A shout goes off around the Arts Factory campsite: hey, have you seen the possum? I’m not excited. I’ve seen ten possums in my life, more, in parks, in my mother’s garage. Then a rush of people… excited exclamations in a dozen accents. A snake has dropped from a tree and wrapped itself around the possum, quick as lightning.
We watch as the sinuous coils slither around the creature, lovingly squeezing its life away. It caresses it carefully, slowly. It has all night for this embrace. Bones crack. The snake opens its mouth wider, dislocates its jaw, kisses the tip of her head and swallows. It is as if she is lying on her back in her lover’s arms, she looks so peaceful. We are transfixed. The crowd is divided: the vision is ‘awesome’, ‘disgusting’, ‘intense’. Even ‘beautiful’. Certainly ‘savage’.
After a half hour or so, we are startled by movement: surely the possum isn’t still alive? But no, it’s a tiny baby possum crawling from its dead mother’s pouch, wondering what’s going on. It’s a heart-wrenching sight. The security guy from the Arts Factory tells us that even if it’s left behind, we legally can’t interfere and rescue it. It blindly noses around for quite a while before the snake realises there’s more movement and traps it between two coils. Someone spots a second, tinier tail peeking from within the pouch, but this one doesn’t move.
It takes the snake around two and a half hours to completely swallow the possum, and by the time it is finished, there is nothing possum-shaped about the elongated bulge inside the snake.
In the morning, there is nothing left behind but sand swirls and the slight stink of snake oil.