Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

She feels certain of this. She feels certain about a lot of things she can’t explain, the way some people are certain that God exists. Some thoughts just cross her mind and sink their teeth in.

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

there’s no harm in finding what joy you can in a dirty and depressing job that someone has to do.

It’s hard to eat at someone else’s house without imagining all the hands that grew the vegetables and cut the meat and packaged it, how long it was sitting out with stale air and spit droplets falling on it before it made its way

She thinks the darkness and tight walls are supposed to feel safe and private. But the darkness expands outward in all directions. It listens.

She was a very reap-what-you-sow, karma-comes-for-us-all kind of person. She thought the starry sky was symmetrical and that every wrong would be righted in turn

Drinking makes the world cloudy, makes her bones soft and blood heavy like treacle, her mind one foot in a dream. It feels like being buried under a great invisible weight,

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.

No one wants to help her untangle her mind; they want her to disappear.

has always seen things that weren’t normal, in one way or another. And for the most part, it’s been survivable.

lots of people are nice—surface-level niceness is meaningless.

Whatever she finds, it will be for her and her alone. No one will help her. No one will save her.

She wants to believe in a world where the police always catch the bad guys, where they get thrown in jail for the rest of their lives, where the survivors can mourn and move on and learn to be happy again. But only children can believe in that world.

then nothing I did before in my life will matter at all, just the death that I didn’t choose. I am not going to let anyone take away what makes me a human.

But it doesn’t matter if we’re uncomfortable—we don’t get to look away. We’re dying and no one can hear us.”

I dedicated this book to “everyone we lost in the pandemic,” but “everyone” should also include “everything.” The pieces of ourselves that died in 2020. The hope we had in others, the trust we had in our leaders, the dreams we once believed in. Everyone who reads this book (at least, in the year it debuts) has lived through 2020 and will compare the experiences of these characters to their own at that time. There was so much we couldn’t predict.

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