Flight

I entered the desolate stairwell at work and saw a lone little brown leaf on the floor, then had that odd feeling, when knowledge overlaps perception, for in the next demi-instant I saw that it was a bat, too dark brown to be a leaf; also, somehow I felt it was still alive.

I nudged it with my toe, and it gave a crackling hiss, feebly twisted its angular wings. It was clearly injured, and angry. I wanted either to gently scoot it out of the way or to kill it bloodlessly. I touched it again with my boot, to make sure it wasn't going to suddenly spring into flight. It hissed again. I would have been afraid if I were a small animal, and as it was, I felt so unsettled by this bat, even though I knew it couldn't hurt me, that I left it where it was and went up to the office.

Someone took a box down, turned it over the bat and pushed it off to the side. Later, after a call to Animal Control ("What I'm gonna need for you to do is to put it in a plastic bag"), I found a Dollar Tree bag and a vague determination to be decisive. No one in the office had leather gloves.

The bat was weaker. I leaned closer and saw its tiny pointed ears and flat nose shaped like the roof of a pagoda. Its wings and pillowy body were crushed indeterminately together. This flying mammal: how different from me. It turned its head back toward me, just barely, and gave a hiss more like a sigh.

It took me three or four tries to grab the small bundle of its body without flinching, my hand inside the bag like a glove. Such an ugly shroud. I tried to jostle the bag slightly so the bat wouldn't be on its back as it waited to die.