Stray Bats

By Margo Lanagan and Kathleen Jennings

Dachshund droids, mad crones, shapeshifting children, a plethora of witches, dragonstalkers, familiars, slithering eels and, of course, bats, flit and fly through these pages, aided and abetted by Kathleen Jennings’s deft and inspired pencil drawings. Stray Bats is a glorious miscellany of vignettes based on poems by Australian women. While some of the pieces hie close to the originals in form and theme, some stray far, far from them even as Lanagan delights in playing with language, rhyme, and rhythm.

This could be the perfect gift for that slightly otherworldly person in your life—or for yourself, when you need a moment of magic, a dip into darkness, a spark of light.

For the reader who would like to explore further, there are a list of poems that inspired the author and notes on where those poems might be found.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Small Beer Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781618731760

Margo Lanagan

Margo Lanagan has been publishing stories for children, young adults and adult readers for twenty-five years. She has won numerous awards, including four World Fantasy Awards. Two of her books have been Michael L. Printz Honor books and she has been shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula awards and for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the young adult division. Visit Margo at her blog, AmongAmidWhile.Blogspot.com, or follow her on Twitter at @MargoLanagan.

Book preview

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Stray Bats

Words by Margo Lanagan

Illustrations by Kathleen Jennings

Small Beer Press

Easthampton, MA

Stray Bats is no. 13 in the Small Beer Press chapbook series.

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.

Stray Bats copyright © 2019 by Margo Lanagan. All rights reserved.

Cover & interior illustrations © 2019 by Kathleen Jennings. All rights reserved. kathleenjennings.com

Paper edition printed in a saddle-stitched edition (ISBN 978-1-61873-175-3) by Paradise Copies of Northampton, Massachusetts.

Ebook ISBN 978-1-61873-176-0.

Small Beer Press

150 Pleasant Street #306

Easthampton, MA 01027

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First edition.

November 2019

A Wind Age

The storm blew in on the king’s back. In his fury he commanded his sages to build a glass bridge, out from the sea-cliffs into the tempest. You and I, his daughters who had so displeased him, were to walk it.

I was ice at the thought, struck dumb, too frightened to blink. But you shrugged, and took my hand as if we were stepping into a dance. Let’s waste no time! you cried. And I’d crossed from rock to glass before I knew it, between the two clutches of old men trembling from strain and age and cold and the force gushing through them.

The bridge came up from the lightning-split whirl, just in time to meet our feet. It formed ahead of us, flexing as if alive, buffeted from all sides. It felt as if we were walking aboard an invisible ship, or on the sea itself. My little cries were lost in the song of the bridge’s becoming, its protests, and the wind’s crack and roar.

Our father’s storm poured up around us. Straight-backed you marched us through, as if it were a guard of honour.

Far, far below us, breaking water rushed and flashed, the ocean falling over itself to attack the cliffs. Again we reached the end, and more bridge came, smooth and treacherous, each time we stepped off into air, into the punches and drags of his rage.

Don’t look scared! you tinily cried. Scared is what he loves!

I still remember the small stony body I propelled along beside you, how I held no space for anything but terror, anything but the weathering of that weather, how sure I was that at any moment we’d be cast adrift, falling forked through the darkness, the only comfort your hot hand gripping mine, the pain of that, all the way down to the sea.

Kites in the fog

The kites in the fog thrum like a ship’s rigging. Even on stiller days, they’ll sing to the least breeze. The sky is preaching, roaring down the lines from every angle, even with only a few kites slung upward from the grey winter beach. If you walk far enough from the market hall you’ll hear them.

They stand on the shingle between town and high water, patched kites with knot-bobbled string. When they were many—box and tube, plain diamond and bedizened bird and fish—how the chorus would have rung and interwoven!

Free yourself from the town. Trip down to the beach, past the saint-huts and the drowned fire pits. Die to your town self.

The kites are out there, calling among themselves, voices of cloth and struts and cord, packed in fog that soaks them, sifts through them.

The crabs keep their distance, disliking the song in the rock at their claw-tips. They find new crevices, black clefts in grayed air. They’re poised at the thresholds, scraping the stones and eating the nothing there-off.