The Bat

The problem with the bat, you claimed, was it wasn’t dead. The greater problem, I thought, was it wasn’t quite alive. We carried it in a box to the park, behind the dark gazebo, knowing the dark gazebo near the shore is where things give up, where things get claimed, where the anonymous do the claiming. We had both done that, on either end like a see-saw, and now we were at an impasse. Hadn’t we met here? I couldn’t stand to go back, not with this quivering black body in a shoebox, not with that wide black yawn approaching in the sky. Would it be better if it were small, you asked? Like a bug, you asked? Would it be better if we had poison? If we could make it breathe? If we could stomp it out like a fire? I didn’t answer. As we approached the wooden steps, my mind drifted to the efficient angles of boats sleeping in the harbor, their delicate maths solving and unsolving. We left the bat on a bench. It might have rained after, though I never saw you again. But the boats, do you remember?

 

 

 

Ashley Farmer is an MFA candidate at Syracuse University. Her work has appeared in The Progressive, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and elsewhere.