Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Sometimes Cora thinks Delilah is more of a dream than a sister, a camera flash of pretty lights in every color that you can never look at directly.

She’s tried to metamorphosize herself into someone else—a box beneath her bed is stuffed with yarn from when she tried to be the kind of person who crochets, her bookshelf is mostly cookbooks from when she attempted to be the kind of person who likes cooking, and of course there was that night she watched intricate nail art videos until dawn. But everything sloughs off Cora like dead skin because she is not the kind of person who creates things, who makes a mark on the world. She is an echo, quieter and quieter until she’s nothing at all.

When it’s done, Cora is wide-awake and raw and dizzy from the heat but it’s the only time in the world she truly feels Fine—that moment when she steps out of the shower and hasn’t touched anything at all.

But now Cora has forgotten something, has gaps in her memory, empty holes in the grout of her brain where something used to be, and that doesn’t feel like the good kind of crazy anymore.

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 you can’t teach someone how to be a person. Cora was never real, she was only an echo of Delilah, and with her gone, she is no one at all.

The funeral for Zubat (named after Harvey’s favorite Pokémon) takes place on a stretch of abandoned train tracks and soft earth in Long Island City.

to decide,” one of them says, but Cora can’t do that; she needs someone else to decide for her because her choices are always wrong. Whichever door she picks will lead her somewhere terrible, she is certain of that.

No one wants to look harder at us. To imagine that we’re real people. Every day I clean up their brains and blood and I know that a white man coming for me isn’t an if, it’s a when. And the worst part is I know no one will find out who did it, no one will write about it in the newspapers, because who cares if another Chinese girl is dead—they’ll hear me screaming and just put in their headphones and keep walking.

But she has always felt like she’s out at sea with only a star map and no stars at all overhead, voyaging somewhere far and nameless,

It’s been defanged, as her therapist would say, because the not knowing and guessing is always worse than the knowing.