Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are, the way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest of the world moving around them.

It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.

But Cora knows that the face of fear is not an abstract what-if. Fear is born in the after, when the world peels back its skin and shows you its raw, pulsing innards, when it forces you to remember its name. Anyone who has seen the face of fear knows you should damn well be afraid.

Sometimes, when it’s really bright outside, it feels like I’m still in one of my games, like I have unlimited lives, everything is scripted, and I’m just pushing buttons and it’s okay if I fuck up—I can go back to my last save. Except I know that’s not true. I only have one life, and that’s fucking terrifying. I burned through so many lives in video games, died so many times. No one would ever make a game where you only have one chance. But that’s all any of us get. And the worst part is I know I’m losing. You get a sense for it in games when things aren’t going your way, when it’s better to just start over. But this is my only life and I’m losing already, and I don’t know how to make it stop.”

Yifei says that hungry ghosts are real, and every part of Cora wants to believe her. It’s a dangerous thought—the idea that it’s not Cora’s own mind that is bending, but the barriers between worlds. She doesn’t want this secret that no one will believe. She has a history, after all. She’s the perfect person to haunt because no one will trust the things she says ever again. Whatever she finds, it will be for her and her alone. No one will help her. No one will save her.

Cora doesn’t know if any of that is true, but it certainly doesn’t feel like it. As a crime scene cleaner, she knows better than Mayor Webb when there’s been an uptick in violent crime. Cora doesn’t particularly trust the mayor’s word at this point either. His platform has always been More Police Everywhere All the Time, and in times of fear, a lot of people think that’s enough to keep them safe. But a few months ago, the city had protested for days after the police shot a Black man trying to fix his flat bike tire on the sidewalk. The NYPD drove a police car into a crowd of protestors and all the mayor had to say was that the protestors shouldn’t have surrounded the police car in the first place.

It’s that you’re asking me to believe in folktales when I don’t believe in anything at all, she thinks.

Cora would make the perfect member of any religion, the kind of person who doesn’t want to decide, who wants a textbook to tell her what to do. But Cora has always kept that kind of unwavering trust reserved for only one person. Delilah has always been Cora’s God. For one brief, sharp moment, Cora thinks of her mother singing from treetops above kale farms and wonders which of them is crazier, what part of them shattered and made them want to hand their souls to someone else.

Auntie Zeng’s eyes water. She rises to her feet, opens a window, lets plumes of smoke into the sky. “It’s not about my gods or your Auntie Lois’s God being the right one. There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.” But Cora doesn’t feel like she’s decided anything. She feels like someone has grabbed her chin and taped her eyelids open and forced her to stare at something she never wanted to see. She never asked for these ghosts. Delilah is dragging her across planes. Even in death, she has Cora on a string, pulling taut around her throat.

Auntie Zeng said there are thousands of doors that will open to anyone who knocks. This is the door that Cora chooses—the one that opens up in the starbright fires of hell.

This is why Cora is always quiet—when something actually matters, it matters too much, and everyone can taste it in her words. It scares them, how much it matters to her.

But maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.

Cora lets out a sharp laugh. “I have paperwork explicitly stating that I can’t buy a gun,” she says. That’s one of the many things that happens when you’re involuntarily committed in New York. Cora had laughed when she first learned this, never imagining that she’d ever want a gun.

Everyone is gone, she thinks, the realization a violent tremor through her spine. Harvey and Yifei, who carried her home, who scoured the subway at night for her. She remembers Yifei feeding her dumplings, buying her food, texting her to make sure she was fine. They were never supposed to be her friends, but they didn’t give Cora a choice. You blast people to bits or hack them apart because you don’t see them as human—you take away the shape of their body and then no one else can see them as human either, Yifei once said. But somehow, Harvey and Yifei feel more human now than ever before. Harvey’s body is a slurry of soap and blood, and Yifei is a crushed soda can, but those are not the images that sear into Cora’s vision. The brightest, loudest memory is the two of them standing over Cora at Delilah’s altar with their hands on her shoulders, when the spice in the air stung her eyes and Harvey was holding his mouth open for dumplings and Cora still had hope. A killer tried to unmake them, but he failed. Harvey and Yifei are still here.