For my fiction workshop this week, the beginning of my story is loosely based on a real life event in which my friend Kari and I discovered a bat in my guest bedroom sometime during elementary school. I went into the guest bedroom about once every three months (mainly to play Seaquest, which was a very short phase), so perhaps it was just fate that we decided to go in there that day.

The thing is, when I saw the bat on the curtain, the first thing I told Kari was, "Don't turn around. There's a bat on the curtain."

I'm not sure why I did not want Kari to see the bat. Of course, she turned around, saw it, and we both ran out of the room in a panic. The bat then made its way through the crack in the door, and the towel covering the crack, and down the stairs, at which point Kari, me, and my mother became prisoners outside of the house.

When my dad came home, he found the bat on Kari's shoe. So much for protecting her from the bat I didn't even want her to see.