Disclaimer: This story is most certainly fictitious. To say that it is based on actual events is like saying that your morning cup of coffee is based on a tree from another country. While in some sense it might be accurate, it’s neither completely true nor particularly helpful. The facts have been embellished by imagination to the point where even the small truths that exist need not be believed. The views and thoughts of the characters involved are not meant in any way to express my own or anyone else’s views or thoughts. This is written solely for your entertainment, as well as my own. Please enjoy.
My family has acquired a Chinese boy. The process was significantly less troublesome than buying pigs off eBay, though since I was not exactly involved in the process I can only give you this information from hearsay, which also goes for my knowledge of swine purchases.
We have only acquired him for about 10 months, so comparing it to a purchase should probably be discouraged, for several obvious reasons. The actual process was more like a library rental, or a benign kidnapping… Actually, foreign exchange student is a significantly more accurate description.
Very quickly after his arrival we attempted to initiate him into the traditional American lifestyle of soda, sugar, and excess… Oh, and also hard work.
This foray into hard work was partially practical since it involved chopping down trees that we would use to heat our house over the cold Minnesota winters.
After vaguely explaining the procedure to our new helper, hoping he would pick up more by the experience than our clumsy attempt at speaking our native tongue, we headed into the woods in search of dead trees.
Now, little known to me, our Chinese boy, also known as Josh to everyone reading this story, and known as some other name by people who knew him in real life, had found a live bat in one of the fallen trees.
Being young and unfamiliar with the local wildlife, Josh has played with the creature, taking photos and carrying it around until it had finally bitten him harshly on the finger and he had thrown it into the small stream at the bottom of the hill.
When Josh came to me with finger bleeding, I told him to put his gloves back on and be a man. He probably tried to explain what happened, but his English was poor and my Chinese was worse, and to top it all off I was not exactly in a good listening mood.
Now some people would fault me for not taking a better interest in the foreigners injury, but I would suspect that these people have never galavanted through the forest with a chain saw, pretending it was a light saber. Not that I suggest this action is either appropriate or safe, but I can vouch for it being very, very fun.
We continued cutting away at a large tree and began filling our truck with wood to take back home. We had more than enough wood to fill the truck and we began making a stack to come back and pick up at a later date. As we took a break to drink water and refill the gasoline and oil of the chain saws, we noticed that Josh was missing. We looked around and called once or twice, but we couldn’t see him.
It’s not like we were too worried, he was a fairly intelligent young man, and seemed good with directions. Also, if he was lost, we figured it would be fairly easy to find a replacement, China having a good billion or so people. Certainly there would be no international incident if one of them disappeared.
Just as we were about to get back to work a Jeep drove up and four guys jumped out, each of which waving a gun or two in the air. The sight reminded me of that one movie with the Africa and the guys in Jeeps with guns. For a moment I wondered if they were from Africa.
“Hey! Are you guys from Af…” I started to ask, and was rudely interrupted by a few gunshots fired into the air.
Their leader demanded that we give up our wood. We told them it was ours, but they didn’t seem terribly pleased by that prospect. We tried to insist they didn’t have room in their Jeep, and they then asked us for our truck. The negotiations were going downhill quickly, mostly because they had guns and we didn’t, but they also had better reasoning skills than we did since they had guns and we didn’t.
Within a few minutes we were forced to comply with their wishes, or at least we were about to when Josh showed back up.
To say Josh “showed up” may be putting things mildly. To say Josh “swooped out of the sky in the shape of a five foot tall bat, screaming terrifyingly like a mad man with eight foot wings where his arms use to be” would be slightly more, if not completely accurate.
Our new gun wielding African movie friends expected this new horor movie arrival even less than we did, and we never saw it coming at all. They turned and fled, throwing weapons and insults and curses in every which direction. They jumped into the Jeep and drove off at speeds typically not safe on pavement, regardless of the rough terrain in the woods.
As they left, we turned and looked at Josh, and saw the half human half bat creature slowly transform back into a fully human creature. We gazed relatively uncertainly at him and he stared back at, all of us silent.
Finally, he said “I Batman!”
And that’s how we acquired a small weapon arsenal and accidentally created a Chinese superhero who is part bat who might have rabies.
