Giorgia the Bat
The jungles of South America thrummed with the sonorous snores of hibernating souls. Even in their collective rest, the forest was alive. The only ones fully awake were a nocturnal pair– an aging father, Sonny, and his grown-up daughter, Giorgia. They glided along, bleating their high-frequency chirps to the top of their lungs, echolocating their way across an unlit path.
As they sped through the dense foliage, Giorgia could clearly sense that a hazard was at hand. Sonny was veering dangerously close to a tree– the tallest of all the trees– as he sloppily swerved from side to side, his clumsy flight pattern a known symptom for bats of a certain age. She watched helplessly as he got nearer and nearer, and all she could think to do was panic and utter with an impotent shriek: “Paaa, you’re gonna crash.”
And so, despite her shrill warning, he hit that tree. Sonny smacked, full-bodied, onto the trunk with a resonant thud, his feeble wings rippling from the force of the unexpected collision, propelling him aggressively onto a bough just a few feet down.
Within moments, Giorgia flew her way to the branch, landing with precision in her claws. She spread her wings and wrapped her fleshy wings around her father’s gray-fuzzed torso, checking for a pulse and other signs of life.
“Dad, are you ok?” She yelled at her father so that he could hear her. Sonny, after all, was an elder of the animal kingdom. With the ravages of time, his ears had undergone quite a dramatic level of hearing loss and thus were ineffective at perceiving the echo of his breath.
“Ohhh…” he groaned. All around, they could hear the other animals giggling and tee-heeing at his tumble.
This enraged her quite a bit. Though she could not see them, Giorgia barked back at all of them, her head twirling in every direction to make sure they all got the message: “Shut up. Laughing at an old bat? Go back to sleep already. I know you all have work tomorrow.”
The tee-heeing ceased.
Giorgia quickly flew to a nearby tree and returned with a peach for her father to nibble on.
“Here, eat this,” she said as she sank her vampiric teeth into the fruit’s feeble skin, ripping it apart before digging her worm-length tongue into the juices, soon realizing it was spoiled and disgusting. “Blech!” She tossed it down to the ground, where it fell and turned to a mash. “No good. I’ll have to find some elsewhere,” She sighed. “I told you not to fly so fast. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?!”
“Yes, sweetie, you did. I’m sorry.” His head was still reeling from the impact of the crash like a boxer on the fifteenth round, his neck gyrating, milky eyes spinning, seeing plenty of stars and stripes across his hazed-up view.
“I knew I should’ve taken the lead. But your pride just wouldn’t let you be led by a girl, would it?
“Y’all, be quiet!!” an angsty anteater bellowed from below.
“Mind your own business, you nosy freak,” Giorgia yelled back. Then she turned to her father and made a kind expression at him.
It was rare to see an adult bat like her still tethered to her parent like that, but her loyalty, at least when it came to him, knew no bounds.
In his advanced state, helping him was the least she could do for him. It was her, Sonny, after all, who raised her from her infancy, when her mother was abruptly taken from them. He depended on Giorgia to help him get around, to guide him, and steer him in the right direction. In her mind, he was still the strong and smart bat that he remembered from her youth. In those early days, he could still easily navigate these very same trees, so bereft of light, yet so full of acoustic foliage that he could echo in on with his Chiroptera beats.
“It’s been a long journey. Let’s take a break, alright? Get some rest. I’m gonna go see if I can find some decent eats.”
“This is no time for a break, it’s almost dawn. The hawks will be out and about, and you’ll be late for the mating season.
“So what?”
“By the time we get there, all the best suitors will be spoken for.”
“Again, so what?! There’s always next season.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be around that long, and I want to meet my grandbabies before I leave this dimension.”
“It’s nice to have dreams, but maybe don’t keep your hopes up.”
This made him shudder. “Don’t say that.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’d rather be by myself and happy than miserable and in a partnership of desperation. That wouldn’t be fair to our offspring, don’t you think? Let’s face it. I’m kinda weird. It’s so unlikely I’ll find anybody out who can match my weirdness.”
“Your mom was weird, too. She found me.”
“Oh, wow,” she said with sarcasm, rolling her eyes like a teenager.
“Have you ever heard that story of your mother in the barn?”
Oh dear, Giorgia thought, he’s waxing nostalgic again.
“We were still dating at the time. The barn animals were all sleeping. And your mother sneaks in, fangs out, carefully sinking them into a cow’s teat while it sleeped. And she took a good, long sip from its juices. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. I thought it was so revolting, but your mother seemed to be enjoying it. Ah!” he said with love in his eyes, “Carmilla was so stealthy when she wanted to be. Next thing she knew, your momma, being the diva that she was, she had to go and open that big mouth of hers, all stained with milk and blood, saying, “Oh, I adore that pattern on your fur. Look at this black spot right here, it’s shaped just like Africa. Did you get that painted or is that natural?”
Sonny laughed through his old bat coughs.
“Oh, and the cows screamed and screamed and screamed, and the whole farm woke up and got us both chased out of that human village with a frenzy so crazy. I sure do miss her sometimes.”
“I miss her, too,” she replied. Sonny had been telling this same story since Giorgia was a pup, but she did not stop him, as she enjoyed hearing it every time. It reminded her of where she’d inherited her craziness from. A kind of crazy strain she carried in her day-to-day shenanigans. It was a craziness, Giorgia had to remind herself, that was not without its consequences. It was these kinds of antics that inevitably led to Carmila being captured by poachers, who cruelly froze her in a glass case of azure formaldehyde, where she was exported to a far-off land, sold for a laugh at a local shop full of goth clothes and morbid collectibles.
Giorgia herself was not kidding when labelling herself a weirdo. She was quite the unusual chimera, even by bat standards. With her father’s piercing black eyes and her mother’s pretty, porcine nose, she was a rare crossbreed between a vampire bat and a fruit bat, loving fruits as much as she loved blood. She also had a way of getting tangled up in messes that she had no business getting into in the first place. Her ginormous, triangular ears always oriented her in the direction of new points of danger, new points of mischief. Anytime she detected a sound, in that dense sonic sphere of her natural habitat, any sound that was out of the ordinary or just otherwise enticing to her senses, she was quick to follow it, without hesitation, eager to uncover what it was that had produced that particular snip. Whether it was a moth flapping her delicate wings, a cricket rehearsing a new tune with its legs, or just an oily toad trying to discreetly pass flatulence, Giorgia’s curiosity always got the better of her. She possessed very little impulse control in that regard. She could be smackdab in the middle of a conversation with someone, be it a potential friend or a potential mate, and very rudely, out of nowhere, without excuse, she’d wander off into the distance to see what it was that had caught her attention. Suffice to say, she struggled to get along with any kind of bat. Any friends she had usually did not stick around in her life for very long, and as a self-labelled weirdo, she spent her days in long isolation. If it weren’t for Sonny’s constant presence, she would not have had very many other living things to hold conversations with.
“Alright, Dad. Just take a nap and we’ll get back on track, easy.” So they put a pause on her migration towards procreation, and she went out searching for food.
She looked everywhere. And though her ears were quite sophisticated at identifying trees and rocks to avoid, they were not quite advanced enough to find any food amidst this darkness. Her smelling capabilities left a lot to be desired, though as she continued in her search, she did eventually land on an odor, and most importantly, a sound, which seemed somewhat promising.
She heard a sound that sounded like a fellow bat feasting on fruit.
Crunch, crunch, crunch. Gnosh, gnosh, gnosh. Gulp, gulp, gulp.
She wandered over, past the bushes and past the rocks, continuing to fly, but slower this time, staying low, flapping as quietly as she could, until she arrived at a serene little clearing in the woods. When she looked around, she found nothing but a pungent pile of odorous, fetid berries. She grabbed at her nose to keep from sniffing it.
“Heeeeyyyy yoouuuu. Get away from therrree,” said a voice, apparently detached from a body.
Her ears perked in the direction of it.
From behind a bush, immersed in piles of trident-toothed leaves, gaily bobbing from side to side, a beady-eyed bat with a sloppily shaped snout came running at her.
“Excuuuuuse meee, do nooot touch my fruit!”
Giorgia stared blankly at him. She had a thing about staring. She could stare at someone for an uncomfortably long amount of time, just observing them, without saying a word. In this instance, she couldn’t stop thinking about how very punchable his face looked. That rhino’s horn of a nose, those shriveled up eyes, that dumb little mouth– it was annoying her. But, having years ago taken a vow of peace, she did not act on her impulse. The days of her youth, sucker punching other animals, were long behind her.
“Ummm… hi,” he continued. Her dead-eyed glare freaked him out a little. “Caaaan you stop staring at meeeee? Whaaat doo you wantt?? Step awaaayyyyyy and leave my fruit alone.”
“Excuse you, my guy. This fruit is rotten.”
“Preciseeely as I enjoyyy it. Mmm.” He grabbed one from the steaming pile, a berry that was covered in a film of fungus with a gray, cobweb-like texture, and then swallowed it whole in a single gulp. “Mmm. The ethanol level on that is juuuust riiight. Nothing quite liiiiike eet.”
She did not even try to hide her disgust. “You eat rotten fruit? Good gracious. You know that's poison, right?”
“Ah, heeeeck,” he chortled, “we all gotta dieeeee from something, don’t weeee? Oh, I’ve been feastin’ on these fermented things since fooooooorever agoooo.”
“Who taught you to eat that mess?”
“Well, missy, nooooobody taught me. A fiiiiire burned through my home a whiiiiiile back. Was the ooooonly one in my tribe to survive. Saaaad but truueeeee. There wasn’t aaaanny food for miles, it had all wiiiithered aaaawaay into these spoiled, burnt-up treats. Hunger being the spice it is, ohhhh yes indeeeeeed, I found these to beeeee the most exquiiisite treaat of all! These fruits make you feel relaxed, and funny, and ohhhhhh-so-haaapppyyy.” He tripped on a rock and stumbled down to the ground, face-first.
Giorgia had never seen a more pathetic specimen in her life. “And you call yourself a bat? Frying your senses like that? Do you have no appreciation for the gift of your body?”
“Yeeeee think my body is a gift, hmm?” he said, rising back up, with a flirty chuckle, clutching his rotund, rolly-polly, rotten berry-filled belly.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m just saying if you’re not careful, something bad can happen to you. Sooner than you expect. Why, a hawk, might–”
“Oooh, hawks are good friends of miiiine. Weeee get along famously. They’re pretty, pretty gentle birds once you get to know ‘em a little.”
“Sure, I believe that. They’re probably just fattening you up.”
“Heeeeeeyy, yeee calling me fat?”
“Sorry to insult you,” she said while checking for dirt beneath her nails. “I’m sorry I bothered you. Can you tell me where I can find fruit that isn’t absolutely disgusting? Looking for fruits that my pa can eat.”
“Your paaaaaa?” the drunken bat laughed. “A bit old to still be hanging with your pop, ain’t yaaa?”
”He is a senior. He depends on me. So pipe it.”
“Verery, verery noble of yeee. Good luck finding a mate with that old fart tethered to yeeee. Nobody’s gonna wanna, gonna wanna,” hiccup, “deal with you aaaand your pop.”
“I didn’t ask.”
The drunken bat scratched the back of his head, feeling a little ashamed. “I dooooo actually have some things you can take. If yooooouu’d like. But not aaaallll of it.”
“I already told you, sir–”
“My name is Seymour.”
“Seymour, I don’t want your expired produce.”
“I have fruit. Gooooood fruit. The kind you’d like, your highness. I was storing it in a treeeeeee a little waaaaay’s back, waaaaaaaiting for it to ripen to my liking. But, youuuuu could take some. Follow me.”
By foot, he led her to his stash of fruits, and let her pick as many as she wanted. And for the first time in a very long while, this chatty bat found herself at a loss for words. What wondrous fruits Seymour had in store in this dusky, hollowed-out tree. Sweet plantains, tangy mangoes, velvety figs, and succulent papayas. But one item in particular caught her eye. Oh, what was that glimmering golden orb sitting on the corner there? It was, of course, a blood orange– a fruit that combined two of her most favorite things: blood and oranges.
“Take…” he hiccuped, “whatever youuuu can carry.”
“I want the blood orange, and that will be sufficient, friend. That is something Dad and me can enjoy together.”
She took the blood orange and only the blood orange. As she began flapping her wings, the dense fruit perched between her curvy claws, she flashed a gentle, appreciative smile at Seymour. “Thank you for this, it really helps. And please, get some help.”
He smiled and waved her off.
Within moments, she was far away from there, flying in the air, the coolness of the wind, gelling with the thickness of the humid heat. As she levitated in that sky, she marinated in thought, thinking how Seymour would not be such an unattractive fellow if he just got his guano together.
When she came back to the branch where her father was left, her heart sank when she saw he wasn’t there.
“Pa, paaaa,” she cried! “Where are you?”
She looked all around the tree and all the other trees surrounding it. In desperation, she even dropped the orange, and it fell from a long distance, the splat it made resounding in her ear. She was getting so afraid, and she started flying erratically, in circles, crying out: “pa, pa. Where are you?”
“Your father left,” she heard a voice saying. When she turned to look, Giorgia saw it was a plump little caterpillar, wrapping itself in a cocoon.
“What?”
“I saw him scaling down this tree. It was pretty funny to see,” the caterpillar giggled.
“He climbed? By himself? Did he get hurt?”
“I don’t know, but he was definitely bumbling his way through a lot of it.”
“Which way did he go?”
“I’m sorry I can’t help you anymore. I’m going to turn into a moth now.” And the caterpillar sealed itself completely in its new home, a hardened shell where it would melt into a soup before eventually transforming into something beautiful and new.
Giorgia flew down to the bottom of this tall tree, and at its base, she looked around for traces of where her father might have gone. Something curious stood out. A red trail of juice, leading deep into the distance. Giorgia stuck her tongue out to taste. It was the nectar of the blood orange she’d dropped. She followed it deep into the darkness, deep into that unknown path.
It was a blessing to her heart when she saw the slime trail end with Sonny, walking by foot, all by himself, with nothing but this blood orange in his clutch.
“Pa,” she cried with relief. Giorgia landed right beside him and gave him a hug. “What are you doing walking by yourself? You nearly gave me a heart attack!”
“Oh, there you are. I was just about to tell you, there’s no need to go out and get that fruit. I found this tasty orange on the ground, and it’s making me feel so much better.”
“Yes, I see that.”
“And you see, I don’t need you around me all the time to help me get around?”
“I see that, too.”
“Shall we continue on our journey?”
The dawn was beginning to crack. The faint glimmers of sunlight were peaking over the horizon. Soon, the rest of the jungle was to awaken into its diurnal stir.
“Ok, but let’s go on foot. And don’t stray too far from me, ok pa?”
Sonny nodded, and they both went walking together side by side. Far in the distance, Giorgia heard what sounded like a hawk catching its morning prey. For the first time, she felt no need to fly over and see what it was.