A Vegetarian Catches a Bat.
He sits, exhausted, on the broken couch he found in an alley. He occasionally sips at a Root of All Evil, an absinthe cocktail he’s currently enamored with. It’s cold and good.
On the television, cam girls are getting murdered by a deranged fan. The protagonist is arguing with the love interest about why her new job as a sex worker is working just fine for her, thank you. He says all the right things.
A dark shape flits through the air, cutting through the blue light of the screen like a flashlight beam in negative. He blinks. Rubs his eyes.
He thinks he’s hallucinating. Wormwood. The Internet said that whole thing was a myth.
“Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country.” — Wikipedia
Apparently, it also makes you see bats.
The hallucination flies overhead again, with enough out-of-place grace to reinforce its own place in reality. He stands up, ducking his head like he’s boarding a helicopter. He’s not sure what to do. His body is comfortably numb, but his heart is beating furiously.
It comes through again, bobbing strangely through the air like a marionette. He picks up a pillow from the couch and throws it. The creature dodges the pillow easily and continues on its course. It flies into the hallway and takes a right. Towards the room where his children are sleeping, limbs splayed all over their beds.
“Fuck,” he says.
He runs into the hallway, ducks under the bat and pulls their bedroom door closed. He blindly reaches out and does the same to the door of his own bedroom. Only after the doors are slammed shut does he worry about the noise he’s making. If they wake up now, they may never sleep again.
He crouches down in the kitchen. The bat’s not doing laps anymore. He wonders where it is. On his phone, he’s googling the best ways to get himself out of this situation. There are several methods, all of them terrifying.
He crawls to the front door and opens it, then turns on the porch light. He doesn’t realize that he’s treating the bat like a moth until later. A bat is not a moth. Bats eat moths.
He carries the broom around the house, looking for the bat. He doesn’t know if he’s going to try to shoo it or smash it. He’s not confident in his ability to do the former and is morally conflicted about the latter.
The finds the bat perched on the molding above the hall closet. As he approaches, the bat flees. He ducks and mentally ushers the beast toward the open door, but it doesn’t give one single fuck about the open door.
It’s only when it stops again that his alcohol fogged brain starts thinking about rabies. Months ago, when the smaller kid was bitten by a neighborhood cat, he’d reassured himself that she wouldn’t get rabies. The Internet said that cats don’t generally get rabies. It’s bats you have to worry about. It was reassuring then.
He stumbles to the front door, slamming it shut, hoping the bat didn’t do what he’d asked it to. He remembers the oft-repeated anecdote in all the Internet articles about the young girl who was bitten in her sleep and didn’t even know it. One of the few deaths caused by the disease. He thinks of the skinny girl in the other room, her long, pale legs paperweighting her bed clothes.
He searches, broom in hand. He looks under the couch, on the bookshelves, in the trash. Nowhere.
Fuck.
There’s a high shelf above the fireplace. It might be there, hiding in the shadows, waiting to attack. He climbs up on the heavy armchair. The shelf is empty. On his way back down, he nearly misses it, just a few inches from his face, stuck to a framed family portrait like an ugly brooch.
It’s not scary now. It’s small and fragile. He grabs a Gladware bowl from a kitchen cabinet and quickly slams the bowl over the top of the animal. It reacts immediately, screeching and flapping its wings furiously. He slides the lid between the bowl and the wall, trapping the bat inside.
“The bat’s going to die?” the big one asks as we drive down the street the next morning. It’s overcast and gray, the official uniform of the Inland Northwest. Droplets of rain hit the windshield.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Can’t we just let it go?”
“We could, but we’re not going to.”
The on-call woman from the health department, her voice thick with sleep, had said to preserve the bat. He would need to take it to a veterinarian’s office to be euthanized and decapitated so that its brain could be sent to Seattle for testing. The access to the sleeping kids was the problem. The risk was incredibly low, but the stakes dire. Too dire for compassion.
“When you bring it in, please make sure the container is secure. The waiting room is going to be full, so, if you can, please put the container in a paper bag or something.”
The waiting room is, indeed, full. Standing room only. He carries the bag full of helpless creature past the parrot in the dog crate. He stands at the desk.
“Are you Caris?” a woman in scrubs asks.
“Yes,” he says.
“Is it secure?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Is it alive?”
He remembers an hour earlier, when he’d opened the container to show the kids, curious to see a real bat. He’d thought it was dead. But as they begged him to close the container again, he noticed its ragged breathing.
“Yes,” he says.
She takes the bag. He takes his children.
The clouds are still outside, frowning at him.
