It's 8:37 p.m. on October 31 and the moon is rising outside the bedroom window and Ursula, looking into her phone camera to apply black lipstick, is trying to remember a line from a D.H. Lawrence poem about bats. She says it's something about how their wings, the black wings of bats, are like scraps of old umbrellas, disgusting weird leathery umbrellas; she says it's clear that Lawrence was revolted by bats.

I feel like my brain is a lump of soggy oatmeal, I feel like I'm breathing fog, something is wrong, I'm bare-ass naked, I feel drunk, something has happened where all I can say to her is Yes, though I've only known her since 8:37 p.m. on October 30.

"I fucking love bats," she says. "Unlike Lawrence."

I can't remember where my clothes are. I wonder when I ate last.

"Google it," she commands.

"Yes," I whisper.

She tosses me her phone and bends to lace her boots. It takes me a half-dozen tries to type in lawrence bats.

I'm sucked down the google rabbit hole. Tens of thousands of bats have invaded Lawrence, Kansas. Climate change is driving them inside. Bats in attics and closets and upstairs bedrooms, bats hanging from ceiling fans. Ursula tells me bats can squeeze through a quarter-inch crack.

I want to say You know a lot about bats, but all I can say is "Yes."

I can't focus my eyes.

Ursula touches up her black lipstick, runs the blood-red nail of her index finger over my throat, unclasps my fingers from her phone, one finger at a time.

I shudder.

"You are crazy in love with me, aren't you?" she says.

"Yes."

"Good," she says.

She tells me that some bat bites are fatal. She reads from her phone: "Bats have very small teeth that may leave marks that are not easily seen."

"Yes."

"You cannot always tell," she reads, "if you have been bitten by a bat. You should go immediately to the rabies clinic at Lawrence Memorial Hospital," she reads, "if—"

—and then she looks up and smiles and her teeth behind her black lips are like tiny glistening bits of glass, and she reads a bulleted list, popping the bullets in the air with her index finger:

• If you awake to find a bat in the room
• If you find a bat in a room with an unattended child
• If you see a bat near a person with a disability
• If you are intoxicated

"Were you intoxicated?" Ursula asks.

"Yes," I say.

"Did you wake to find a bat in the room?"

I want to say I don't know, I want to say Please, I want to ask her to stop now, but when I open my mouth I hear myself say, "Yes."

"Some things are worse than rabies," Ursula says. "Isn't that right, belovèd?"

And I say, "Yes."

She tells me that D.H. Lawrence was probably a vampyre, and so was Lady Macbeth, and that more people than you would think were vampyres and still are vampyres.

"Yes." I'm starting to weep.

And some, she says, are succubi.

"Yes."

"Lie down here on the floor," she tells me, and when I do she presses her stiletto heel over my heart.

The sharpened spike of the stiletto starts, slowly, slowly, to break the skin over my breastbone. My oatmeal brain fades back to 11:58 PM on October 30. I let her buy my drinks, mescal, tequila, tequila, mescal. I let her take me home, let her lay me down on her moldy leather sofa. Ursula was all over me. She bit my lips, my tongue, she bit me all down my neck until she drew blood. I think I remember this, I think so. The last thing I think I remember is Ursula, on the night before the night before the Day of the Dead, trying not to laugh, hand over her mouth, smiling with her very small teeth.

.

Detail of art on main page: recoloring of the coat of arms of Sesava Parish, Latvia.





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