The bat lived at Ellie’s house. We saw it first on a weekend that February. She pointed at the tiny lump of fur lodged in the corner of the back porch and said, “Look. A hibernating bat.”
We saw it again in March and it hadn’t moved. We talked about the bat’s upcoming awakening and how it would soon swoop to the surface of Ellie’s pond and eat newly hatched insects and touch its tiny wingtips off the water.
But spring came and the bat didn’t move. Didn’t swoop. Didn’t seem to be dining on any of the tasty neighborhood pond bugs. One of its elbows—if that’s what bats have—stuck out a little, like it was broken or something. We talked about how it might have an injury or a birth defect.
“Like the way I can’t bend this finger down all the way since I broke it,” Ellie said, showing me her right-hand index finger.
Life on Ellie’s commune was different. They used hammers before they could walk. They didn’t have any plastic. They swung on a homemade swing with a wooden plank as a seat. They played on the frozen pond without adult supervision and had chores that involved livestock. Ellie was in charge of chickens. One time when she was seven, she broke her finger while hammering a door hinge on a chicken house back into place.
I was convinced that the bat was out of hibernation and was simply nesting there at night in the exact same place under the eaves of her back porch. If we were in any way smart, we’d have stayed until dusk that night to watch the bat leave in order to answer our curiosities about it, but we didn’t. Ellie had commune chores and a secret boyfriend. I had reluctant homework and senioritis. We were happy believing the bat was fine.
When we met on Easter Monday in late April, the bat was still there, elbow pointed to the eastern horizon like it had been since winter. Ellie found a stick and poked it and then sniffed the stick.
“Doesn’t stink,” she said. “And there are no flies or anything.”
“Don’t bats have fleas?” I asked. “I heard they carry fleas and ticks and stuff.”
“I think it’s dead,” Ellie said.
“Doesn’t look dead,” I said.
“Doesn’t look alive, either,” Ellie said.
She poked it again and it didn’t move. Then she nudged the stick up into the siding where she could force the whole bat out with one slice and it fell into her mother’s sprouting summer lilies. Ellie reached into the lime-green and came out with this oddity—perfectly intact, still furry, still with eyeballs, still with paper-thin wings folded like it was resting.
We leaned down and looked at it.
“It’s petrified?” Ellie said.
“Probably more like mummified,” I said.
She ignored my correction and placed the bat on the picnic table and went into the house and got a jar. I took a picture of the jar. I named the picture in my head. Empty Jar.
“It’s so light,” Ellie said, weighing the bat in her palm. “Do you want to hold it before I put it in?”
I put my hands out and she placed it in my palm and we looked at it. Even though it was dead, Ellie seemed to see it as a new stray pet that needed a mother or something. When I put it in the jar, she sealed the lid and held it up and said, “I christen thee the petrified bat! Hear ye, hear ye, the petrified bat is king!”
“Might be a queen,” I said.
“Whatever,” Ellie said. She inspected it through the glass. “It’s alive and dead at the same time or something.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s the closest I’ve ever come to God,” Ellie said.
“Amen.” I was being sarcastic. Because Ellie said stuff like that sometimes and it was annoying. Because we were seventeen and this was silly, us finding a bat and acting like it was something special. This was what nine-year-olds did.
But then something serious came over me. I said, “Hold on. Let me see it.” Ellie handed the jar to me and as I looked at it—a tiny lump of mummified fur—I said, “Maybe it is God.”
The bat was dead but somehow it represented life because it looked alive. It was mysterious and obvious in one hollow, featherweight package.
“We’ll put it in the shed,” Ellie said. “My mom will never find it there because that’s where we keep the cleaning supplies.”
Ellie’s mother didn’t believe in cleaning.
My mother was dead, and I had no idea if she was ever a clean freak or what.