Bat Man

My sophomore year of college, I took a fiction class and it has been one of the best classes of my student career. The following story is one of the pieces that I wrote in that class. It needs some work and is something I intend to edit again this year. Until then, I hope you enjoy the original!

Bat Man
By Anna Rohaly

I find I have an unusual hunger these days for bats. Stranded and alone, trapped on an island in the middle of the Pacific, I lived in a cave surrounded by the little creatures. When the turf was too rough to catch fish, I was often forced to hunt my little winged roommates. During the day they simply clung to the top of our short cave. I could catch the little bats by stunning them with light and then just plucking them off of the wall. After taking them down I would kill them, then tear their wings off and cook them over my fire for dinner. When I ate them then, I always found them leathery and chewy but now I am craving them. I will just have to go for a late afternoon walk and see if I can find any.

Leaving my house, I wander down the cement streets and past the pastel colored houses. It seems strange after living alone on that island for almost eight years to come back and see that people do exist. I know that my neighbors think I am strange. I don't like talking to people. On the island I talked and no one replied and I fell out of the rhythm of conversations. My therapist wants me to help organize a block party. I on the other hand want to blow up the block party and live alone again, so you can see that we have different ideas of how my therapy should be going. 

 

The houses are beginning to spread out now and there are more trees and grass between them. I wish I had lived out in the country before leaving for that fishing trip. I could have returned and lived in isolation instead of here, surrounded by noisy people. There are moments when I almost remember the noise, where I almost enjoy it again. On the island there were times that the absence of people's voices and noises grew so overwhelming that I would scream for hours, and covering my ears would lie curled up in a ball on the sand. I feel torn between two worlds now. 

 

I see an abandoned house sitting back in the woods away from the road. Ivy grows up the walls, covers the chimney, and in some places grows over the clouded windows. I hear a small screeching sound that is more familiar then any person's voice. The cry of a bat is hard to mistake for a voice and though people think I am insane, I find the sound comforting. 

 

I veer off of the road towards this source of comfort. Moss softens my footsteps and covers the small path that used to be a driveway. Reaching the house, I cross the rotting wooden porch, passing old rusting lawn chairs and a red wagon. A No Trespassing sign hangs in the window but I walk past it, ignoring orange and black and the little letters next to the door spelling out Robertson. I pull the door open. The lock has been unturned for so long that between the rotten door frame and the rusting bolt one small tug was all it took for the door to swing out on its hinges. I walk into the old home. 

 

It used to be lovely and in a very different way it still is. The tiled floors inside were protected from the rain and so they remain sturdy even though they are covered with dust and bat feces. The family had moved out in a hurry. Furniture is still in the rooms, some of it toppled over, some of it covered in cobwebbed sheets. I walk into the kitchen and find a wood stove, a white and red metal table, and an old fashion sink. The stained glass window over the sink is a dusty, muted green and gold. I turn the handle on the sink and watched as well water gushes out a brownish green from the faucet. 

 

The bats cry from somewhere else in the house. Leaving the kitchen, I cross the floor and walk into the living room. The couch is toppled backwards and a mouse peeks out at me from under the stripped cushions. I walk over to the chimney where the faint bat screeches were coming from. There are even pictures left behind on the mantel. An old woman smiling and holding two little kids, a beautiful young woman holding an infant, and man standing next to that young woman at the alter. Everyone smiling, everyone happy. What had happened?

I may not know what happened here but in this house I can see my own life mirrored back at me. I could almost swear that it is my own face staring back at me from those pictures. Some tragedy had struck this lovely family in this little home, a tragedy so terrible that they had been driven away by the force of those memories. Perhaps one of the children had died and they had moved away to escape all reminders of her. The young woman may have been diagnosed with cancer and the family had payed for her treatments until they had lost everything including her. Maybe the father's company had been accused of fraud and they had been left with no money after the court battles. Or maybe he too had been washed away at sea and instead of swimming to an island had been lost among the waves. What ever had happened, I felt tied to this house somehow, as though the house had been abandoned and isolated just as I had been. 

 

Tearing my eyes away from the pictures, I move the fire poker and shovel away from the wall and sit down next to the fireplace. Putting my head in my hands I allow the overwhelming feelings I've been shoving down to come out in long sobs as I listen to the soft calls of the bats. Every emotion, every second of overwhelming presence crashes down on me so that when I leave the house later with only one bat in a bag, I can barely walk.

After that first trip to the abandoned house, I began to go there more frequently. Each time after that, I took some cleaning supplies with me. I swept, mopped, and replaced the rotting wood. I sanded and fixed the plumbing so that the water ran clear. Weeds were pulled, the ivy was trimmed, and paint was bought for the trim work. The better the house the began to look, the less abandoned, the better I began to feel. The one change that I did not make however, was to chase out the bats. I let them continue living in the chimney. They always did make good roommates.

A month after I was done with the major renovations and fixings within the house, I went to the bank and bought the home for the price they had set after first evaluating the building. I convinced them not to go out for a second look. Driving my car back to the little house alone in the woods, I noticed one last change I needed to make. I went out to the edge of the road and put out a mailbox. My name, Tom Roberts, is engraved on the side. Like a life raft, the mailbox would secure me to humanity while the house will keep me from their insanity. I felt myself smile a real smile that day for the first time since I was brought home. I have found my place in the world.