By Jessica Jo Staricka
Featured Art: “Nope” by Alex Brice

One night twenty years later, among cardboard boxes fuzzy with dust in the basement of my mom’s final house, I find a tennis racket. I’m puzzled. We never played tennis. Maybe the racket was trash left behind by a previous renter that we accidentally packed and brought with us on one of our many moves. Maybe Gladys and I begged a dollar off our mom to buy it at a garage sale and made up our own game pitching pinecones to each other in one of the back yards. 

But when I pick it up, its exact heft and balance rush me out of this basement and twenty years back, to the perfume of white pines and the prick of their needles through the holes in my sneakers, to the gravel yards and dandelion lawns and empty horse corrals and collapsing barns of the half-dozen ramshackle farmhouses we rented growing up, to their living rooms on summer nights, where Twins games played on TV, where I tinkered with salvaged arts and crafts, where my sister Gladys played an out-of-tune piano if the house happened to come with one, and where a bat appeared in the corner of the ceiling. 

We’d shriek, then bolt across the house to fetch the tennis racket from the broom closet. If Gladys commandeered the racket, I grabbed an empty box. Bats roosted in the attic of every house we rented. Occasionally one got lost and crawled down into our domain instead of up and out into the night. But in one house, one summer, just after we’d moved in, when I was twelve and Gladys was fourteen and our mom worked every night until eleven, the bats intruded so relentlessly that we became master bat-bashers before we were even unpacked. 

The bats were not cute. They had pinprick eyes, pinched faces, enormous ears, and bodies like fuzzy, rotten kiwis. Their leather wings belonged on something decayed. They were nonnegotiably tainted, like rats, or cockroaches. Bats turned all of us, me and Gladys and our mom, into squeamish squealers. 

Yet back into the living room we ran, racket at the ready, and there the bat clung. 

“Hylda, throw something at it,” Gladys commanded. 

Among the bins and boxes of our unpacked belongings, I found a roll of thick winter socks. I lobbed it toward the bat and hit the wall beside it. The thunk startled it into the air. We screamed, so hard that Gladys’s scream hurt my ears, so hard that my scream hurt my throat. The bat flew in panicked loops, and we ran in panicked circles. We chased the bat when it ran from us, and we ran from the bat when it flew our way. We cowered when we went through doorways, lest the bat duck through at the same time and get snagged in our hair. Finally, it flew down the hall, and Gladys led the way into the kitchen, crouching and dashing and gripping the tennis racket over her shoulder like a baseball bat. 

The crunch of tires on gravel and the dinging brought on by a broken door latch announced Mom’s arrival. When the mudroom door swung open and she and her Super 8 work polo stepped in, Gladys and I shouted that there was a bat, as if the presence of the tennis racket wasn’t warning enough. Mom flung her purse aside and grabbed and rolled up a magazine. 

We clung to our weapons and scanned the room. No bat. 

“Uh oh,” I said. 

Gladys headed the search effort. Mom and I followed her through the house, around disorganized furniture and boxes, listening for that swish, looking for that flicker of darkness. This new-to-us old house was extra small and covered in flaking white paint, inside and out. It reminded me of the old country schoolhouse we’d tour at the county fair. We reached the dimly lit living room, a dead end. 

“This is bad,” Gladys said, toeing an end table we hadn’t found a spot for yet, then peeking into an open cardboard box. “He could be inside or behind any of this stuff. And what about the basement? And upstairs?” 

“Better just burn the house down now,” I said. 

Mom laughed, then shrieked. Gladys and I leaped to defend her, but it was only one of the old lace curtains that hung in every window in the house that had brushed Mom’s elbow. 

“We won’t find him until he starts flying again,” Gladys said. “Think the house is shaky enough that stomping around might make him take flight?” 

We went on a stomping, clomping, jumping, shouting, crouching, cowering rampage. The house vibrated and the windows rattled. We shifted boxes and furniture, then ran for cover. We checked the basement, and we checked upstairs, and we checked the main level five times. The wall clock that had been left in the kitchen by whoever last lived there read midnight, but we had no idea if it was fast or slow or set to the wrong side of daylight savings time. 

We gave up on stomping and regrouped in the living room. I plopped onto the middle of the floor and groaned that I’d never be able to sleep until we got that bat out of here. 

“Would it be less scary to wait until daylight?” Mom asked, joining me on the floor. 

“Maybe, but what would we do until morning?” Gladys asked, sitting too. 

“Stay up?” I suggested. 

“What else is summer vacation for?” Mom said. 

Then, I saw it. Behind Gladys, in front of the dark window, the bat was tangled, unmoving, in the white lace curtains. 

I screamed. Mom and Gladys screamed at my screaming and shouted “What, what?!” and looked around madly in search of what I was pointing at. They saw it, their screams grew higher, and we all hopped to our feet. 

“Ew, ew, ew,” Gladys said. 

“He looks stuck,” Mom said. 

“Is he dead?” I asked. 

“I think he’s just given up,” Gladys said. 

To test it, I grabbed a roll of paper towels and chucked it at the wall beside the window. The bat squealed that insectoid squeal and thrashed around, but his nasty little claws were definitely caught in the curtain. 

“Okay, after the bat is sorted out, those curtains have got to go,” Mom said. 

We debated removal strategies. The bat flailed from time to time and we and the bat took turns squealing. Finally, Gladys convinced us we could shimmy him down and out of the curtain with a box and volunteered to do the deed. I found a shoebox with a lid and dumped the office supplies out of it. 

“We need hazmat gear,” Gladys said, her voice low and wobbling. 

She held the lid on one side of the curtain and the box on the other, trapping the bat between. He screeched incessantly. While Mom and I trembled, Gladys maneuvered the box down the curtain. Sometimes an ear or a piece of wing poked out then disappeared again. It was working. The shoebox reached the bottom of the curtain and Gladys fit the lid and box together as the last of the lace slid through. 

“You look like you’re going to throw up,” I told her. She looked exactly like when she’d had food poisoning last summer and spent the Fourth of July dry heaving. 

“I think I might,” she said. The box quaked in her grip. “I can feel him scratching. Can somebody else hold this?” 

Now came the disposal debate. We’d never captured an uninjured bat before. Normally, a bat intrusion ended when Gladys knocked the snot out of it with a fabulous backhand swing that sent it into the wall with a splat and ensured it was pretty much done-for by the time we scooped it into a box. We’d bring the half-dead bat to the back yard, dump it onto the tennis racket, then sling it so rocketed into the woods in the dark, inevitably landing in its final resting place, where a fox or cat or the elements could finish it off. We never felt too bad about thwacking bats. There was no other way to get them out of the house. They couldn’t be herded, and they couldn’t be caught. We’d tried a butterfly net once, but the bat’s claws tangled in it, and we’d ended up pitching both the bat and the net into the woods. 

But this time, our bat captive was unscathed. His continual squeaking was pitched so high it had to be skirting the upper limit of the human hearing range. I proposed releasing him outside. He didn’t need to be put out of his misery. It would be the merciful thing to do. But how could we release him without risking him flying into the face of the releaser? Could bats even take flight from the ground? Would shoving the box outside and knocking the lid off have been a death sentence for him, anyway? 

Finally, we tugged on our tennis shoes and went out into the dark back yard, to the edge of the thin woods. A thousand fireflies sparkled out of sync in the grass. The frogs in the wet ditches along our gravel road filled the night with their burpy buzzing. I held the trusty tennis racket, just in case. Gladys climbed onto our tarp-covered firewood trailer. Mom passed her the shoebox. Then Gladys launched it like a shotput toward the woods. It soared in a magnificent arc, at the peak of which the lid flew off and came fluttering down, sending us all scrambling back inside so we never saw whether the bat crashed to earth with the box or took flight. 

We were rattled, yet back to the living room we went to resume our projects while Mom boiled spaghetti noodles in the kitchen. The house we’d just moved out of had come with a lousy old upright piano, and Gladys, though she’d never had a music lesson in her life, had been figuring out the chords and melodies of her favorite songs with trial and error and a skilled ear. She was into moody punk rock, Green Day and Blink-182 and Simple Plan, bands I couldn’t tell the difference between. A year ago, she’d gotten a handheld blue and yellow plastic CD player from our uncle for her birthday. Since then, she checked out CDs from the library and listened nonstop, not just enjoying but studying the songs, it seemed, until she had to return them. Mom took us garage saleing on summer weekends, and now, Gladys bought nothing but CDs. 

But this house had no piano, so instead of sitting with her CD player before the keys, playing choppily along with whatever she heard through her yellow headphones, Gladys sat curled up with her CD player in the corner of the couch, concentrating, like she was not just hearing the music, but reading it.  

I, meanwhile, sat on the floor working with my main garage sale purchases of leftover crafting supplies. I’d recently graduated from open packs of construction paper, pipe cleaners, and glitter glue and advanced to cheap little wooden shelves and boxes that I was figuring out how to sand, stain, paint, and varnish. I kept my supplies and works in progress in a big bin labelled “Hylda’s Crafts,” but the projects were outgrowing the bin, and I was considering setting up in workshop down in the basement, where the previous owner had left shelves of old wood stain, wood glue, wood scraps, paint, and sandpaper. 

Mom joined us in the living room. We ate spaghetti and jarred pasta sauce together while half-watching a rerun of that night’s David Letterman. Mom perused an old National Geographic, I sanded the paint off a wooden letter holder, and Gladys listened to her music with her eyes on the TV. Then Mom rose, dropped the magazine, and said she’d better unpack some more before bed. Gladys and I got up to help. We tackled the dining room, emptying boxes, taking down the lace curtains, sweeping mouse droppings out of the built-in China cabinet, piling taxes and other important paperwork onto Mom’s steel desk, twirling a broom through the nests of spiderwebs that loomed in every corner. There was a missing floorboard under the window that gave us a view straight down into the basement, and we swept the dirt and mouse droppings into it to be dealt with later, whenever it was the basement’s turn to be undertaken. 

“Why do we always live in these dinky farmhouses?” I asked. Usually, we had to move because a basement flooded, or a floor collapsed. “Let the mice and bats and spiders have them.” 

“Because rent is cheap,” Mom said breathlessly while she carried a box in from the mudroom. She was very short and very blonde but always stocky and strong. “The farmers don’t want to tear down the houses because they probably grew up in them. But they don’t want to fix them up because they’re too far gone. So they rent them out to us.” 

“Where do the farmers live?” I asked. 

“In nicer houses,” she said. 

“Do the nicer houses have bats in their attics?” Gladys called from the kitchen. 

“Now and then, maybe, but the farmers can probably afford pest control,” Mom said. 

“And they don’t use a tennis racket for it, either,” I said. 

Mom cracked up. She and I got sick of the flaky white dining room and joined Gladys in the kitchen, where she was cleaning the crumbling remains of a nest, maybe a squirrel’s, out of the pantry. Her long face looked busy. She was scheming about how to get a piano. I could tell. We were always scheming about how to get what we wanted in the most affordable, homemade, DIY way we could manage, because that was all we could manage. When we shopped at thrift stores and garage sales, we went for whatever coat or coffee maker had the most character, even if it needed stitching or deep cleaning. We found it fun to be gritty. I had a theory that our mom gave us outlandishly old-fashioned names, Gladys and Hylda, to try to inject us with class. They weren’t white trash trailer park names. Even our pets sounded like they came from old money. We’d had a cat named Estelle and a dog named Minerva. Our mom’s name was Josephine, and she insisted on being Josephine, not Jo or Joey or Josie.  

Mom had a new job at a Super 8 two towns away. She always seemed to have a new job. She’d never finished high school. Whenever it came up, she sounded disgusted at her younger self. She typically worked at gas stations or motels. We lived one paycheck at a time, and that paycheck never seemed to get bigger, but we never worried about food or clothes or school supplies. “We live in this crummy little house so we don’t have to go into debt,” she’d say, like debt was the plague. She had one credit card for emergencies, but she kept it locked in the firesafe with our social security cards and birth certificates. 

We unpacked and tidied until we tired enough to drift to our bedrooms. It was bliss to be falling asleep before a box fan by my open window, to be in a new-to-us house, to be done with the school year, to have shelves of expired but usable crafting supplies awaiting me in the basement, and to have a summer of garage sales ahead for finding more. 

It was not bliss, however, to bash bats. Two nights after the lace curtain episode, a bat swished through the kitchen and hid for an hour behind the open pantry door before Gladys and I found and pummeled him. Three nights later, a bat appeared on the trim above my bedroom door, so I was trapped until Gladys answered my screams, burst inside, and crushed him with the rim of the tennis racket. Every night after sundown, I started flinching at shadows. We all did. Mom would shout and drop a spatula while making dinner, then call, “Sorry, sorry, it was nothing!” Gladys would leap into a defensive crouch if a curtain swished in the breeze through the screen windows. 

When our unpacking was finally finished, the big mission of the summer became for me and Gladys to convince Mom that a piano was within our meager means. 

“People are practically giving away these old upright pianos,” Gladys said one afternoon, slapping the classifieds section of the Marsh County Record in front of Mom’s bowl of cereal at the kitchen table. “Someone’s selling one on the other side of Flood Lake for just fifty bucks.” 

“But this ad says we’d have to go pick it up,” Mom said. 

“We can borrow Uncle Gabe’s truck like we did for moving,” Gladys said. 

“He has to drive all the way down from Chisolm every time we borrow his truck, which we do too much already,” Mom said. 

“If you don’t want to ask him, I’ll ask him myself,” Gladys said. 

“I don’t think you can even move a piano in the back of a pickup truck,” Mom said. “The piano would have to be on wheels, and you’d need a ramp, one that isn’t very steep, either. And then what about the drive here? Won’t that ruin it, driving down all these gravel roads? And we’d have to pay to get it tuned, too. I’m sorry Gladys, but it’s just not feasible right now.” 

We shifted gears and shopped for an electric keyboard, instead. Every weekend, when Mom took us garage saleing, I accumulated more wooden shelves and bins and boxes to refurbish. Mom suggested I check out some woodworking books from the library, but I hated protocols and instructions and the concept that there was a “right” way to do everything. Figuring it out was all the fun. I ruined half the projects I started and wasn’t bothered a bit. 

For Gladys, garage sales were not so prosperous. The few keyboards she found for sale were small, more like toys than instruments. At the end of June, she bought one anyway. 

“It’s two dollars and better than nothing,” she announced, and Mom handed her the cash. 

We spent our evenings in the living room, me woodworking cavalierly, nailing wobbly shelves into place, staining wood without even a glance at the wood stain’s instructions, Gladys plucking out pieces of those favorite songs of hers on that tiny keyboard, huffing every time the song’s range went beyond the piano’s. She figured out chords, but the toylike keyboard couldn’t accommodate two hands, so she couldn’t do chords and melodies at the same time, and she never sang, at least not that Mom or I ever heard. 

Then, at the end of July, at a seemingly disappointing garage sale of baby clothes and toddler toys, we found at the back of the garage a magnificently long keyboard piano for sale. It could use either batteries or a power cord, and Gladys tested it with both. The keys weren’t pressure sensitive, and it had no foot pedals, but it had five octaves, only two short of a real piano, Gladys informed me. She played each note one at a time. She twisted the volume knob. She flipped a switch that made each tone echo even after the key was released. Everything worked. She got a twenty-dollar bill from Mom and bought it. Then we got home and she plugged it in and sat on the living room floor to make some music and discovered that it could only play four notes at a time. 

She stood. I stood, too. She marched to the mud room. I followed her. We kept a five-gallon bucket by the front door to store glass to be brought to the recycling center. Gladys hoisted the overflowing bucket and carried it outside. 

I waited in the doorway. Mom appeared behind me. We stood at the threshold and watched Gladys carry the bucket across the sunny yard to the concrete patio in front of the shed. She picked up a quart-sized canning jar, screamed, and smashed it against the cinderblock foundation so it exploded into a thousand baby blue shards. She grabbed and smashed a beer bottle next, then a salsa jar, then a cracked drinking glass. One by one, roaring and grunting and sometimes shrieking, Gladys shattered every piece in the bucket. 

Mom and I stood transfixed, mouths agape. Gladys, her bucket empty, returned to the house, face blank. She nodded at me and Mom like we were acquaintances she’d met on the sidewalk, passed us on her way inside, and came back out with a broom and dustpan.  

Then Mom and I watched with slack mouths all over again as Gladys swept her broken glass into the bucket. She carried it over to us. The shards tinkled and clinked. 

“Where should I put this?” she asked Mom. 

“You can put it back where it was,” Mom said. “We can probably still recycle it. Can you make sure you got all the glass out of the broom?” 

“I already did,” Gladys said. 

“Okay, thanks,” Mom said. Then, “We can get you piano lessons next summer. We can start saving right now and make it work.” 

“I don’t want piano lessons,” Gladys said, impassive. “I never have. I just want to do be able to do it my own way. Excuse me.” 

She went into the house, and then through the open windows we heard her teasing out one of her moody rock songs, choppily, sometimes faltering by her own mistake, sometimes faltering when she hit the note limit so one tone was cut off to make way for another. 

“I’m having better luck with my projects than she is,” I explained to Mom. “I find crafting stuff all the time, even around the house. That might be making things worse.” 

Some of my projects had outgrown my box of crafts and now inhabited the little basement workshop. Sometimes I hammered and sanded and wood stained away down there, seated at the counter between a mounted vise and the cold woodburning stove, listening to a radio that played static unless I propped it up in the sill of the little window near the ceiling. Sometimes I worked outside on the dandelion lawn. Mom had banned staining and painting upstairs, so when I sat at the kitchen table or on the living room floor, I carved, instead, fashioning little pine blocks into wooden fish with a set of heavy woodcarving knives I’d found at a garage sale. My hands were covered in knicks and gouges, but my fish were getting good. 

“I’m even thinking about selling some of the stuff I fix up,” I told Mom. 

“Hylda, you don’t have to sell your projects,” Mom said. 

“Oh, it’s not the money,” I said. “I’m just accumulating too much stuff. I don’t need any more wooden boxes or shelves or end tables. Besides, it would suck to have to haul it all whenever we move again.” 

“What makes you so sure we’ll have to move again?” Mom asked. 

“We always have to move again. My money’s on getting frozen out come winter.” 

But at the height of summer vacation, winter felt years away. We hunted in vain for an affordable keyboard in the classifieds and at garage sales and even in an instrument shop with a secondhand section that had prices that made Mom go pale. We went to the library every week, and Gladys would get on the computer to scroll miserably through keyboard pianos for sale online that were used and yet were hundreds of dollars beyond of our budget. 

“Why can’t I just get lucky?” she’d say to the screen. “That’s how it’s supposed to work for us. We keep trying until we get lucky.” 

One hot August night, I came up from my basement workshop and into the kitchen for a snack. The windows were propped open with humming box fans blowing in fresh air. Mom was reading an old Reader’s Digest while waiting for a boxed cake to finish up in the oven. We were always snacking on boxed cake, boxed blueberry muffins, boxed cornbread, or boxed brownies. Gladys was eating leftover batter off a rubber spatula while listening to her CD player, which was so dinged and scratched from sliding in and out of her backpack that the LCD screen that displayed the track number was unreadable. 

“I finally got that broken leg back on that little end table,” I reported. 

“The one with the leaf design carved into it?” Mom asked over her magazine. 

“That’s the one.” 

“Good. That little table is just the cutest thing.” 

“If you want it, I’ll give it to you for your birthday when I’m through with it.” 

“Well now you’ve ruined the surprise!” 

“All right, all right. How about a trade?” 

“What do you want for it?” Mom asked. 

“Your dresser.” 

“That’s a big project.” 

“I’m moving up in the world.” 

“And what would you do with it?” 

“Paint it blue and gold.” 

“That sounds cute,” Mom said. “And after you’re done with it, then what? I have to trade you something else to get it back?” 

“Can you guys just—?” 

It was Gladys. She was leaning over her CD player, headphones set aside, palms pressed to her forehead. The fans droned on. The wall clock over the stove ticked. 

She looked up. 

“Quit staring at me,” she said. 

“What were you going to say?” Mom asked. 

“It really doesn’t matter,” Gladys said, sounding old, and utterly exhausted. 

She returned her head to her hands. Mom and I kept right on staring. Gladys had a long face that was thin except for her wide cheekbones. She’d grown even lankier in the last year. I stared at my sister, all knees and elbows in a giant T-shirt, and I did the math, and I figured this would be the one of the last houses we battled together before she graduated high school and found something better to do with her life than pining for simple things she couldn’t have.  

I grabbed a bowl from the cupboard and wiped off the paint flecks that accumulated on everything in this house. I set it by the box of corn flakes that lived on the kitchen table. 

“I’m thinking of selling some of the stuff I make,” I told Gladys. “I could set up at the end of the gravel road. I feel like, I dunno, hobby farm moms and grandmas might like it.” 

“I’m happy for you,” Gladys said. “Please don’t think I’m not happy for you.” 

“Oh, I know. I just mean I could help you buy a nice keyboard piano once and for all.” 

The whole kitchen suddenly smelled like chocolate. The cake was getting close. I heard Mom pop open the oven door and shut it again, but I kept my eyes on Gladys. 

“But you know I don’t want help,” she said, so quietly she was hard to hear over the fans. 

“But you want a piano,” I said. 

“But I don’t want help.” She curled in her seat. Her knees came to her chest. Her hands went from her forehead to the back of her neck. Her headphones fell off the table and dangled there. “So I guess I don’t know what I want.” 

I looked at Mom. Mom looked at me. Somehow Gladys screaming while shattering glass felt better than this.  

I grabbed the corn flakes and started filling my bowl so Gladys could hear that I wasn’t just standing there pitying her.  

Then there was a dark swish to my left. I flinched, turned, and found a bat flying through the mudroom door and directly at me. I shrieked and dropped my bowl so cornflakes exploded out. Mom flung her magazine aside. Gladys leapt to her feet and into a crouch. 

“Please tell me that was just a trick of the light,” Gladys begged. 

“It went that way,” I squeaked, pointing into the dining room, cornflakes crunching under my bare feet. One dining room wall bore a giant mirror, and in its reflection, the bat made its silent loops.  

Gladys sped to the broom closet, then called shrilly, “Where’s the racket?” 

“I might have left it outside after the last bat,” Mom said. 

I declared, “I need a box,” and when I couldn’t find a cardboard one, I thumped downstairs and grabbed a breadbox I had just started sanding. When I came back up, it was just me and the circling bat. I heard Mom and Gladys running around out in the dark yard in search of the racket. I chanted, “Ew, ew, ew,” and slid my shoes on. The only thing worse than a bat tangled in my hair would be a bat stepped on barefoot. 

The bat dipped through the dining room door and flew my way. I dropped my breadbox, fell into a squat, and wrapped my head in my arms. The front door flew open, and I peeked up to see glorious Gladys clutching the racket and wearing her grim, determined, terrified, unstoppable pest control expression, standing in front of Mom like her knight. 

“It just flew over me toward—” 

Mom cut me off with a disgusted bark. I spun to where she was pointing and screamed, too. The first bat had retreated again to loop around the dining room, but now there was another, this one clinging to the wall clock above the stove, peering at us with its needly eyes, crawling around the rim of the clock until it squeezed behind it so its fuzzy butt and wingtips stuck out. 

“Mother of God,” Gladys said. 

“I’ll keep an eye on this one,” Mom said, pointing to the bat wedged behind the clock. 

“Come on, Hylda, let’s get this jackass,” Gladys said, and started for the dining room. 

I retrieved my breadbox, which after being used as a bat receptacle, I knew I would never use for bread. Gladys led me into the dining room and screamed. Not one, not two, but three bats circled near the ceiling. One swooped into the dark stairwell and disappeared upstairs. Another flew into the kitchen and triggered a shriek from Mom. 

Gladys bared her teeth, locked her eyes on her target, swung the racket, and walloped the remaining dining room bat into the mirror so hard it left a smudge. It fell behind the steel desk and squeaked piercingly. 

I climbed under the desk with my box, but in the dark and dust among shoeboxes of old bills and tax papers, I couldn’t see it, could only hear it, and was too scared to grab and move the boxes lest I accidentally grab the bat itself. I heard a crash in the kitchen, probably the clock finally falling off the wall, and a gasp from Mom. I heard Gladys grunt like a real tennis player and heard the thwack and rattle of a bat being wacked against the China cabinet. 

“Here’s another one,” Mom shouted. 

“Is it a convention or something?” Gladys yelled. “Hylda, get out of there and help me!” 

“Oh God, the cake is burning,” Mom called. 

I backed out from under the desk. One bat swooped through the kitchen. Another soared past the stairwell. Three injured bats squealed like tiny pigs in different crannies and corners. 

“That’s it,” I shouted. “Abandon ship!” 

I dropped my box, Gladys dropped the racket, and Mom threw on some oven mitts, grabbed the cake out of the oven, and ran outside with it. 

“Yeesh, Ma, you left the oven on!” I called after her. 

“Grab some forks,” she called back. 

I did, squirming at the sight of the bat that had fallen with the clock into the sink among the dirty dishes. Then I shut off the oven and dashed outside after Mom and Gladys. We regrouped on lawn chairs under the big oak tree in the pinkish glow of the yard light. 

“See if there’s some pop in my car,” Mom said. 

Gladys checked and came back with three cans. The three of us huddled around the hot chocolate cake, eating directly out of the pan, washing it down with warm Pepsi. 

“Total loss,” Gladys said through a mouthful. “Might as well move out now.” 

“What on Earth would cause—how many?” Mom asked. “Four? Five? Why would five bats get into the house at once?” 

“It’s their house now,” I said. 

“It always was,” Gladys said. 

“I can’t believe one fell in the dishes,” Mom said. 

“One fell in the dishes?!” Gladys said. 

“Right into the sink.” 

“Like I said, total loss.” 

“This cake hits the spot, though,” I said. 

“When do we go back in?” Mom asked. “We have to face the music eventually.” 

Without a word, Gladys set her fork in the pan and went to the house. I watched her cautious, crouching silhouette through the mud room windows. She came back out with her arms full and even shut the lights off behind her. She joined us again in our circle of light. She was carrying our tent and all three of our sleeping bags. We assembled the tent together, pausing to sip our Pepsi and take another bite of cake, complaining that the yard light couldn’t be turned off so we could see the stars better, and listening to the distressed bats inside, whose tiny squeaks occasionally made it through the open windows and pierced above the frogs, crickets, mosquitos, and distantly purring farm equipment. 

Gladys went inside once more, and this time came out with her unsatisfactory keyboard tucked under her arm, comical because it looked almost as long as she was tall. 

We ducked with our cake and our cans inside the tent to escape the mosquitos. I unzipped a square in the tent’s ceiling to reveal its screen skylight and let the peachy light in. Gladys sat cross-legged at her piano and played some favorite punk song of hers, sometimes floundering, confident at the beginning, then faltering as she reached parts of the song she had not yet arranged and memorized. While she played, we watched mosquitos buzzing against the overhead screen, and ate boxed cake, and talked about absolutely nothing. And after twenty years, after Gladys graduated high school and became a gardener and did nothing that had anything to do with music, after I went to college and graduate school up north and started a scholarship organization and did nothing that had anything to do with woodworking, after Mom found a beloved job working sales at a bakery for owners who treated her like family, after I dove into a glorious partnership with a glorious man and had three glorious children without ever thinking about a marriage license, after Gladys lost her life to uterine cancer and took nearly every solid thing out of the world with her, after Mom fell asleep behind the wheel and died two days later in the hospital, I am gripping our tennis racket in the basement of our mom’s final rickety farmhouse. I hold it up to the naked bulb to look for any smear or smudge of bat still stuck to the strings. I bounce it to feel its perfect weight. Then I swing it again and again, casting strange shadows, tripping on boxes and broken furniture, plummeting and floating in the loss and the love of the only people this tennis racket ever meant anything to, and it is sublime, and absolutely not just a trick of the light. 

---

Jessica Jo Staricka grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. Her work has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Beloit Fiction Journal, and elsewhere. When she isn’t writing, Jessica can be found drawing or exploring.