Forty-Four Wings

At first there are eight, each a punctuation mark against the autumn twilight. Drunken commas that careen and keel, their wings curly braces that beat with furious efficiency. Bats the color of old pennies, their flight dizzying to watch. What I cannot see, although I know this is true, is that bats can flip into Spanish question marks, curl their tails to capture mosquitos and moths, pull them toward their mouths.

*

We sold our house. Of the two of us, I am the last to leave. I step onto our porch—that is no longer our porch—and watch the bats for half an hour, an hour perhaps, my sense of time lost because neither the evening nor I have any use for it. Evening, eventide—such lovely, old-fashioned words, ones you would love—dimmet, dusk. A language of loss.

*

The first night we slept in our house we heard bats roosting in the chimney. The next day I climbed onto the roof and set wire mesh to block the opening, despite your worry that female bats need a place, warm and safe, to raise their young. Perhaps you were thinking of the young we knew we would never have. For a while then in the evenings we would watch to see if bats would still come. You, always eloquent, predicted they would arrive in full paragraphs, swarm to write pages in the sky before leaving it blank.

*

I will leave soon, but not yet. I count forty-four wings opening and closing like umbrella folds. Behind me, the house—no longer our house—is dark and quiet. In coming years, it will settle into itself soundlessly, as houses do. Floorboards will slant, chimney bricks will crack. The porch will sink into the earth enough to shift columns from the beam. Those who will live in this house will not discern the changes, until one day they step onto their porch to breathe in their evenfall, their gloaming, and remark how beautiful, how odd, to watch a swirl of bats feeding and wheeling overhead, to see them, one by one, pour themselves back into the chimney.