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.

Cora thinks about the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the Mona Lisa, and all the beautiful women immortalized in oil paint, and wonders if they said cruel things too, if their words had mattered at all or just the roundness of their eyes and softness of their cheeks, if beautiful people are allowed to break your heart and get away with it.

A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter.

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.

On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, a door opens. The starving dead crawl out, mouths full of dust, and reach for a home that has already forgotten them. Their stomachs scream for food, but their tongues are heavy and dry, their necks as thin as needles. They lick the tears of the living from the dirt, and sometimes, it is enough to sate them. But sometimes, the hunger only yawns wider.

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.

If you want someone dead, you should have to sink your fingers into their eyes, feel their trachea collapse under your hands, let them scratch your arms and pull your hair and cry and beg. Because if you kill someone, you should want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted before. It shouldn’t be easy.

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.

Cora doesn’t like thinking of all the parts that make her up, all the glands and sacks and tendons and flaps. She wants to exist like a Lego person, with one singular body that exists in and of itself, solid, no room for anything inside.

She knows that memories are not like turning pages in a photo album until you find the right one—every time you recall something, your brain rebuilds it from scratch, and every time it’s just a little bit different. It has to be, because brains are not video cameras; they don’t have that much empty space for unnecessary details.

But all it takes is a single moment to cross into the broken reality, the bad one.

She knows that all organs are nothing but meat, and she knows a brain doctor isn’t any more shameful to see than an eye doctor, but she doesn’t think she can survive another medical professional telling her that her mind is a web they cannot untangle.

He always seems nervous when he gives his sermons, but Cora prefers it that way—he seems more human somehow. Because something about the immense gilded ceilings of the cathedral commands fear, and Cora doesn’t like being the only one who feels it.

“For the children they never had,” Father Thomas says, his voice low. “Imagine if all of us built crypts for our dreams.

“These were some of the first tiles used in Grand Central Station. Fitting, isn’t it? All the dead are going on a journey.”

Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it’s a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own flesh.

It is all too easy to sink into a trance of peeling away the layers, because this is the part of cleaning that Cora likes the most—the part where you rip off the skin and what’s left is unrecognizable, transformed.

Normally, these crime scenes feel like a distant echo of a scream, but this one is wailing in Cora’s ears.

But Yifei cannot know if Cora will die. Delilah didn’t know she was going to die. It’s not something people know ahead of time, for the most part.

John Green wrote: “You can’t see the future coming—not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.”

Do not let your empathy stop at the borders of your own community.