'Twas Beauty Killed the Beast- or - how to kill monsters

Marsupials are a strange breed. They have fur like mammals and give birth to live young, but prematurely according to our standards. Marsupial's come with their very own baby bags with which to carry the prenatal young until such time as they decide to jump out and start fending for themselves. Of course the majority of their diversness resides on the far side of the world on and around the Continent/Country of Australia. That goes without even being said...

North and South America's fossil records indicate that we had our fair share of Marsupial diversity as well but at some point in history the ecosystem was inundated with mammals and the marsupials failed to compete for food and water and so died out.. All that remains of their furry baggy kind are a few squirrels I didn't know about and neither did your sixth grade science teacher, aaaannnnd- the North American Possum or Opossum depending on how old the book is. Unlike the bunny faced fully fuzzified kind of marsupials you find down under, these natives of forests, sheds, and local dumpsters resembles none other than the R.O.U.S.'s of Princess Bride fame. Rodents of unusual size. In other words: Giant Rats.

Yet unlike the giant rats of S. Morgenstern's classic tale, these dog sized creatures have more in common with reptiles than rats. Exchange those heavy incisors for a set of alligator teeth and the fuzzy hair you might expect for the mangy white snaggled hair of a swamp witch and you'll start to get an idea of what the North American Possum looks like.

Now dispensing with any further explanation- the story...

I know a young lady in Tennessee. She lives about 40 miles from Nashville on a small farm. Two nights ago she heard something outside her home. It was her chickens. A week or so ago she built a new coupe for the young hens she'd been raising this year. It so happened that a large ugly Possum had discovered the coupe and had decided to make it his own personal buffet.

This girl isn't very tall and isn't very wide, but what she lacks in stature she makes up for in what a famous southern lady calls being "fragile as coal trucks" or as I like to say "having a face like a dump truck.," but I digress.

Behind the back door of every home this girl's ever lived in sits an old aluminum baseball bat. As far back as she can remember its never been to a game, but two nights ago it played quite a different game. Armed with nothing but this bat, this young lady of which I speak ventured out into the yard gripped by a sensation only a disrupted grizzly bear commands when a tourist feeds her cub Tabasco sauce. There perched on her henly house loomed the dark figure of the biggest swamp gator rat you could ever imagine.

With a mighty heave she let that bat swing as hard as it'd go! A deafening "Ping" rang out across the farmyard followed by the thump of a heavy hairy body armed with four sharp sets of burly claws! Up came a mouth full of razor sharp teeth and a guttural hiss of deranged anger and hate!

There's nothin on this earth so awfully fierce as a possum that's just been distracted from a free meal! But before the beast could get its footing to leap at her she let fly with another hard overhander! This time the PING was accompanied by the crunch a skull makes when it starts to give way. But the Possum doesn't run so much on brain power as it does on raw hatred in the bloodstream and that was now running at a hundred and ten percent!

It snapped its crooked jaws and hissed its fierce black breath at her! But something deeper than a natural protective nature had taken over her otherwise gentile demeanor.. Her heavenly blue eyes now glistened black. Her breath came in heavy gusts like the ones from a bull that's about to charge. A bead of sweat ran down her cheek. Judgment day.

The Rat monster leaped towards her but was pummeled to the ground by an earth shattering shower of hard metallic clanks and crunches the likes of which you've never even nightmared about! The chickens huddled in stunned silence as the killer became the killed.

By the time she'd finished with it, there was more blood on her than on the carcass and the only bone left in tact was the wishbone although the buzzards made quick work of that yesterday. Rather than waste time with a Christian burial which would have been sacrilege anyway since beasts like that don't hail from above, she hauled what was left of it out to the highway where it could stand as a warning to all evil creatures and demons and maybe dissuade some of them from meeting a similar fate.

The bat is safe.

back behind the door

sitting in silence

waiting...

waiting for the time when it can once again strike a blow for justice!

Justice and a marsupial-free continent!