A Batty Experience

By Author: Jai Prakash Srivastava
Total Articles: 198
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I was browsing for upcoming free movies on TV and noticed something that caught my eye on the SyFy Channel. There was a movie on called Bats: Human Harvest. It sounds pretty freaky to me considering it involves the creation of genetically engineered bats that are trained to kill! This reminded me of my own batty experiences. Perhaps I was a vampire in another life because bats seem to find me wherever I go.

I was probably about 8 years old when my mother found a dead bat in the basement sink (a good beginning to a decent horror flick). She ran upstairs to tell my father so he could remove the hideous thing. Instead of being concerned that there was a bat in the cellar, he thought it was funny, taking his time before he finally went down to dispose of it. He brought the bat to the back porch and thought it would be a great gag to flail the floppy thing around like he was going to toss it. Mom wasn't too happy and I had a few nightmares, but we laugh about it now.

It's wacky enough that my mom found a bat in the basement. You'd think that would be her one and only encounter. Well, it wasn't. I was about 16, hanging ...
... out in my room on the first floor, doing my own thing. Mom was in the attic of our two-decker with my aunt retrieving some hand-me-downs for her to take home. I'm reading my book.

Everything's peaceful, then, sure enoughboom-boom-ba-boom-boom-BANG! What the @#$%? I give it few minutes then I run out to the back porch, yelling, MA! No answer- so I dash up the back stairs up to my grandparent's porch to find my mother, aunt and grandmother were practically wetting themselves laughing as my aunt holds a bloody tissue to her knee. I'm begging everyone to tell me what's going on, but no one can stop laughing long enough to catch a breath to tell me why my aunt was bleeding and why they thought it was funny. My grandfather is swearing in Italian and English and is the only one who seems angry about something.

Once everyone was able to compose themselves long enough to put a sentence together, I found out that while my mom and aunt were together in the attic, a bat started swooping aimlessly around their heads and, for a second, swiped my mother's hair. My aunt was so hysterical that she ran out of the attic and fastened the hook and eye lock after she slammed the screen door shut, like the bat's going to open the door. She locked my mother in and ran down the back stairs so fast that she missed a few on the way down. This explained the loud thumping I heard from the first floor as my aunt has a little meat on her bones.

The second my grandfather heard my aunt take a digger, he ran out to the rescue and was shocked at the fact that my mother was still locked in the attic. Super Papa saves the day. He grabs a broom and books it into the attic where he finds my mother holding her nightgown over her head and jumping wildly as if she were being attacked. She wasn't wearing anything underneath her nightgown that morning.

If you think we can look back at the bat in the basement and laugh, you can imagine how uproarious things get when we rehash this story over holiday dinners. So, yes, bats like my family and they like me. I was in the attic one day to pack some things for my first apartment (I went up during the day assuming that any bats would be sleeping soundly). I turned to a niche and wondered whose box spring and mattress were propped up against the wall. As I was studying them carefully out of curiosityyou guessed itI saw a bat- hanging upside down off the box spring sleeping ever so soundly. I backed up very slowly, with my heart in my throat and floated my way down the stairs. I was thankful that I did not disturb Dracula's sleep.

My last encounter with a bat, and hopefully my LAST, was when I was enjoying a victory cigarette in the back porch of my new apartment. I was relaxed and happy to be free. A bat flew in from the open sliding door that leads to the clothes line and was swooping back and forth in a confused frenzy. My roommate laughed as I almost broke through the back screen door. The bat disappeared never to be found again.

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