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.

When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.

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.

Fine—that moment when she steps out of the shower and hasn’t touched anything at all.

She wonders, not for the first time, if she ripped out too much of her brain when she pulled Delilah out of it. Extricating Delilah Zeng from your mind is probably a lot more difficult than it seems, like pulling out a tumor that’s grown into all of your brain’s crevices—getting rid of it means ripping out healthy tissue too.

After enough time passes, the lying always becomes easier.

But this is my only life and I’m losing already, and I don’t know how to make it stop.”

But her voice sounds clipped, like she wants to change the subject, and Cora knows too well what it sounds like when you have a secret, how much of it spills out in the words you don’t say.

That’s why she feels uneasy when the darkness of the distant train tracks converges into a silhouette, a black hole of a girl in a dress, standing as if waiting for a train that will never come.

Ever since that night on the tracks, Cora has begun to see spots of darkness. Every day there are more of them, a swarm of tiny specks at the corners of her vision that disperse when she looks in their direction, hovering just beyond her gaze.

She wants to exist like a Lego person, with one singular body that exists in and of itself, solid, no room for anything inside.