10th Grade Recommended Reading List: "My Life as a Bat" by Margaret Atwood

Consider: a great many people believe in them, and if sanity is a general consensus about the content of reality, who are you to disagree?

An interlude of grace.

All I want is to get out through the hole in the screen, but that will take some
concentration and it’s hard in this din of voices, they interfere with my sonar.

I’m heading to my home, to my home cave, where it will be cool during the burnout of day and there will be the sound of water trickling through limestone, coating the rock with a glistening hush, with the moistness of new mushrooms, and the other bats will chirp and rustle and doze until night unfurls again and makes the hot sky tender for us.

There was my preference for the subtleties of dawn and dusk, as opposed to the vulgar blaring hour of high noon.

There was my déjà vu experience in the Carlsbad Caverns—surely I had been
there before, long before, before they put in the pastel spotlights and the cute names for stalactites and the underground restaurant where you can combine claustrophobia and indigestion and then take the elevator to get back out.

Even the vampire bat will target a hairless extremity—by choice a toe, resembling as it does the teat of a cow.

Vampire films have always seemed ludicrous to me, for this reason but also for the idiocy of their bats—huge rubbery bats, with red Christmas-light eyes and fangs like a sabertoothed tiger’s, flown in on strings, their puppet wings flapped sluggishly like those of an overweight and degenerate bird.

Vampire films have always seemed ludicrous to me, for this reason but also for the idiocy of their bats—huge rubbery bats, with red Christmas-light eyes and fangs like a sabertoothed tiger’s, flown in on strings, their puppet wings flapped sluggishly like those of an overweight and degenerate bird.

Each was to have a small incendiary device strapped onto it, with a timer.

They would have crawled into holes in walls, or secreted themselves under the eaves of houses, relieved to have found safety.

At a preordained moment they would have exploded, and the cities would have gone up in flames.

It is difficult to experience loathing for something merely metal, however ominous.

It is difficult to experience loathing for something merely metal, however ominous.

The quickness of heartbeat, the vivid plunge into the nectars of crepuscular flowers, hovering in the infrared of night; the dank lazy half-sleep of daytime, with bodies rounded and soft as furred plums clustering around me, the mothers licking the tiny amazed faces of the newborn; the swift love of what will come next, the anticipations of the tongue and of the infurled, corrugated and scrolled nose, nose like a dead leaf, nose like a radiator grille, nose of a denizen of Pluto.

The quickness of heartbeat, the vivid plunge into the nectars of crepuscular flowers, hovering in the infrared of night; the dank lazy half-sleep of daytime, with bodies rounded and soft as furred plums clustering around me, the mothers licking the tiny amazed faces of the newborn; the swift love of what will come next, the anticipations of the tongue and of the infurled, corrugated and scrolled nose, nose like a dead leaf, nose like a radiator grille, nose of a denizen of Pluto.

The quickness of heartbeat, the vivid plunge into the nectars of crepuscular flowers, hovering in the infrared of night; the dank lazy half-sleep of daytime, with bodies rounded and soft as furred plums clustering around me, the mothers licking the tiny amazed faces of the newborn; the swift love of what will come next, the anticipations of the tongue and of the infurled, corrugated and scrolled nose, nose like a dead leaf, nose like a radiator grille, nose of a denizen of Pluto.

We pray for food as all do, and for health and for the increase of our kind; and for deliverance from evil, which cannot be explained by us, which is hair-headed and walks in the night with a single white unseeing eye, and stinks of half-digested meat, and has two legs.