All These Bats (as in rodents, not baseball) Are in Our House

Bats are hanging over us from the ceiling beams. This isn’t a nightmare. This is real. I know because I can hear them squeaking. There are maybe a dozen of them, their jagged vampire teeth bearing down, their black-haired wings fluttering on again, off again, agitated little blood suckers. They must have entered through the chimney. That’s probably it. Someone forgot to close the stupid flue and now we have a full on infestation on our hands, the impending spread of rabies. What a crummy way to go—

Oh here comes Dad with the fishnet and tennis racket. The impromptu exterminator. He looks tough, but I know he’s scared. He hates spiders, birds even. He passes out at the sight of a blood, tips right over. He may be fooling the bats, but he’s not fooling me.

He inches below the first bat, measuring the net, licking his lips, breathing slow, gripping the tennis racket in the other shaky hand, nothing like Agassi or Sampras. And now I’m stuck in a moral dilemma.

Sure, these bats are disgusting, have rabies, aren't considering our well-being at all, may shape-shift at any moment and kill us, but does that warrant a death sentence? So they took an accidental wrong turn down our chimney, so what. Doesn’t everyone, every living thing—even the nocturnal ones—deserve a second chan—

The tennis racket thumps against the fishnet. The bat falls limp, sagging into the mesh wiring, and off my dad goes, scooting past me. For a moment I think I see the bat staring out at me, asking why this happened, begging for help, begging me to do something, to save his family, his friends, to have a little heart because my gosh they're only trying to survive, that's all, just survive— Dad opens the front door. He walks outside. I watch him through the window as he flings the net. The heavy carcass blurs black in the clean air, an ink smudge across the sky, and then lands in the uncut grass. An improper burial.

Dad walks an assassin’s walk back in through the front door, head down, without speaking, and returns to the ceiling beams. I close my eyes. I can’t watch this. I feel like I’m in the coliseum, a barbarian reveling in death, seeing it as sport, or a spectator to an electric chair execution, watching from that room with the one-way mirror—

The tennis racket thumps again against the wood beam. The fish net stretches tight with another dead load, and Dad moves nervous past me, wiping his forehead, avoiding eye contact, the net sort of rustling. I might throw up. This isn’t right. But then again, it’s either them or us, right? Sure, this may be wrong, but I don’t want rabies. I want our house back. I want to survive this hostile takeover. And surely, survival is more important than compassion or doing the right thing. Surely survival is the right thing.

                                                             So maybe the bats aren't the only animals in our house. Maybe even if we flush out the bats, the animals will still remain. Maybe there's a    rabid         animal   in all of us.