It had to happen sometime: Our bat-free apartment is bat-free no more. After a year and a week of living in this apartment, the universe grows displeased with our complacent, naïvely overconfident acclimation to batless living, and thus it is that I wake up at four in the morning this past Friday to discover a bat flying around our bedroom ceiling. How it teleported itself in here, I’m sure we’ll never know.

Tempting as it is to just hide under the sheets until the beast finds its own way out, we feel we have to get hands-on. We run ducking out of the bedroom, checking our persons for bite marks. The bat takes a few laps around the apartment’s rooms and then flies into the kitchen and vanishes. I cautiously remove an appliance box from atop the pantry cabinets and am met with an eruptive Malmsteenian cadenza of electronic-sounding bat squeaks, like R2-D2 on helium. I stand on a chair and see that the bat has squeezed into a half-inch gap in the wall above the cabinets.

I open the kitchen window. Quiet pre-dawn traffic noise drifts coolly in. Laura goes to the storage closet and retrieves our Bat Net. (A small butterfly net, kindly bought for us last year by Laura’s mother.) I attempt to persuade the bat out of its hiding place by jabbing it with the Bat Net’s hoop. The bat boggles at me and pokes its alien snout out of the wall and bares its tiny fangs while continuing to emit its weebly little cellphone sounds. It is almost adorable. Laura holds a bedsheet over the doorway to trap the bat in the kitchen with me. We are not calling Animal Control.

The bat gets fed up with being jabbed and scrabbles free of the wall and takes flight, careening around the kitchen. For once I am grateful that our apartment’s kitchen is so small. I jump down off the chair and start swatting and the bat helpfully flies right into the Bat Net. I slap both bat and net down to the floor, slide a piece of pizza-box cardboard under the opening, and throw the bastard out the window.

We go back to bed and try to ignore our confused stomachs grumbling for breakfast and start wishing for an early winter. The Bat Drowning Bucket never enters my mind; I may be mellowing in my old age. Also, erasing.org turns eight today. Cheers.