Lot #2201: taxidermied Virginia opossum, upright, with clock in mouth. This was Mayfield’s attempt to create an art piece that mirrored one of the persistent visions of which she had been complaining in the year before her death. Specifically, she insisted that the opossum was a manifestation of a Muskogee psychopomp that would visit the soon-to-be-deceased to remind them of their mortality. Nga-to-fe-do, she called it, the Time Devourer. Mayfield’s close friends, worried, consulted the Muskogee Nation’s official historian, who confirmed that no such psychopomp existed in Muskogee religion, and that Mayfield’s name for it was “not necessarily nonsense but definitely not Muskogee.”

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