That Bat Trick

Today’s question (courtesy of The Cafe of the Cosmic Blog) is: Did you really play that trick on your favorite sibling? And if so, what was that trick?

I never played any tricks that I can recall, but there is one sibling trick that is part of our family lore...

Bats lived in our house. Not really in our house, but somewhere between the roof and the ceilings. They never did us any harm, but once in a while we would wake up in the middle of the night to the ‘flit,flit,flit’ of bat wings. Bat Alert would be sounded, and my dad would somehow round up the offending critter and exile it to the dark of the outside night. Anyway, when my youngest sister Anne was a teenager she often made a dramatic production of how she despised/feared/hated Bat Nights.

Brothers Paul and Tim (likewise teenagers) couldn’t resist capitalizing on Anne’s bat fright. One day when she was away and they were suffering from too much free time and mis-placed creativity, they hatched a plan...

The mischievous duo made a ‘bat’ puppet out of a black sock or two and hung it near the ceiling in Anne’s room. They ran a series of camouflaged strings from the ‘bat’ to a nearby hiding place from which they could make the ‘bat’s’ wings flap.

The flap that followed Anne’s encounter with the ‘bat’ was enough to fuel laughter and re-telling of the story for years to come, and even Anne, when she got over her fright, had to admit that it was pretty funny.
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