Bat-thing Response to Meredith Andrea’s ‘Pipistrelle’ It was like this: a high street place of bodies busy with their heels and soles, the ordinary tramp of feet on wet pavements. I was little but not as lost as the bit of brownish-black on the pavement that a woman kicked to the side with her pointy shoe. The way she curled her nose at this bit of slack stuff drew me closer, and down. Toot of traffic was big around pedestrians, their crossing and me more afraid now for this flimsy thing dropped from some dark into daylight danger, now scraping its bit of brolly-self against wall-edge, stranded amongst cigarette stubs and chewing gum, the click-clack of heels, the swing of shopping bags - like live litter, this little mouse-thing with webbed wings. My mother’s voice, like ultrasonic singing, sounded somewhere above, a kind of echolocation. She fell upon me, rainy-eyed. Lost creature. It could have been a Pipistrelle. In The Green Gate (Cinnamon Press, 2015)