the bat

What determines whether one turns into Batman or a vampire from a bat bite? Is that how vampires come to be anyway, or is it solely from bites from other vampires? My knowledge is limited, coming only from Twilight movies and hot ass Christian Bale (who I know was Batman, but my only experience with him was Newsies, which I gladly watched every time my middle school chorus teacher was absent, and watched once more when I subbed on March 13, 2020, armed with a vat of Purell). None of this knowledge, however, prepared me for this past Monday night.

I’m new to cats. I had cats as a child, one with a nub for a tail and another who covered every surface in our house with snot, but I don’t think I really got the full cat experience until I adopted my two orange cats, Simon and Oscar, this past April. They bite me to wake me up, yell at me as I make their food, and run their version of the Boston marathon around my one-bedroom apartment. I may be partly to blame for their behavior as they are spoiled beyond belief, but as a mentally unstable single woman in her 20s, this is my one true job here on Earth. For starters, they get dessert every night in the form of Churu cat gogurts and I walk them in a stroller around my neighborhood, to the dismay of crotchety old men that live nearby.

On Monday night, after watching probably too many episodes of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (my new obsession now that Milf Manor and Love Island USA have ended), I asked Simon and Oscar to pick out their flavor of gogurt for the night, but Oscar was somewhat distracted by something. He often stares past me at nothing (which is terribly unsettling as a woman living alone) so I wasn’t too concerned. Maybe I should’ve been, however, as a giant silverfish racing across my subpar peel-and-stick-tile floor then entered my field of vision. Now, these cats have caught bugs before– I once saw Oscar shove a fly into a crack in my windowsill like a sadist, so I know they have the ability. They have the ability but they decided to do nothing but watch me use any projectile I could find to kill this thing.

“You guys couldn’t have helped?” I said, returning to prepping their dessert. My skin was now crawling, as one bug translates in my mind to a whole, full-on fucking infestation. I went to bed, trying to ignore the thought that silverfish would be running rampant in my apartment while I slept.

I wish I could describe this sound as I heard it. I really wish there were words to describe the horrid half-screech, half-click sound that woke me up at 2am. Regrettably, despite spending over $120k on education in the English language, I am unable to find the words to explain the sound. In lieu of an accurate description, please imagine the most shrill, unsettling sound you can think of. So I wake up to that.

A few months ago, I bought my cats toy mice that make noise when touched, as a means to entertain them and occupy their one collective brain cell. My 2am brain was convinced that the squeal of my worst nightmares was coming from the battery in the mouse dying out. I walked out to my kitchen to put the mouse away until I could deal with it in the morning, and was met with the scene of Simon and Oscar standing over the furry brown mouse, which turned out not to be a mouse at all, but an honest-to-god fucking bat in my kitchen.

What would you do about a bat in your kitchen? Consider that answer, and now add that it is 2am and you have taken meds before bed, prescribed by your psychiatrist specifically to help you sleep better. So essentially, it is 2am and you took a prescription-grade sleeping pill only three hours before. Now, what is your answer?

If your answer was to lock yourself and your cats in the bathroom and call your mother who is four hours away and also asleep by 9pm on most nights, we may be kindred spirits. I need to make clear that I love my mom immensely and she does have the answer for a great deal of things, but she is not generally the person I would call under pressure. (This is mostly because of how things played out when we had a large fire in our home but, to be fair to her, there was a large fire in our home.) At any rate, the parent I would have called in a crisis like this up and died on me, so I called my mom.

By the grace of a God I don’t know if I believe in, she answered. At this point, the bat was no longer screeching and was, to my knowledge, dead on my kitchen floor. I was convinced that the cats and I would be spending the night in the bathroom with no airflow and no food or water as I surely was not tempting fate and chancing rabies. Between expletives and half-asleep mumblings, my mom and I hatched a plan for me to put something on top of the bat corpse so the cats didn’t continue to disturb it, just until morning when I could better handle it. My mom’s ideas were things like a laundry basket (sans holes), a bucket, and a flower pot; I had none of these things.

“I have a lot of cardboard boxes, I could put a series of cardboard boxes on top of it?”

“Like a nesting doll?”

“Uh yeah.”

“So like a nesting bat?”

“…yeah.”

Very helpful, thank you for the levity while there is a quite possibly rabid animal that can FLY on my kitchen floor. We decided against the nesting bat, ultimately, and went for the insert to my bathroom garbage can, with a bag inside for easier transport later. I readied my trap and went to work, feeling like a cartoon dog catcher with a comically large net. Naturally, Simon managed to get out of the bathroom when I left and was now another factor to consider. The garbage can was easy enough to put over the bat, which had not moved for some time, but Simon was sniffing at the garbage can and I worried about him getting into it when I went back to sleep.

“I need something heavy.”

“Do you have a brick?”

My mother has lived with my stepdad long enough to think that having extraneous bricks around is regular; anyone living with a man likely has a brick lying around somewhere. I, however, did not have a fucking brick.

“I have my cast iron pan.”

“Yeah, but you’ll want to use that again.”

“It was $12 off Amazon.” What I did not say is that even were it not $12 off Amazon, there is a goddamn bat in my kitchen and it is 2am and I am ready to move out and give the bat my home; I will happily take the L for the cast iron.

“Okay, okay, do that.”

The problem was that a cast iron pan is obviously shallower than a garbage can, so the cats could still probably knock the garbage can over from the side. I needed to find a way to get the garbage can off while keeping the bag around the bat. My 2am brain had decided to fold the garbage bag around the garbage can, like how you do when using it as a garbage bag, so this was not an easy feat. I decided to step on the edge of the bag while pulling the can off, and lo and behold, our little friend was not as dead as I had thought. Cue the horrendous noise again. And cue me throwing caution to the wind and putting the cast iron pan right on top of the garbage can.

At some point here, I’d switched my call with my mom to facetime so she could see the situation in all its glory. I ended up dumping out all of the recycling I had compiled in a Chewy box and put the Chewy box on top of the garbage can and cast iron pan. That still did not feel like enough, so I added a storage bin of halloween costume pieces, Christmas ornaments, and things my ex had returned to me months prior. It felt sufficient enough, but I worried about my cats being cats and getting into it somehow. So I moved a litter box into my room, shut my door as best I could (Boston apartments), and went to bed.

I tried to avoid waking up the next morning for a while, I really did. When I finally did (at approximately 7:30am), I emailed my boss something along the lines of, “Hi, I can’t come in, have to deal with things related to a bat in my apartment,” which probably looked really sketchy as I went home sick from work the day prior. Then, I called a number I found on boston.gov to get the bat tested for rabies.

“You have a what in your apartment?” As if this weren’t the bat contact number.

“A bat? It’s dead, my cats got it, but I want to get it tested to see if I need rabies shots.”

“Sure yeah, you can bring it in. But make sure you print out the form and fill it out. Because we get the results but then we can’t contact you if you don’t bring the form.”

So now, not only do I need to figure out a way to contain the bat for transport, but I need to find a goddamn printer? No one who has an office job has a printer and I stand by that. And I had called out, so it wasn’t really like I could bring my container o’ bat to work and print out a form and then take the bus to the bat testing place. The next option, as found through my 3am Google search, was Animal Control. Animal Control, my new saviors, who said they’d come get the bat for me. I would give my first-born (child, not cat) to Animal Control for their service. True angels among us.

Anywho, after Animal Control going to the wrong address (I’m just a NY accent girl in a Boston accent world), they arrived and called me to get more information.

“Do you have the bat in a container already?”

“Uh, it’s contained, but it’s not like in a container that I can bring outside.” I wasn’t sure how to prep this man for the Three Stooges-level trap I had put on top of this bat, but as he went through the obstacles to get the bat into the extra-large Dunkin cup he brought, he did mention that “nothing was getting through this.” I’m not sure if that was a compliment or comment on my insanity but, either way, I appreciated the acknowledgement. When he finally got to the bat– the equivalent of the bubblegum in the center of a BlowPop, the noise started up again and we found out our little friend was more bat and less corpse. I’m glad he was the one to find that out because I would likely not be here to tell the tale if I found that out while trying to get the bat transported.

In the end, the bat was taken to be tested for rabies and was negative, which saved myself and my cats from a round of rabies shots. I hate that the bat had to die for us to know that and ultimately will probably think about that for the rest of my life, as one does.

But getting the call that the bat was rabies-free in the bathroom of my future office, after being told I would be receiving a job offer the next day, set off a birds-singing, sun-smiling, life-is-a-musical outlook on life that even the New York Italian rage couldn’t offset.

How did the bat get in, you ask? That’s a secret I’ll never tell, XOXO- but really, I have no idea and I swear to God that haunts me more than thinking about my middle school self.