The defenestration of Mr. Mango Duet

Issac gazed idly out his bedroom window at the darkened street while he slurped his forbidden-frozen-fruit treat.

Coy vanilla enveloped in syrupy mango. “Whoever came up with the idea must’ve been a genius!” he mused.

When suddenly- footsteps. Footsteps just outside his door. He was doomed. This was how his long career, as a midnight-snack thief, was going to end. The evidence, fast melting in his hand. The footsteps getting incrementally audible by the second. What was he to do? What was he to do?

Panic seized him. Before he knew it, he found himself violently chucking the three-quarter finished ice-lolly over his shoulder and out the open window. He listened with bated breath. Apart from the clicking bats outside, nothing. “What a waste.” he thought sadly as he mopped his sticky fingers on a damp cloth that he had always kept prepared.

Issac’s story ends here, I’m afraid. Did he stop stealing snacks and eating them at inappropriate times? Of Course not. Did he eventually get caught? You bet. How did he get caught? Not important. As I said earlier, this isn’t his story. This is the story of a chain of cascading consequences that resulted from the defenestration of Mr. Mango Duet. Although, it does feature a thief, some ice cream and the clicking bats from the previous paragraph.   

Imagine you're a bat, right, and you’re trying to squeeze in a few more moments of snooze before it’s really time for you to wake up, when out of seemingly nowhere- a cold something, a treacly something, lands on the branch from which you are currently dangling. Four bats were roosting obliviously in the tree outside Issac’s window when, for the first time in their lives someone hurled an ice-lolly at them. Naturally it startled them and they scattered.

We shall call them: Bat 1; Bat 2; Bat 3 and Bat 4.

Nay! Nay! Scratch that.

 We shall name them: We; Will; Rock and last but not least, You.

Before we continue, some salient points of information:

1. The house across the street belonged to a very wealthy family called the Lodges. They weren't at home and in their absence, legendary and elusive burglar Robin Steele was at work, prying open a safe that was rumored to contain a magnificent emerald and tanzanite necklace.

1. About the same time, Thomas Doe was driving down the street, returning home from his brother’s house. I suppose I must mention that the Doe brothers had just watched a chilling horror movie and Thomas, in a very tender and hypervigilant state was trying his best not to think about the grotesque demoness from said movie. I might also mention that the more he tried to do so, the more he failed . To add insult to injury, five houses down from Issac's house there was an abandoned, crooked little cottage with cracked window panes and a doomy, haunted air that hung about it. He knew that it was looming nearer and was already dreading having to drive past it.

1. Carmen Silva was about to pass out from exhaustion. She had a long hard day filled with traffic jams, clogged drains, a crying baby and a lengthy, droll parent-teacher conference. She was at her wit’s end. But Carmen had a business proposal to draft and send out. In her weariness, she had overlooked a colossal mistake: she was about to send the proposal to the wrong mailing address.

1. There was an ice-cream truck with an open window parked at the top of the street. The employee who’d forgotten to close said window was called Eileen Phillips.

Each of the four bats flew in different directions.

We flew into the open bedroom window, where Robin had just successfully bypassed the safe’s security code. She was hypnotized by the necklace that she was holding, the brilliant green and purple gemstones smiling up at her, sparkling in the luminescent beam cast by her headlight. She was busy examining the other contents of the safe when We flew right into her face, causing her to lose her balance and hit her head on the sturdy coffee table nearby. She saw constellations and within a few moments was unconscious.

Will swooped into Thomas’ car spooking the living nightlights out of him, causing him to swerve dangerously into some innocent dustbins who were, by the way, minding their own business and knocking them all over.

The deafening crash woke up the whole neighborhood, including one Carmen Silva who started with a jolt and ran to the nearest window to see what all the ruckus was about. 

Meanwhile, poor old Rock happened to fly through the open window of the ice-cream truck.

He was an elderly bat and lately had been having a lot of trouble with his echolocation. He flew into the truck, but was having immense difficulty in finding a way out. He flew this way and that in desperate attempts to find an exit, but to no avail. During his attempts he managed to knock over several bottles of rainbow sprinkles, dry fruits, mini marshmallows, chocolate chips, peanut brittle and even an entire jar of gourmet strawberry syrup. Tired from his exertions, he retired morosely into a slot between two boxes of frosted ice-cream cones. The din that he managed to conjure up seemed to go unnoticed by the residents as they were preoccupied with the commotion from the car crash. They must've presumed that the sound of crashing glass came from the now smashed, empty jam jars and ketchup bottles that came tumbling out of the garbage cans when Thomas’ car collided with them. Again, I might add that the garbage cans were the innocent party in all of this and were having quite a miserable day without being falsely presumed to be the source of all of the noise.

"What about You?", you might ask, "where did You go?"

Excellent question. You flew into the abandoned cottage through one of the cracked windows and vanished. Wormhole? Magic window? Portal to another dimension? Only You would know. I can merely speculate.

After the commotion had died down, Carmen fixed herself a mug of strong coffee and set the steaming drink beside her laptop and began to review the proposal that she was trying to send out earlier. She almost did a spit-take when she saw that she had addressed the proposal to the wrong person. "Idiot. Idiot. ATOMIC IDIOT," she hissed at herself as she made the necessary changes and cross- checked everything three times over. Outside there was a low hum of a vehicle crawling into a driveway. "The Lodges must be back," she said as finally pressed send.

What a strange sight it must've been for Mrs. Lodge to behold a woman in a monkey cap and a headlight still running, knocked out cold on her coffee table, clutching her precious necklace.

Steele was arrested  that night and sentenced to prison. In the years that she was incarcerated she conducted several improv sessions with the inmates. This was because if there was one thing Steele had a talent for (other than burglary, bonsai and baking) it was for cracking wicked jokes. After her release she went on to pursue a career in Stand-up and was very successful due to her quaint and exceedingly funny perspectives as an ex-con comedian. "I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for that bloody bat!" she often joked, shaking her fist in mock indignation.

You probably were or weren’t worried about batty old Rock all alone in an ice-cream truck and therefore you may or may not be happy to know that he twittered out unscathed as soon as Eileen slid the door open in the morning.

Eileen was fired for her irresponsibleness and was made to reimburse the company for the damages caused and the losses incurred on her account. This may sound bleak, but wait till I tell you that this had to happen in order to quell a highly diabolical plan by a group of nasty terrorists. “How?” you may ask. Guess who thwarted their plan. Bingo! 

Eileen Phillips joined the army after being fired from her job. Major Phillips has swum across frigid rivers, rappelled out of a helicopter with nothing but a rope, survived a gun-shot wound and even lost an arm while combating a terrorist but still avoids bats and prefers her ice-cream sans toppings.

As for Thomas, the day after the crash, he rolled into the auto shop with his banged up car and melancholic spirit. A mechanic in cover-alls turned up wiping the axle grease from her hands.

“Front grille, eh?” she said, “crashed into another car from behind?”

“Some dustbins actually. Then a fence.”

“Cat?”

“A bat actually. Flew right in through the window.”

“I see. So that means from now on you will be driving around with your windows up a lot. I keep my windows up at night- keeps out the bugs.”

Thomas gave a nervous chuckle, “Yeah...my windows don’t do the closing thing. They’ve been like that for a year now.”

“How do you manage when it rains?”

“Oh...er...I have this little spring thing from which I hang...from which I hang a...a plastic curtain,” said Thomas, going very red.

The mechanic raised an eyebrow and then smiled.

“So...erm...how much will it cost?” bracing himself for the worst then changing his mind saying, “No, no don’t tell me! No, no wait, just tell me…”

Thomas Doe didn’t know it but he had just met his future wife.

So the next time a bat flies into your window (the literal or the metaphorical kind) don't go about yelling like it's the end of the world- well, maybe you could do a bit of yelling, after all a bat has just flown in through your window. Compose yourself and see what you could do to make the best of the situation, because you can never tell what might happen next. 

-Fenelina Geraldine D'souza