[1.5 mins reading time]

Spring. The flush of fresh leaves.

Trees lime-green beneath blue sky.

Nightingales in the valley. Swallows overhead.

It’s a time for planning a kind of pilgrimage. A long walk, around the coast.

So the bat comes as a messenger. She’s a survivor from a former age, when mice ran after cats.

Evening: the girl calls from babysitting.

Something is in the bedroom. A bird.

At the neighbour’s, there it is. A bat.

It glides around the room. Its path takes a laminar flow, sweeping up and over, down behind, filling the room. No sound of wings. All in disturbing silence.

Even after the window is opened wide, the bat stays. For an hour, more or less, it will not be rounded up, by towel or waving hands.

You dance together, you grow close.

The next thing you know, the light has dimmed toward night. Still it glides, filling mental space.

Abruptly, the bat settles on the yellow curtain. It fits in a hand, snug and warm.

It is a mistake.

Gently cradling the neck between finger and thumb. Wings and body enclosed, this pipistrelle, who may perhaps be pregnant.

It is not often that you see a bat of such beauty up close. The bat swivels her head, calmly looks.

The world comes to a stop. Eye to unknowable eye. The pipistrelle opens wide.

Bites down on the thumb.

The teeth pass right through.

The hand opens. She hangs down, teeth gripping, blood dripping, two hearts hammering. This arm stretches out of the window, shaken in the gloaming. Nothing.

Shaken a little more.

The bat flits away. A dead silence follows.

Hush now.

Listen. Listen to the house, to the garden, to the valley and all the country far and wide.