You wonder why I'm here? I've been here since time began. I've always sought out the dark places because I cannot stand the light. As a result, I'm blind, but I can navigate like no other mammal simply by my high pitched cries telling me where obstacles are to my flight, enemies approaching and location of my food. I also have the uncanny internal memory of where I've been and how to get back to my home before dawn every night.
All other mammals attempt to fly, but don't. Some jump great distances, and a few glide. But I can fly many hours without landing based on my skeletal structure, my membrane wings and my high metabolism. Energy expended requiring me to eat for hours in my nightly forays of insect slaughter.
You, you mammal of the day, you don't understand my way of life. You hate me, defile me and kill me if you catch me, day or night. Don't you know why you are so wrong about me? I'll try to tell you, but you won't listen. I'll never fly into your hair, or anywhere near you, if I can help it.
I eat insects. I especially love mosquitoes. The blood filled ones are the best because I need blood. Although I never have bitten the throat of any animal to get it that way. Only my cousin, the vampire, does that, but he is rare and lives thousand miles south of here. And, he only gets his blood from cattle and sheep. They hardly notice.
Yes, I'm the blood hungry mosquito's greatest enemy. I can smell them or sonar locate them and zero in, never missing a kill. Each female mosquito gorged in blood lays thousands of eggs in stagnant water, releasing hordes of new mosquitoes every evening for my pallet of raw blood and guts.
At dawn, I arrive home to my cool dark place where I hang from the ceiling to avoid the danger on the floor, covered with thousands of years of my clan's collective guano.
Squirming with scorpions, roaches, ants, lizards and snakes, it is a very dangerous place. If I or my baby should ever fall to that squirming, hellish mass, we would be immediately overpowered and eaten by those terrible, nasty creatures, leaving only our bones.
Such is and was the way of our lives until the tall, noisy mammals who cannot fly come into our home searching for our guano. Prized as some kind of food for their sun needing crops, shining lights in our faces making us squirm, trying to escape the awful glare. And then, there are some who come to study us, rip us from our hanging footholds to take us to laboratories and dissect us for their pleasure. Such horrible creatures!
Worst of all, there are those who completely clean out our homes, build lighted trails through them, and thousands come with their echoing noise, making it nearly impossible to sleep in quiet and darkness anymore in those places. Making us migrate to other places, so hard to find.
Some of my kin have stopped fighting and have gone to the cities to hang in the trees, belfries, tunnels, canopies over parks and arcades. Even under bridges where the vibration and noise overhead is somehow blocked out while they sleep. I couldn't bear it; I would die before I would sleep under a bridge!
Sometimes, I wonder if our kind, even the fruit eating and pollinating kind, will survive another century with the way those two legged walking bastards have destroyed our homes and made our insects we live on disappear. Some of us have become very sick because of what they've done to our food trying to kill it more efficiently with deadly poisons.
Don't they know killing them is killing us! Will they learn in time? I doubt it. We are survivors. We have survived much longer than they have. They are adapters. Like changelings, they adapt to something different after they've destroyed every good thing that comes their way,
They think of us as evil. Deathly afraid of us when they hear us in the dark chatting and see us in the light. Our very existence makes them cringe like the moving mass of predatory creatures on our home floor. They are frightened and want to destroy us simply out of fright without thought that we are caring for young tenderly just like they do, drinking our mothers' milk and cuddling to feel warm and safe.
But they will never learn, they are too stupid. Making up stories about their species becoming like us, only living forever--we don't--on the blood of other two legged walkers. How preposterous! Who would believe such nonsense? We don't. We just want to continue our nightly food flights, trying to avoid the nighthawks and owls who are our enemies, eternal. And then, return home to our colonies of friends and relatives for chatting and sleep. That's all, nothing more.
Just leave us in peace, please. Have you learned our language yet?
Copyright 2023 © Ronald W. Hull
6/19/23
