Every night, just before the heat folds back into the limestone and the drones blink out above the highway, the bats rise from the cave off 290. A ribbon of them, thin at first, like a secret testing the edges of a whisper. Then more. A rush. A violent cloud.
That summer, no one had seen Vera Quan.
She wasn’t exactly famous, but you wouldn’t call her obscure either. Artist, essayist, known for her field recordings and lecture-performances, the kind of person who didn’t so much speak as vibrate meaning into a room. Her last talk was held underground, in a reclaimed recharge zone below the Edwards Aquifer, where the city once tried to reroute water like it rerouted people — quietly, bureaucratically, and without apology.
I didn’t know her well. We’d only met twice. Once at a city-funded art show in the Seaholm Intake Building, where she spoke about “form as control,” and once again at a backyard party where someone was grilling jackfruit. Both times she had that look — like she was already listening to something you couldn’t hear yet.
The disappearance was not sudden, but it was complete. No calls. No posts. No scheduled appearance at the Salado symposium. The first people to notice were the archivists, the second were the poets. Her absence unfolded not with urgency, but with a kind of sinking.
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The story goes that Vera’s final lecture was about emptiness. That she performed it without a script, pacing slowly across a cracked concrete floor beneath the city, her voice echoing against limestone walls wet with old water. “This,” she began, “is a lecture written with my voice.” And then: “The cave is not known by its walls, but by what spills out of it.”
They say she described the bats in great detail — how they emerge from the hole like punctuation marks, how their volume gives shape to the space they leave behind. A kind of negative geometry. The measure of hollow things.
That detail stuck with me. The idea that you can only know a place by what exits it.
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I began walking more after she vanished. Not out of intention, but because my body seemed to want something that didn’t involve a screen or another message marked “urgent.” I wandered Shoal Creek, poked around the edge of the closed-off section near 183, passed the signs about water quality and rattlesnakes.
And one day, I found her name again — not in a news alert or on a flyer, but etched into a limestone block behind the old Whole Earth store: V. Quan — 2029. It was faint, half-covered in moss, but I knew it wasn’t a mistake.
I started looking for other signs.
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The city’s map of the aquifer is elegant and clean — a blue rectangle stretching beneath everything from the edge of the desert to downtown. But that’s a fiction. Anyone who’s dropped a sensor into the groundwater knows better. The rock is spongy, carved with impossible time. The water moves like memory — slow, partial, untraceable. Vera once called it “a negative ecology.” She said the aquifer was an archive that refused to be cataloged.
What if she’d gone into it? Not metaphorically, but physically?
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I met an old contact, Julia, a hydrologist-turned-sculptor who now lives in a suspended greenhouse off Montopolis. She keeps air plants, solar stills, and broken ceramic chairs wired to recording devices. Julia said Vera had been experimenting with “acoustic sediment.” Using field recordings of dripping water to write text — not language exactly, but vibration, echo, interval.
“She told me the cave was her final collaborator,” Julia said. “That it was teaching her to un-write.”
I didn’t ask what that meant.
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Three months later, a film appeared online. No metadata, no credits. Just a static shot of the bats rising at sunset. Thirty uninterrupted minutes. Then silence. Then, at minute thirty-one, Vera’s voice — distant and calm:
“I watched the bats leave and understood the cave not as emptiness, but as the record of everything it had held. What pours out is a way of knowing. And what remains is not absence, but volume.”
The screen went dark.
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I don’t know if she’s alive. But I do know that I began hearing water differently after that. Every faucet, every puddle, every echo in the tunnel under Mopac felt like a whisper. Not of her, exactly — but of something she touched. The city had always tried to forget what flowed beneath it. Vera reminded it.
Sometimes, at night, I walk to the mouth of the cave. I watch the bats emerge, a thin line, then a chaos, then a dance.