It was a dark and stormy night…
A lot of fiction starts out that way, but this non-fiction
story starts out that way, too.
It’s been raining and storming here all night. I barely slept between the crashes of thunder that shook the house and the lightning
that lit up our bedroom like a sports arena. We live in a
wooded area (it isn’t called The Woodlands for nothing), and every time it
storms, I lie awake waiting on a tree to crash through the house. I’m a bit of a worrier. I’m a scaredy cat; I hate
scary movies- and I’m very, very freaked out by collies and garden gnomes. (You probably don’t want to know.) Irrational fears are part of the reason I have a VIP pass to Crazytown.
So as you can imagine, I was more than a little unsettled
this morning when my husband woke me up at 6:15 with the news that there was a
bat in our house. ON
HALLOWEEN. The irony isn’t lost on
me; believe me.
He opened the front door to go to his early morning CrossFit
class, and this furry little demon flew out of the storm and into our living
room. I don’t know what the hell
he thought I was going to do to help, but he woke me up, anyway. The first word out of my mouth?
“RABIES.”
See? My brain instinctively jerks the steering wheel toward worst-case scenario. I blame my mother.
I got up, already terrified of what was to come, and started
flipping on lights and shutting all the doors upstairs that contained our
children and dog. I tiptoed down
the stairs and he silently pointed to the bookcase, with eyes bugging out of
his head. I think the fear pooling
in his eyes was what really flipped my oh
shit switch. If my big, strong
CrossFitting husband is scared of this thing…we are screwed, people.
He put on the gloves he wears to feed our snake (big thick ones)
and grabbed an old towel. I
watched from the stairwell in silent horror, gooseflesh overtaking me, as he
crept to where it rested on the bookcase.
He mumbled something about wishing the Turtleman lived in Texas just
before he dropped the towel on it and tried to wrap it up.
Didn’t work, it scrambled out from under the towel and I SAW
ITS FACE. I will never get that
image out of my head for as long as I live. And the sound it made, my God- the sound! It was this evil, high-pitched shrieking
sound that could’ve only been breathed into its strange little body by
Beelzebub himself. Then it got
much louder in intensity and had these odd layers of intonation. That’s when I realized I was screaming,
too.
He finally managed to wrestle the shrieking hell beast into
submission under the towel, and he took it outside and let it go.
He just looked at me, totally disgusted, when he came back in
the house. Lot of help I was. Ha. He said he knew I wouldn’t be much help, anyway. He just needed a witness to call 911 in
case it started trying to eat his face off.
I’m glad it’s over without event, but I’m left wondering…is
this a thing? Do bats just fly
into people’s effing houses?
Because if so, and this happens to me at some point while hubs is out
of town for work… I will
pack our suitcases and leave. It
can have the house. We’ll get
another one.
Happy Halloween!
