F. Palmer
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I don’t see the bat. I’m lying on my back in the grass, letting the warm light of evening slip between the great big branches of the park’s old oaks and spread dappled across me. I’m half on the grass and half on the boy I’m seeing’s threadbare picnic blanket, thinking about the day and the coming night, about him and about us, if there ever will be an us, if I want there to be, if the way the wine bottle is sweating means that the wine inside will be warm and sour and if I’ll drink it and what it means that I definitely will no matter the temperature. I’m certainly not thinking about bats – it’s not even five in the afternoon and even though it’s colder and colder every evening, the sun won’t even touch the horizon for another couple hours – until a man on a blanket nearby points it out.
“Is that a bat?” He gestures to a nowhere spot in the sea of picnic blankets and low-profile camping chairs. The orchestra starts to play, that cacophony of notes before the conductor raises his arms. I didn’t come here for the music. I came here to lay out in the sun and drink wine and cut my teeth around stone fruit and to watch the boy I’ve been seeing close his eyes to really listen to the instruments and to decide if that makes me want him more or less or not at all.
“That’s odd,” the man says, and the woman sitting beside him peers over his shoulder. “I didn’t know bats came out during the day.”
They don’t come out during the day. Unless they’re rabid, I think, and imagine a thick froth between dog teeth, Icarus burnt to a crisp on the sun. I roll my gaze down my outstretched arm and find there, at my fingertips, the small dark body of a bat, its head fuzzy like a dead dandelion.
Bat bites don’t hurt, and in a summer spent outside they are much less offensive than the mosquito bites all down my arms and legs. Bats have such small teeth, smaller than pretty much any other mammal. And they don’t bite like other biting things. Snakes would make themselves known even if their fangs did not, all that movement, all that hissing. Spider bites have a higher profile, a venomous burn. Wasps and bees sting and writhe. Bats don’t do any of that. They will press their needle teeth through the membrane of your skin like a kiss.
When the concert is over, when the boy I’m seeing is rolling up his blanket and I’m packing up the picnic basket, I look around at the grass and the fallen leaves and something shifts inside me. Some tidal thing lurches across my horizon. I chalk it up to the silence between the boy I’m seeing and I, the tension that has settled over us that we can’t seem to dislodge no matter how hard I try. I am thinking about how he rolled away from me the last time we fucked and didn’t look back at me once until he left in the middle of the afternoon. I am not thinking about the feeling that has started at the base of my brain, like an itch but not one I could scratch if I could reach under my skin with my fingers.
Four days after the concert, the boy I’m seeing calls me to tell me he doesn’t think we should keep seeing each other. If I’d been myself, I might have cried or hung up the phone, but all the days before the call felt like a single long blur and lately I’ve been feeling like a bottle bounce bounce bouncing down a flight of stairs, cracking with each hit, waiting to touch my failure point to go shattering apart.
That night, in the bed I haven’t left all day, I dream that I’m chasing the sun, arcing up until I can feel the heat of it on my face, burning, boiling. I wake up with a fever that doesn’t go away and a thirst that feels about more than water, that digs into the dark marrow soft inside my bones. I don’t call the boy I’m no longer seeing even though I want to. I don’t call an ambulance even though it’s starting to feel like maybe I should. Instead, I pace a complicated bloom of circles, drink water and retch it out. I wander out into the hallway, feeling my way along with the blind tips of my fingers. My mouth feels like it’s reshaping and I am frothing from it, foam between my teeth. My teeth feel narrowed, squeezing each tender root. My ears howl, so loud it blocks out the light. I blink and I’m at the bottom of the stairs. I blink and I’m out on the street, the sun a smear of color along the horizon. I blink and I’m on my hands and knees in a ditch, dirt rammed beneath my nails, retching white and bloody, famished. There is an agony in the pit of my stomach that goes searching through the palms of my hands. I blink and there’s the bat, sitting in a heap amongst the leaves. It’s reaching for me, wings wide and limpid, shivering. I blink and it’s a man – long and thin and sickly, eyes the color of the blanched sky. “You’re rabid,” he says, moving closer. “You’re hungry.” His hair is fuzzy like a dead dandelion and I watch his needle teeth break open a vein in his narrow wrist. He smells like loose change and when he offers it to me, I close my lips around it. “Drink,” he says and I do even though his blood is freezing and tastes like it’s sat coagulated in his wrist. The sun inside my head goes supernova, the glass of my body shatters.
F. Palmer is a writer, reader, and bookseller based in the United States. She likes when it’s hard to tell if a story is scary or sexy. You can read more of her work at SUBSTACK
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