It’s glaringly clear. You’re lying. You’ve never cared about babies. You only care about bats. If you have to listen to anything screaming, you finally admit after all these years of marriage, let it be bats. Plus, unlike babies, you say, bats could live in ottomans.
Granted, you say, they’d have to be big, cavernous ottomans. One of many glaring problems with your bat-daddy dreams. Babies only scream for the first few years, I say, bats shriek forever. People lie about how bad bats are, you say. Have you ever heard a bat scream? It’s actually quiet, gentle as a baby.
So you don’t mind babies, I say. I’m fine with the ones I can keep in ottomans, you say. Which would be bats, I say. You just glare at me. Or are you still lying, I ask. I never lie to you, you scream.
You have two modes, I say: lying or screaming. What kind of parents would we be for a baby, you ask. The only lie here is that we’d be ready. And yet, I say, you’re ready to take care of ottomans full of bats? I wait for you to acknowledge the glaring hypocrisy of this logic. Instead you say, Yes, I’ll take bats over babies any day.
You want bats? I ask, hefting the Louisville Slugger we keep by the door. Want to hear some real screaming? The viciousness leaches out of your glare. This is no home for babies, you sigh. If we had one, I’d have to hide it in the ottoman every time Mommy got mad. That’s a lie, I scream.
But really I just want to put away the baseball bat and lie down. Because you’re right: living bats could simply have flown away from our rage. No need to hide in an ottoman. Bats can fly far beyond their screaming parents. Babies can’t. That’s the glaring hole in my plan.
We can’t fit giant, cavernous ottomans in our apartment; that part is still a lie. The glaring impossibility of bats has struck us. Now the only screaming we can hear is from the babies we’ll never have.