“Are you mad?” Jeff asked, startling me half out of my wits.

I jumped and nearly clubbed him with the tennis racket firmly clenched in my cold sweaty hands.  I hadn’t heard his car pull into the driveway.

“Yes, uh, I mean no,” I stumbled, trying to sort out a reasonable answer to his question.

He was right, after all, in asking. 

It was a Monday night in early January in Schenectady, New York. The front and back doors were propped open; all the windows were open; and I was standing in the middle of the living room floor, wearing only my gym shorts and holding a tennis racket.

“I saw a bat,” I explained.

“A bat?  Like a thirty-four ounce Louisville Slugger?”

“No, not a baseball bat.  A bat, you know, a mouse with wings.”

“Joel, how long have you lived in this house?”

“Just over a year.”

“And how long have I lived in this house?”

“Just over two years.”

“Have we ever seen or heard a bat in the house before?”

“Well, no.”

“Well then,” he finished, smiling triumphantly.

“Jeff, it was a bat.”

“Where was it?”

“I was upstairs lifting weights.  I was having a great workout, and I was bench pressing.”

“How much?”

“One hundred sixty pounds.”

“Could you have strained your brain?”

“Jeff … okay, so I was on my back, holding the weight up like this, and suddenly I heard a flutter and there, circling the light directly above me, was this big brown bat.”

“Did he have sharp pointy teeth like this?” asked Jeff, putting two fingers up in front of his teeth to resemble fangs.  “Was he the killer bat?”

Ignoring his teasing, I continued.  “I dropped the weight and ran into my room and slammed the door shut.  I thought to myself, what do I do, what do I do, what do I do!  I opened the door and peeked out.  He came flying straight at me!  I slammed the door shut.  I didn’t know what else to do, so I tried to read a while.  But I couldn’t concentrate.  Then I found my tennis racket.”

“You were going to play tennis in the snow?”

“No no no, just to protect myself …”

“From the little bat with the sharp pointy teeth,” said Jeff, making the fangs again and laughing.

“Okay, so I opened the door again, and then I slowly walked around the house and opened all the windows and doors, hoping he’d fly out.  I haven’t seen him since, though.”

“I don’t think he’d fly outside, do you?  It’s brutal out there tonight.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I agreed.  “So you believe me?”

“I believe you saw something … or you’re setting me up for some prank.”  He gave me the evil eye.

“No, Jeff, really … I saw the bat.”

“Okay, I believe you.”

Jeff helped me check all the rooms, but we didn’t find anything.  We closed the windows and doors.  We did discover that a wiring access panel had fallen from the wall to the bathroom floor.  The bat likely had been up in the attic and had gotten out through that panel opening. 

When we went to sleep that night, we closed the doors to our rooms to keep the bat out.

The next morning there was no sign of the bat, and by the time I came home from work I had all but forgotten about it.  I saw my tennis racket on the couch, so I picked it up.  I walked upstairs and opened the door to my room.

The bat was flying in circles around my room! 

It made one more loop and then he came straight at me!

Without thinking, I held up the racket and swatted the bat, knocking him against the wall.  He fell to the floor with a thud!

My heart was racing.  Suddenly I felt terrible.  I leaned over to examine him, hoping I had just knocked him out.  Unfortunately, I soon discovered that I had killed him.

Jeff arrived home from work moments later, and he found me upstairs mourning over the bat.

“That’s the bat?” he exclaimed.

“Yep.”

“His body’s so little but his wingspan is huge!”  Jeff stretched the wings out to maybe an eight inch span.

We decided that the bat had somehow made it back into my room the previous night and had probably spent the night tucked away in my closet.  I tried not to think about that.

Later we buried the bat in the back yard.  At a cookout at our house the following weekend, we were retelling the story.   One guy – Bob — didn’t believe that we had a bat in the house, and every time I saw him after that he would ask me about the bat.  “How’s your friend, the one with sharp pointy teeth?” he would ask, holding two fingers in front of his mouth to look like fangs.  And then he would laugh.

A year passed by.  I got married and moved to North Carolina.

And then, on a cold winter night, I received a phone call.

“Hello, Joel?” whispered a voice.

“Yes, this is he,” I replied, always careful to use the right pronoun there.

“This is Bob.  You know, Bob from Schenectady.”

“Oh, hi Bob from Schenectady.  Why are you whispering?”

“Never mind.  I’m renting the house that you and Jeff rented last year.  Can you tell me something?  When you had a bat in the house, what did you do?”

I chuckled and sat down.  “Okay Bob,” I began.  “What did he look like?  Was he like a mouse with wings, and did he have two sharp pointy teeth like this?”

“Joel, stop it!” whispered Bob, emphatically.

I laughed.