her vehicle and then unload twelve opossum, I was hooked. I had no choice but to walk over and start up a conversation. I’m just flesh and blood after all.
And don’t let the “O” fool you, opossum is how you spell possum. The adorable marsupials that litter the sides of roads everywhere. I’d never actually seen one that wasn’t run over. I always just assumed they were flat with their eyeballs already popped out.
John Smith, one of the founders of Jamestown, Virginia, recorded in his notes that the opossum “hath an head like a swine... tail like a rat... of the bigness of a cat.” Author Jennifer L. Armentrout once noted “Gods were like possums. You could go your whole life without seeing one, but once you found one of them, you found the whole freaky family.”
They made a beeline for the nearby pond- we were at the local forest preserve, and jumped in. What was crazy was that she had them perfectly trained. They would listen to her every command. The scene was right out of a nature show. I could hear the jaunty music playing in my head as I watched their escapades.
So why did I feel like a prisoner once we started talking?
Because she introduced herself as a prophet of God. Right smack dab in her opening sentence.
The mother of all conversation killers. The needle slid off the record.
Then, as we continued to talk, she started to make inferences that perhaps she wasn’t so much a prophet of God as God herself. I was playing along until then but needed to nip that talk in the bud.
“A girl God? It could never work,” I stated. There wasn’t even a hint of uncertainty in my voice.
This was not the reaction she was expecting. I assume that most the time, people have either tuned her out or thrown themselves off a ledge by this point in the chat so it might have been uncharted waters for her. “Why do you say that?” she asked, clearly startled.
“I startled God,” I thought to myself and smiled. Then I checked her face for a reaction, just in case she was reading my mind. Gods can be like that. Very nosy.
“Well,” I began my explanation, “if God is a man, it’s easy for him to cover up his big, divine hog.” I arched my eyebrows and tilted my head as if asking if any further explanation was necessary.
It was.
“A girl God, on the other hand, well… her boobs are right out there for everyone to see. I can’t imagine a female God without a big rack, so she’d be up there sermoning away and it would be a total sausagefest in the audience. Every male disciple wondering how they can get their God to jump up and down for even a few seconds. Girls with small boobs would resent her right off the bat.”
She stood stunned by my analysis. Even the opossums turned to look at me, their little jaws hanging open.
Eager to help her understand, I took on the persona of a woman with small boobs. “You know she only got to be God because she has big tits. What a whore!” I put my hands on my hips and wobbled my head back and forth in a very condescending way, although I thought better of waggling my finger at her.
The female prophet of God began to herd her passel of opossum back into the car. The last one in looked back at me and shook its head.
“You’re assuming a female God would be human, aren’t you?”
“Uh… yeah” I said, still in character, hands on my hips and wobbling my head back and forth. My finger itching to waggle.
“There’s your problem. Humans... with their hubris and their wild variety of cup sizes,” and with that, she transformed into a giant opossum and got into her car. Not before giving me a quick peek at her thirteen nipples, in a circle of twelve with one in the middle. Twelve fuzzy little faces peering at me from the back seat as she drove away.
After she was gone, I was left to wonder if I was still Rorschach in the metaphor.