Baby Bat

The day we saved the baby bat, found sleeping on our new front step in the stairwell, third story up: It was the second day in our first apartment. You and I scooped the bat onto a Rubbermaid lid, carried it down the stairs and outside while it cried against the clear plastic, tiny sound waves protesting wakefulness or the sun or our movement. You walked so delicately, transfixed; I was too. Your hair was the same color as its back: dusty brown and lighter at the ends. We left it under the tree in the graveyard, on a patch of grass. We hoped it was missed by the coyotes and crueler birds -- we hoped, but had no way to know. We hoped we'd done all we could.

We named that home The Nest -- our attic apartment, collected pieces of each other there and braided them in. The first time we made love in that nest was on the floor in the living room with only a couch and a rug in the whole place, and the hardwood floor and empty walls and morning sun pouring in.

The sounds of the bats in the ceiling came back months later, maybe the baby's family, in the walls, in the crawl spaces, ones we couldn't save but still heard the knocking and the crying. I wish I could see with my voice the way a bat does. I wish I could have cried at you to learn your shape in relation to me, to understand where you disappeared to that year, to throw my sounds at the room and have it map us out in 3D; I wish my tears and the yelling and the sound of us in bed making love and moaning and shifting the frame, marking the floor, could have saved us, could have mapped our holes, and the space we filled.

Why did you carry that baby bat with such care? How did it feel inside that clear plastic container, not knowing we were trying to save it, just knowing all was bright and unknown and its sound bouncing back to it, forming the shape of lost. Maybe I'm the baby bat, crying. Voice bouncing back to me, awake and alone, in an empty container, carried by a past version of you, by the you that couldn't hear me but carried me to the safest place you could muster.

The safest place is here now, without you, and I can finally see again.

Christie Flemming