Susan Senator

I am extremely pumped, which means I will crash sometime in the afternoon.

Woke up at 4 a.m. I lay there thinking, “I have to be up in two hours but I’ll be a wreck if I don’t go back to sleep,” over and over, which did nothing to help my cause. And just as I was shutting my eyes and drifting, I heard a faint rustling noise. It was coming from the window shade on Ned’s side. Rustle, rustle. Whir. Oh God, wings. What the f***? A mouse? Or — gulp — a bat?

I have to tell you, I know there are many pro-bat people out there, people who tell you that bats eat mosquitoes, yadayada, that they’re really good, not scary, blahblahbla. Well they never had one dive-bombing at their heads in their living room. Those things can be tiny, like a benign shriveled leaf when they’re at rest, but when they fly, they’re huge and like something out of a horror movie. We have had three bat episodes in this big old house of ours, and I never want to go through that again. Max screaming, all of us herded into one room to get away from it. Then, the ominous silence when it finally tires and the furtive search for the thing. We had to trap them and kill them and get them tested for rabies — oh yes, that is what you should do, do not let them get away because you may have been exposed — they were negative, thank God. I got the boys rabies vaccines, as a preventive measure (not the kind of shot that contains human gamma globulin, but the kind veterinarians get prior to going into practice.) I actually had to take the three of them four weeks in a row for shots! But the thing is, what if it were to happen again, during some night, while they were asleep. Would Nat be able to tell me what had happened? He has trouble initiating. Would Benji wake up, even?

I got the roof holes all closed up and had the house bat-proofed, but when I heard that rustling noise I felt my stomach plummet. It sounded like we had a bat again.

“Ned,” I whispered, pushing the pillows off his head. “I hear something trapped behind the window shade.”
“Whaaa” He said, poking out of the bedclothes. I turned on the light.
Rustle, whir.
“What is it?” He asked.
“Could be a bat,” I said.
We looked at each other.
“Shit.”
“What do we do?”
We stood there for a while and stared at the window shade. We heard nothing. I leaned in and flicked it. Nothing. Turned the light out. Nothing. I started to raise the shade.
“Be careful, Sue.”
“You do it.”
Finally he got up the courage to lift the shade. I peered at the glass of the sashes. Nothing.
“Well, whatever it was, it’s gone,” I said.
“Wait!” Ned said. “There it is.”
I looked down, and there, resting innocuously below the window sill, was a huge moth. I picked up the magazine lying nearby and mushed it ferociously.
Don’t mess with an anti-bat person at 4 a.m.