Bats and Stones — The Festival Review

Their bodies — too heavy but also very light, compared to how heavy the world was, whirling and made of rocks, circling the pretty sun that will, someday, sleep — faded, unable to withstand my presence.

You did your best not to look at the bodies; just the sight of those sheets too much of a reminder that the world was somehow fracturing. The frail hands of life’s clock, through which years of lives had patiently floated by, skimming hours, days, weeks — now those hands caught people’s throats, heads, hearts, lungs and pushed them into my embrace.

You wear masks as if the whole world was out to ski, but without any snow or joy or hills. You walk level ground with flatlanders’ faces, trudging from one place to another, realizing that those family businesses which you had thought vastly wealthy, savings in the bank, turned out not to be: they had worked very hard and saved very little, and were gone.

You thought that the clouds looked terribly lucky, far up in the sky.

In England, there were advertisements, showing a steaming cup of coffee alongside the words: Is a cup of coffee worth dying for? I wouldn’t know.

I brought silver linings, of a sort. Food, cooked at home, became an exquisite thing. Somewhere a novel is being written and songs are being practiced and movies are being created, and they are good — very, very good — both by accident and on purpose because they are trying to explain how sad and funny and confusing it is to be a human now.

But, of course, I wouldn’t know anything about that either.

I just want the caves to myself; I want to join the bats, in their palaces of stone, hidden away.

I am wily as a bat; I can fly very fast, and then I can fold myself into a chrysalis, a cocoon of clinging dark, and sleep. I am durable in sunlight; I can see into the dark of the future and the past. No one can begin to know how long I have been alive. I, who am an expanding or folding umbrella, sleek fabric stretching from bone to lightweight bone, waterproof and water-loving, gray and brown and adaptable.

I can sing songs about stones. The stones know me and I know them; we have been here for almost all time; we could answer all questions of history if we wanted to.

But don’t ask us. We are weary.

We have all the future before us. The stones and I excel at hibernation, unlike the rest of the world. We bear our chameleon colors with pride, surviving icy temperatures and extreme heat.

In truth, this is our strength: if I am within a bat, its body heat burns my boundaries away, the heat of its flight melding us into one.

But the rest of the animal kingdom cannot do this. They crumple, fall, perish. But the bats and the stones and I will continue on, as if driven by some secret store of perpetual energy. Like a cancer, we are units of entropy, the infernal advancement of time.

Stones and caves may be heavy, but I, like the bats, am a finely engineered lightness.

Poor you — bodies too heavy for flight. Poor you, light as dying moths, nothing, compared to the heaviness of stones.

Rebecca Pyle, a Pushcart Prize-nominee, has published poetry, fiction, essays, and paintings. Her work has been featured in Chattahoochee Review, The Penn Review, Tayo Magazine, Guesthouse, Common Ground Review, The Perch, Die Leere Mitte, and Posit. Learn more at rebeccapyleartist.com.