A 3,000-word story about a fiesty Southern girl plagued by bats, neighbors and insatiable curiosity.

1. I‟ve been telling stories since I was old enough to walk and some of it I blame on
my next-door neighbor, Miss Ann.
When I met her she had already aged and paled in the silence of advancing years. She put me in
mind of a hardy but self-sustaining plant left alone to manage on very little, like particular kinds
of ivy.
I‟d stop by her little gray house with the wooden boards and white shutters on the way home
from school every day. Maybe it was out of some sort of misguided duty. She needed no one and
asked for nothing, but I‟ve always lived in my head, more or less, and liked imagining a tragic
past around her spinsterish, spare existence.
When I rode my bike back and forth past her house in the summer I could always
hear the classical music tinkling out her living room window. The music spilled forth
like a sprung leak in a water line, permeating the air and the land with the foreign
syncopations of Turkish rondos and Hungarian symphonies.
Miss Ann had a garden, canned her own vegetables, sewed her own clothes and
was known to carry a small handgun in her cloth flowered purse in case of various
emergencies. She was also right handy with a baseball bat. Door to door salesmen knew
not to call. So far as was known, she was married (at least once; she wore a thin gold
ring) but had no children. If there was more to her history, no one had managed to get
past the front door long enough to find it.
I figured she put people off because she missed her husband so much. She sat
there at the window some days still waiting, and she acted angry to others because they weren‟t
him. Something like that. From where I‟ve seen it, the things people did and said came more
from their bruises than anything else. Scars can turn a person funny ways. So I reasoned Miss
Ann was one of those.
There‟s this about growing up in a small town: people are all the time watching
you. Sometimes through crosshairs, but generally unarmed for the most part. I had a
tendency to sit in trees and get to thinking about life and the meaning of it all, until the
neighbors told my mother that Mattie might be getting a little tetched and could possibly derive
some benefit from a group activity, like Girl Scouts.
I wasn‟t doing anything so unusual up there in the tree, except for making up
reasons for why people do things. It‟s a private game of mine. In real life it doesn‟t work so
well, since it makes me wishy-washy — one group of friends pushing me one way and another
group pulling me opposite.
My problem is, I like every point of view and it feels unfair to pick one over the
other. The tragic is also much more fascinating than real life most of the time, unless the tragic
is real life, in which case no one wants to talk about it really. Then I just make it so tragic I can‟t
think about anything else until it‟s all resolved in my mind.

2. There must be a very good reason for everything that happens in the world, else
how could people get up, of a morning?
I had it mind to make Miss Ann like me. I mean grownups generally do. I can sit
and talk to them about the weather and ask their advice about things and they look
flattered and important when I do it, like they‟ve been waiting for nothing else.
Women whose children are grown and have long since stopped listening to them, women whose
husbands live their lives at work and come home only to sleep and eat, women fluttering
about on the edge of a life they used to have, anachronisms in their own home, those
women like feeding me cookies and asking me about school and offering up stern
admonitions. That’s the kind of company I tend to keep.
I‟d rather have those women in school with me than my own friends; sometimes I
get the feeling they‟d prefer it too. The women, at least, consider me valuable and
interesting. I do enjoy that, being the center of a person‟s attention. I like making people feel
good, too. I admit it.
Sometimes a lonely person just wants to talk and know a body hears them back.
And from the looks of it, there aren‟t too many lonely people in grade school. Just me,
and that don‟t count for much.
Miss Ann, I believed, was horrible lonely. Must have been, the way she‟d lash out
when I came around: with insults I chose to believe were some kind of awkward hug.
“There you are, it‟s the candy-ass,” she‟d say, her forehead creased in one deep furrow. “Didn‟t
your mother never teach you how to dress? Orange doesn‟t go with blue. And your hair‟s cut
crookeder than a dog‟s hind leg.”
Her hands never moved while she talked. They stayed folded calmly in her lap
over her much washed, threadworn white housedress with tiny pearly buttons. She was a definite
kind of person, Miss Ann. Like she‟d never hesitated for a moment over nothing.
It was strange how, as hard and cool as she could be, strands of soft gray hair — grayer than the
weather-beaten wooden boards of her house — would wisp down around the sides of her
weathered face gently. Those tight-strung veins in her hands, those strong fingers that yanked
weeds out of her backyard garden with all the impatience of a mother combing out her
daughter‟s hair over the kitchen sink — did those hands ever falter?
My mother‟s hands didn‟t, but then, my mother is Holly Beth Nightingale, the
most well manicured and sedate woman in Trinity County. She used to paint and file my
own fingernails every day before school, until the principal called to tell her I was
chasing the boys around the playground with my highly polished claws, claiming to be a
dangerous tiger. Apparently, that was not the use she had in mind for me.

3. I had thought it was right inventive, personally. But she said she wouldn‟t do my hands up
anymore if I was going to act like a hoyden. Then she sent me to my room to look up hoyden in
the dictionary because I didn‟t know what that meant, but thought it sounded thrilling. I still do.
(I believe I am a great trial to my mother. I am sure she wishes I had been born a
boy. Then she could at least have some excuse for me.)
The lines in Miss Ann‟s face were so deep that it was hard not to reach over and
run my finger along the grooves. I thought about a fire her husband might have perished in, and
resisted the temptation to uncap my ball point pen and make a dot in the fleshy ditch where a
smile line must have once been.
“Why aren‟t you bothering someone else around here?” She flashed at me one
afternoon when I came skipping up on her porch. “You hang around my front door like
some kind of ragtag mutt, pestering a person with your everlasting questions. Why save it all up
for me?”
I had no good answer for her. I just felt linked to her, some way. Her loneliness
and mine, two empty tin cans at opposite ends of a string. I was just trying hard to hear what
sound came out from us, the way the girl up the street brought a giant peach-colored conch shell
from the beach in South Carolina and told us she could hear the ocean in it when she put her ear
against it. And I never could hear that ocean, only the hollow rush of air that made my head feel
empty and start to ache.
This was of course in the summer of our great discontent. I read that phrase in a
book once and loved it: “of our great discontent.” I save up words like my father saves
up money for beer. It was our great discontent because that was the summer my father left to
work the railroad, and we got bats in the attic.
It emerged we‟d always had the bats but never noticed it much because my father used to
stand outside at dusk and pick them off with his twenty-two when they circled in on the eaves.
Until he left I hadn‟t realized it was at the bats he was shooting at; I‟d be up the street playing
and hear the reports and then one of the neighborhood mothers would sigh and say, “There he
goes, shooting the gnats again.”
I‟d always straighten proudly at this and say agreeably, “Yes, they don‟t call him
Dead-Eye Dick for nothing.” Gnats are very small, you know, so he had to be a good
shot to hit them.
All that summer I‟d only half-sleep waiting for the bats to fall. They swoop over
your face in your sleep, bats. It‟s an unusual feeling to feel that puff of breeze flap over
your face realizing there‟s a small rodent at the end of it. Bats really do fall out of the
woodwork. They can scrunch tighter than a quarter and then just sort of plop out like one of
those expanding sponges you can buy that open up in water.

4. It‟s funny, because outside against the open sky bats look graceful and acrobatic,
even, tracing invisible ovals and circles in and out of each other. A bat in your bedroom is a little
different: wobbly, frantic, fast and unorganized. Close quarters make a bat nervous and they hit
the walls a lot.
The drill was supposed to be: if you get a bat in your room, get out of bed and
close the door behind you to trap the bat in one place while you get help from Mama.
But when you‟ve got a crazy bat diving around your head, this option looks very
unappealing. I‟d generally just pull the covers over my head and scream at the top of my lungs,
and that worked as well as anything, I guess.
Well, Mama got it in her head that bats can winch their feet into your hair in a permanent
manner if you let them, and that they fly around like that looking for human hair to nest in. She
thought if they get you, the bat feet can‟t be removed unless it‟s with scissors.
Mama is from the North and not at all accustomed to country things, so you have to forgive her
that much.
But that whole summer Daddy was gone, she kept a broom and a pair of his underwear by the
bed in the event of bats. If she heard us scream, she‟d put the underwear over her head to protect
her hair, pick up the broom, and go off on a hunt.
We‟d scream and point and duck under the covers again while she swung the broom savagely,
like a murderous felon wielding a pickax on a chain gang. I truly suspect the exercise suited her;
she took a real pleasure in bludgeoning those bats flat.
After she killed the bat, she‟d kick it up daintily onto the flat of the broom and hold it out in
front of her like a cat bringing in a dead mouse; we‟d admire it and say, “It was a big one,”
before she flung it out the door with a catapult motion of the broom.
Once she even got a bat in her own room; it flew into the window fan and stretched its wings
across one of the blades. She got up right quick and plugged the fan in and put it on high just to
give it a healthy spin, and then she let it out so we could watch it stagger drunkenly around the
room. Then she flattened it for good.
The strategy worked well enough for us until the night the bat landed in the southernmost
bedroom. My sister panicked and locked the door behind her when she ran for help, and the only
way my mother could get in that room to kill the bat was to crawl out on the roof and come in
through the window.
I don‟t know why our neighbors would be up to midnight to see it unless it was from all the noise
we were making cheering her on, but they talked for years later about the family when they saw
Holly Beth Nightingale, the most well-manicured and sedate woman in Trinity County, stalking
across the roof with men‟s underwear on her head and a broom held aloft like a pirate
brandishing a sword.

5. The minister left AA pamphlets on our doorstep for days after, which my brothers understood to
be an auto club membership and put in the glove compartment of the car to show the police
officer, just in case we ever got a flat. It was a very good day when Daddy came back again and
went back to picking off the gnats at night with his twenty-two.
If you get rid of the gnats, the bats don‟t come. Starving them off works as well as anything, I
guess, though to be truthful about it, beating them to death was a lot more fun.
But, “Why save it all up for me?” Miss Ann asked me again as I dug a grayed canvas toe of my
sneaker in a self-conscious pivot on her front porch. Her dull marble eyes had a way of coming
to a point somehow when she focused in on a thing, like an angry pencil scribbling across our
blank faces. I felt suddenly too shy to speak. Maybe I‟d misjudged her.
“I think you‟re lonely,” I blurted out, without meaning to. I stopped, horrified at myself. I hadn‟t
meant it to put it to her so baldly. She provoked me to it. I don‟t question people everlastingly.
Just more than the usual, is all.
But she just laughed without smiling, a bitter „ha!‟ that came out on a wheezy exhale of a
breath.Come to think of it, she might just have coughed. She shook her head and looked away
and after that she wouldn‟t say anything at all. Finally I had to turn around and walk back home.
The next day she wasn‟t out on the porch, or the day after that. She wouldn‟t come to the door,
neither, though I could hear that classical music blaring to beat the band. You could say this
about Miss Ann: she did have what my teachers called culture, even if she did give the Amway
man a concussion once with her aluminum bat.
A little violence don‟t necessarily make a person uncivilized, to my way of thinking, but if you
use it right you can sleep better.
I doubt Miss Ann had a sleepless night in her life.
Fourth day, the ambulance came and took Miss Ann to the hospital in town.
Stroke, Mrs. Yost said in a voice she only used for inside the church. I begged and begged until
finally my parents agreed to take me to visit her, though no one could figure out why I‟d rather.
Woman like that is born hateful, they said. There‟s some people you just can’t be kind to.
I didn‟t know what to expect when I walked into her room, clutching my yard flowers that
already looked wilted and sad wrapped in a damp paper towel from Mama‟s kitchen. Miss Ann‟s
eyes were closed and her skin looked almost see-through in that white room: white skin, white
gown, white walls.
A man I‟d never seen before, fortyish, big forehead, sat by the bed already holding her hand and
watching it like a clock. “Mama,” he whispered. “Mama, I‟m sorry. Wake up, Mama. Please.”
His voice creaked every time he said her name, like it was a word too heavy to carry.

6. He never stopped looking at her, long as I stood there, so he never saw me slip out of the room
again in a hurry. I felt ashamed, like I‟d been rude somehow. It didn‟t seem right, standing there
watching like that. She wasn‟t my mother. She did have a child, after all.
For the life of me I‟ll never figure it out, why it is I thought a woman who lived alone would
have no children to speak of, or why I thought losing a loved one in a fire would be so much
more tragic than losing them by never speaking at all.
But do I ever stop making up reasons for why people do things? I had thought,there, for a while,
that the son was so sad and sorry about his mama that he‟d come back to live with her and make
things right. But when Miss Ann died without waking a few days later, that man sold the house
lock, stock and barrel and took not one single solitary thing with it when he went. There‟s a
family of Catholics that live in it now.
Me, I can‟t ride my bike past her old house without wanting to burst into bawling like a small
child. Even now, and that‟s going some.
Some travel light; me I just make up tragedies that don‟t even come close to the sorryness that is
day to day living.
Story telling does seem to be a considerable comfort, some days. It‟s not like violence, because it
don‟t make you sleep better, but it does fit things together neater than they would be ordinarily.
If you can make it a story and not a truth, it won‟t hurt so much. That‟s the least I can figure of it.