Flash fiction by Tess Lloyd

Photo illustration by Appalachian Places staff.

Mamaw and the Ghost Possum

By Tess Lloyd

When we buried Mamaw at the southwest corner of our new pre-fab log cabin, I worried about pushback. The ritual was Cousin McCaslin’s idea. His folklore professor at the state university had played the class a podcast about stone-age Scots burying an old woman at the corner of the house for good luck. Our people were Scots-Irish, and McCaslin thought we ought to honor our heritage, which between the Dollar Store and the Dairy Queen we’d about lost touch with.  

Mamaw giggled when we sat her in a mule-ear chair beneath the tulip poplar. Uncle Buddy suggested we all fire together, but Mamaw only had one bullet hole; the other bullets had slammed the tree trunk high over her head. Only I was fool enough to think Uncle Buddy and Cousin McCaslin really meant for us to blast her. You can see why I worried about pushback. 

What I hadn’t figured was that pushback would come in the form of a ghost, or that the ghost would be a Mamaw-sized possum. But there it was, a ghost possum, wearing Mamaw’s calico dress and housecoat and sunbonnet. “Ike, let me fetch you some fresh-churned butter for that cornbread,” it squeaked, grinning with those sharp little possum teeth and twitching the tip of its tail, which dragged the floor beneath its housecoat. “Honey, wouldn’t you love more leather-britches beans?” it tittered. We never knew when we’d open the shower curtain to find it perched on the clothes hamper. When we tried to nudge it out the front door, our hands fell through empty space. The smell was something between Mamaw’s Tube Rose snuff and road kill. 

“What do the podcasts say about getting shed of ghost possums?” asked Uncle Buddy. When McCaslin couldn’t locate any possum-shedding spells, we decided to bring in his folklore professor, to perform an exorcism. We had streamed the movie on Prime.  

The folklorist, a skinny little man with wire-rimmed glasses, was tickled. He calculated that influencing paid better than professoring and was fixing to start a DIY podcast on YouTube, Gander Gleanings, about living by authentic mountain folkways; he wanted to feature our family in the pilot. The dove-tailed logs of our pre-fab cabin showed we still practiced our traditional crafts, he said. “Can you talk about snake-handling?” he asked. 

“We’re Old Baptists,” Uncle Buddy said, which should’ve put a lid on that pot for anyone who could tell a Mark 16:18 Pentecostal from pokeweed. But the folklorist eagerly punched the record button of his cell phone. 

The ghost possum plopped down in the mule-ear chair opposite the folklorist. “Shall I show them tradwives how to make lye soap?” it simpered. The professor couldn’t see the ghost possum or hear a lick of what it said, so he never replied. Finally the possum put its paws on its hips and asked McCaslin, “Do all your professors have such bad manners?”  

When the folklorist saw the fresh-dug dirt, he got real pale. He wouldn’t sit still, so we had to rope him to the mule-ear chair. The ghost possum complained the whole time about having to stand and its rheumatism so bad in winter. We buried the professor at the southeast corner of the cabin. 

By now Uncle Buddy’s patience was running thin. When the sheriff roared up in his SUV, smoothing his porn-star mustache and blabbing about accessories to crime, Uncle Buddy said he wasn’t no ladies’ handbag. Like the folklorist, the sheriff had a podcast, Mountain Mayhem; I reckon he hoped Mamaw’s story would go viral. We unbuckled his tooled-leather shoulder holster before planting him at the northeast corner. “Wouldn’t want to waste a perfectly good Glock,” the ghost possum snickered as it strapped the holster beneath its housecoat. 

We knew the northwest corner was vulnerable, and drew straws. Cousin McCaslin got the short straw, which seemed fair enough. McCaslin was husky; he’d played tackle in high school, and digging the hole took a while. His skin felt like biscuit dough. The ghost possum wiped a few teardrops from its whiskers with McCaslin’s third-grade report card.   

The four sentinels, who ought to have been protecting the cabin, kicked up a ruckus indoors. By now they could all see each other. The ghost possum offered everybody fried chicken and spat snuff-drool in an old Tube Rose jar. The folklorist shoved his cell phone under the ghost possum’s snout and begged it to talk in tongues. The sheriff tried to hack the folklorist’s recordings to use on Mountain Mayhem, but the folklorist said our release form only covered Gander Gleanings. McCaslin trotted after the folklorist, wearing his football uniform and taking notes in a composition book with the state university logo on the cover.   

Finally the commotion got so bad that Uncle Buddy and I moved into a single-wide overlooking the interstate. We bought a mimeograph machine and commenced to publishing a zine, The New Appalachianalia. Uncle Buddy said the smell of purple ink took him back to junior high. The zine, which we sold at the Exit 46 welcome center, featured articles about bass boats and truck-bed liners and recipes for crockpot catfish stew and pork rinds with crawdad dip. If tradition was what people wanted, by god we would lay it on thick. 

Tess Lloyd is a professor emerita at East Tennessee State University, where she taught American literature, Appalachian studies, and folklore. She co-edited “Writing Appalachia: An Anthology." Her fiction and prose poetry has appeared in “Flash Fiction Online,” “Women Speak,” and “The Ekphrastic Review.”