What would possess him?
I keep forgetting to tell y’all that, a while back, I saw a boy yelling at a dead possum on 11th Street. He wore the uniform of a certain sadly delinquent junior high and was obviously abusing the deflated little corpse for the amusement of his friends.
It made me think of an old superstition. There’s supposed to be something called a Lechusa – a bird that whistles at passersby. If they whistle back, their souls become possessed by the devil. I think this proverbially takes place in cemetaries. Whether the bird is the devil in assumed form or just a local satanic agent, I don’t know. Why there would be a superstition with such a lame taboo – “Don’t talk to strange animals” – I don’t know, either. Didn’t Sleeping Beauty whistle to birds in the Disney classic bearing her name? Maybe I got the superstition wrong, or maybe my grandmother did. Latino superstitions are sort of like the game Telephone – passed from person to person and generation to generation with slight variations on each telling. Maybe they all eventually stop making sense and either fall from oral history or else get reinvented.
I think that if there is any truth or logic in the bird superstition, it could definitely use a corollary about roadkill. It seems to me that anyone who would take the time to mock a dead possum is pretty much destined for bad deeds, anyway. Idle hands are the devil’s playground, right? Serial killers have no respect for animals, right?
Not that I wish the stupid little boy any harm…. I just thought it’d be funny if, after he yelled at the possum, the devil floated out of it and said, “Dude – come on. You’re just begging for it.”
