Echolocation and Bat-Navs

BAT WALK by SHIRLEY STEPHENSON

“You’re a fan of one-word texts.” — “A persistent two-word instruction.”

”You’re reminded of the heartrate monitor, three squiggles […] Sharp jolting waves that move up and down, occasionally synchronised, sometimes not.”

The […] that I inserted above as an edit proves the ’sometimes’ bit…. Yet, in a way, this story is almost, too synchronised, connections too readily set-up, too much on-route, despite its ‘off-route’ sat-nav, whereby ideas and images easily cohere along with mentions of ‘cross-contamination of species’ and Weil’s disease, and its description of a Scandinavian statue — as the narrative ‘you’, a woman mainly haunted by her father’s beep-tracked condition in hospital, but she is also preoccupied, in varying graph-lines, by other factors, such as a friend called Rosie who runs a ‘feel-good’ black-and-white films cinema, and, of course, the ironically not so ‘feel-good’ trip with her boy friend Sam (who is a Doctor of some university science) that entails bat walks in some indeterminate northern archipelago, forming the action of this story, a story with these and other leitmotifs — her phobic dreams and thoughts of spiders, bats & rats — white noise and speech bubbles with noises inside instead of words (black noise […]s?) — a doppelgänger app with no signal and the blotting out of words from a political discussion on the car radio — a huge antlered reindeer and some cattle of Bashan who see people as oblong clouds (in contrast to speech bubbles?) — echolocation and boomerang shouts — a detector like the one measuring ‘your’ father in hospital, inducing a ‘string of saliva’ and picking up alien non-animal sounds and the concomitant bats’ ‘eerily constant’ sounds, and the putting your hand right through a door — “the end of transmission in films […] before black and white lines fill a screen” — “your phone playing games”, your story, too. A story of black on white, as well as containing many enticing […]s that have captivated and/or provoked me.

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Full context of this Nightjar Press publication: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/a-nightjar-sextet/