Stray Bats

by Margo Lanagan

  Stray Bats

  Words by Margo Lanagan

  Illustrations by Kathleen Jennings

  Small Beer Press

  Easthampton, MA

  Stray Bats is no. 13 in the Small Beer Press chapbook series.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

  in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

  Stray Bats copyright © 2019 by Margo Lanagan. All rights reserved.

  Cover & interior illustrations © 2019 by Kathleen Jennings. All rights reserved. kathleenjennings.com

  Paper edition printed in a saddle-stitched edition (ISBN 978-1-61873-175-3) by Paradise Copies of Northampton, Massachusetts.

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-61873-176-0.

  Small Beer Press

  150 Pleasant Street #306

  Easthampton, MA 01027

  info@smallbeerpress.com

  bookmoonbooks.com

  weightlessbooks.com

  smallbeerpress.com

  First edition.

  November 2019

  A Wind Age

  The storm blew in on the king’s back. In his fury he commanded his sages to build a glass bridge, out from the sea-cliffs into the tempest. You and I, his daughters who had so displeased him, were to walk it.

  I was ice at the thought, struck dumb, too frightened to blink. But you shrugged, and took my hand as if we were stepping into a dance. Let’s waste no time! you cried. And I’d crossed from rock to glass before I knew it, between the two clutches of old men trembling from strain and age and cold and the force gushing through them.

  The bridge came up from the lightning-split whirl, just in time to meet our feet. It formed ahead of us, flexing as if alive, buffeted from all sides. It felt as if we were walking aboard an invisible ship, or on the sea itself. My little cries were lost in the song of the bridge’s becoming, its protests, and the wind’s crack and roar.

  Our father’s storm poured up around us. Straight-backed you marched us through, as if it were a guard of honour.

  Far, far below us, breaking water rushed and flashed, the ocean falling over itself to attack the cliffs. Again we reached the end, and more bridge came, smooth and treacherous, each time we stepped off into air, into the punches and drags of his rage.

  Don’t look scared! you tinily cried. Scared is what he loves!

  I still remember the small stony body I propelled along beside you, how I held no space for anything but terror, anything but the weathering of that weather, how sure I was that at any moment we’d be cast adrift, falling forked through the darkness, the only comfort your hot hand gripping mine, the pain of that, all the way down to the sea.

  Kites in the fog

  The kites in the fog thrum like a ship’s rigging. Even on stiller days, they’ll sing to the least breeze. The sky is preaching, roaring down the lines from every angle, even with only a few kites slung upward from the grey winter beach. If you walk far enough from the market hall you’ll hear them.

  They stand on the shingle between town and high water, patched kites with knot-bobbled string. When they were many—box and tube, plain diamond and bedizened bird and fish—how the chorus would have rung and interwoven!

  Free yourself from the town. Trip down to the beach, past the saint-huts and the drowned fire pits. Die to your town self.

  The kites are out there, calling among themselves, voices of cloth and struts and cord, packed in fog that soaks them, sifts through them.

  The crabs keep their distance, disliking the song in the rock at their claw-tips. They find new crevices, black clefts in grayed air. They’re poised at the thresholds, scraping the stones and eating the nothing there-off.

  Listen to the wind, keening among the saints’ kites, roaring down the lines from every angle its multiple-in-single unbearable note and word—while, beginning to chill, you lose your way in the fog. The thrumming all around is impelling you seaward, your work forgotten, the town, your house on the square. You are in among the thrumming kite-strings trembling from the higher storm. They lure you lower, your tiny heat toward the wash.

  Constellation

  The Hares hang low, the dam’s paw tipping the hilltop, not strongly enough to spring. The buck lands behind her, turning after her tail.

  How did the old ones see them, imagine the ear-curves out of those random stars? How did they freeze such lolloping, flowing creatures, such trembling whiskers and thundering hearts, into this cold tableau?

  From pure desire is how they did it, to see dark space made homely, to populate the mystery with the known. To put there fur and speed, whim and warmth, above all a bond, a game, a system bursting to break from its shape, rolling and righting itself and rollicking onward.

  Her paw is firmer on the hilltop now. Any moment they will spring forth and bring the night sky to life.

  Maiden

  Like a rag of mist she drifts along the gully. Hardly more than a thought, she bends to a task that only one soul can know.

  Her eyes are deep as wells, holding no sheen or tremor. Her arms swim the scrub, slender, strengthless. Her fine hair hangs straight, as if dragged down her head by icy water.

  Pale, pale is her figure in the scratchy darkness down there, and silent her progress.

  Night falls, and then we will find her, curled around her own little warmth. She lies among the tree-roots’ arms, a feebler moon fallen from its path, uncertain that it has the right to soar.

  More Information to Help You Get to Rookwood

  Or there’s the back door, so to speak; no actual door or gate will stop you. Just alight, wherever you please. Dawn or evening is best, when joggers and cyclists can’t quite trust their eyes.

  Directly to earth is fine, or there are plenty of trees to provide concealment while you arrange yourself (in case of exhaustion or even tears) for public sightings. Or you can toe a headstone before your last drop to slab.

  Or you may well find yourself approaching from below. Then the road-curves and plot-grids will be harder to make out, hung with roots and expired souls, and you’ll have to make your way among stones, past boxes in varying states of split and decay. Also the gapes, skewed and straight, the endless cries in the endless night, and the eyeholes forced to watch it. None of this should trouble you if you’ve read this far, and if your heart’s correctly set on the job at hand.

  As you can probably guess, this last is the way I favour, for best transition into the work to come. Burst from below, like a mole from its labours, scattering earth, smelling of grave-cloth.

  Sail Away

  I waded in. The waves were small. They crashed and collapsed around my feet, my knees, my thighs, and then were behind me.

  I laid the doll—a forked stick with a tied-on skirt and arms bound crosswise—in the new hat. I placed it on the dark green sea. Out here, such a small vessel, pushed off with enough grim force, would bob away, and keep on bobbing. It would be carried toward the heads for as long as the fine straw floated.

  Behind me the beach lay damp and bare. The white sandy path trickled down through the brush. It led up one way to the purse-mouthed milliner, up the other to my stepmother, the bomb of her, waiting for my arrival to explode her.

  I had been sent to bring the hat. Of the doll she knew nothing; she would have shrunk from it had she seen. She would have mirrored out at me all the hatred I’d bound into it, all the fear

  My only friend, I thought, was that sketch of a person, that mad puppet with a knot for a face, with a square skirt snipped from the best apron. That was how badly I wanted her gone. That was how much rage of hers and pain of mine I’d endure to make this
happen.

  The little straw boat hung and dropped, hung and dropped, beginning to list, shrinking in my sight. The stick girl lay in the flare of her skirt, basking in the grey cloud-light. I stood hands clasped, up to my waist in wet skirts and live water, my teeth clenched hard, my heart as cold as the sea.

  Maiden Flight

  I thought we were free of all this. I married the plainest of plain girls, the firmest set on the ground. I put behind me all my mother’s projects, and her mother’s too. All that rescuing, explaining, grovelling to keep them out of jail. All that sitting of them down, pacing and raving while they laughed, while they shrugged and said, What’s the harm in it, boy?

  I should have kept our daughter occupied, there in the creek beside me. Should never have turned my back to hook the lip of the fish-trap firmer to its stick. When I turned back she was drops in empty water, the shadow of her flying skirts shrinking on the sandy floor. I looked up and she was well out of reach already, spread in delight and surprise on the sky.

  I stand reaching up for the past I can’t have, too frightened even to call her name.

  Stray Bats

  I was the bat that strayed inside to your bedside lamp. And snatched you.

  *

  We were tiny escapists, flapping, made of the lightest leather. My petal ears caught your every sound.

  *

  We claimed the night, flying on and on. Now the east is lightening, my heart heavening at your cry.

  *

  In the morning’s cool light, bats hang dead between the overhead wires. I struggle across the dewy grass and hook myself up the nearest tree-trunk, overpowered by you.

  *

  Your call comes softly at the edges of my hearing. I stutter back, and off we fly again.

  *

  Our cousins fall, small furred souls. But we are not the mo/u/rning type.

  *

  The creatures we hunt together dart around us, insects in their dozens, suckers for the streetlights’ mini-moons.

  *

  An owl strikes two notes from bells made of felt.

  *

  Beneath our friend the moon, birds dream, dogs dream, we roller-coast in air.

  *

  Love is flight, a silent pact never to collide.

  Readying

  She sits on the valley-side, between the stone circle and the waste depot. The diggers clamber among the piles, stirring up corpse-breath and steam.

  It took the whole town to make her miserable. But now they have laid all this out for her. They thought they were merely discarding, but they were opening a way, straight in to the heart of their stronghold. Churned with all the plastics, crushed cans and wasted food are people’s hairs and nails, sleep-crumbs, scabs and flakes of skin. Even the careful ones can’t help but shed their skin.

  Now’s not yet the time, hers not yet the power. But in her depths she hears the stones’ humming, louder than the engine roar and the rattle of falling trash. The will is forming, to turn all this against them. The pain is chilling, clearing; soon she will be but a conduit, and revenge will flow through.

  Shrunken Alice

  I did it, I DRANK YOU. And now I’m parcelled too small, I think, to conceive of how to begin to strive towards how big, how once I towered.

  That giant life, that strength, how did I possess it? How did it feel, swaying and balancing? How did I swing, picking up that cup half the size of the world? How did I sip and, shrivelling, drop,

  to this almost-nothing in the noise of its now rocking,

  to a crumb here,

  to a fly spun out by a fighter jet, an ant discombobulated by a passing tank-tread? My scream’s a feather in a roaring storm. How could I too have blast-and-thundered once, before I came unborn?

  Flight to Loreto

  My mother and I sleep peacefully, back to back in the bed my father made, in the house that is not yet a temple. Apart from the furniture—Well, I use that, don’t I?, she says—there’s no sign of my late father. For that, I must cross the yard to the workshop. I’ll do it tomorrow, I tell myself through my dream. Turn the tools over, sniff deeply of the dusty wood-shavings, of the ghosts of glue.

  I’d know the sound of angel fingers anywhere. I know exactly the thrill that flushes through the things they touch. So when they take hold of the house my eyes open. What now? I don’t stir, don’t disturb her. And neither do they, lifting us. The water dances out of the cup beside me. A lamp slides grittily in the other room. The crosses swing on their nails. The stone step bumps against the doorsill.

  Space opens below us. The air chills and dries—it hurts to breathe. We’re both awake now, but neither of us will admit it. Our backs shiver against each other; my feet are turning numb; the cold is an iced cloth against my face and chest. My mother never cries out, and nor do I. I’ve suffered enough, but I know when it’s important to submit. Now I lie enduring the sickly surges of their combined flight, the gusts of icy air and angel breath. Their song of praise would be beautiful were it not so awful-ly loud.

  At some point as our bodies begin to fail, dreams come to our rescue, strained from our earliest lives. My mother’s is closed to me beyond the sunshine, the endless surprises of my own. It is adorably small, within an enormity I can neither name nor claim. She is there with me. Though often pensive, she allows herself some laughter sometimes, and a little in the way of play.

  We sink back from that pretend-bright world into real warmth, into sleep. The angels set us down. Their grasp loosens, and I don’t feel it. They wing away, and I hear nothing.

  And when we wake, the light is a touch more northerly, and the slant of the land is new. We walk out, bewildered, into the country that will one day become Italy.

  Familiars

  We talk of our Friends, who now are still vivid, still clear at the edges, of how they will fade with the years. How with age and our usage they’ll be depleted. There will come a time when they’ll no longer arrive at our elbows whenever we feel a moment’s doubt.

  We wonder, will they wait to be summoned at gate or door or fountain, with that heady air around them of the Wild barely held in check?

  We’ll grow out of these pettier games: turning our neighbours’ milk, setting little storms inside their houses, knocking down old ones who make the sign against us, trailing the Hunt through the winter midnight. Though we can’t believe it, one day our Friends will materialise at our shoulder, or wind around our ankles, their seductive stink rising, and we’ll just let it fade, not taking any action at all; we’ll feel nothing but tired.

  They are here with us in spirit, as we talk at the edge of the fair, five girls whom no one will approach when we’re together, especially if we’re laughing. The meatwife calls her wares, the parti-man capers, the children shrink and throw him their coins from a distance, the town fills its sacks and baskets. Bricks, mortar, daylight, gossip—and along the lane, the ringing of the blacksmith’s hammer.

  Shore

  I leave this note at whatever aggregation of matter and energy will be your ear, when you descend from that suspended state of light-undivided-from-darkness, into your half-sleep of three score years and ten.

  I leave it so that you will remember, and anticipate, two segments of night. The first you break from, needing suddenly to breathe, gulping air; into the other evaporates all this bodily complication, making sense for the first time.

  I leave it so that you will appreciate how each phase stops and yet runs on into the next. And how, once incarnate, we become the moving vessels for inpouring sightsoundsmell, for tastetouchthought—so much, so constant.

  Behind your breathing and your footfalls, there is another song, stronger, another rhythm, longer. Everything you see, green or grey, racing or creeping or seeming unchanging beside you, may all at once become translucent with new light from an unexpected source. Memory is now. Now,
and now now swiftly become memory, vivid flashcards spilling from a whiff of ancient vinyl, coal smoke or the sea. The stars spin slowly, but they also fly away. They seem legion, but we only see a very few.

  Every being and thing is an eel, sliding through sopping grass between one shoreless dark lake and another.

  Party to an Invocation

  Even in this outcast cottage, even when she’s working in broad daylight, she needs some living thing near. Some tranquil thing that won’t distract, higher than toad, smarter than dog. It gives her focus, helps her feel free; she moves more breezily, more certainly, with this much of an audience. Her hair flies. She whisks around to tell me how her preparations are coming. As if I judged her every move. As if I cared.

  For this she puts out milk. For this she keeps the stove going next to the chair-arm where I settle. Blank minded, full bellied, I seem to watch. But I’m only dozily alert to her sounds, to her motion, to the smells and smokes she raises.

  You wouldn’t notice me more than you’d notice that pot of dead flowers, or that cord tying back the frayed curtain. But I tell you, I’m as essential to the plot as that receipt book, held open with stones to the page she no longer looks at. The beaten table, the red threads around the herbs and her wrist, and around the wrist of the virgin in the distance to whose future all this pertains—without me, as without them, none of this would happen.