Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

There are safe ways to touch her surroundings—her elbow jamming down a doorknob, the sole of her shoe on a toilet lever, her house key poking an elevator button. But Cora hates touching New York with her bare hands, because it is a city that sweats in the summer and oozes pizza grease from its pores and vomits sodden trash bags onto sidewalks.

It is the dirtiness itself, not what comes after it.

Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned. Someone to wake her up and tell her what to eat, what to dream about, what to cry about, who to pray to. Because Cora somehow feels that every choice she’s made has been wrong, that every choice she will ever make will lead her deeper and deeper into a life that feels like a dark, airless box, and when she peers through the slats in the wood she’ll see the pale light of who she might have been, so bright that it blinds her.

But as they pass the third floor, Cora smells blood. She knows its sharpness too well, how its salt can cut through layers of cloth and plastic

Cora showers with the curtain open, water spraying all over the floor, because the curtain casts too many shadows that the overhead light can’t reach.