Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

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.

Of course nothing adds up, your mind is a labyrinth and you are lost inside.

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.

Something about darkness feels so expansive these days. Like the world only opens its eyes after dusk.

She reaches forward because she needs to know, the unknowing is worse than the knowing.

They say it’s the city that never sleeps, but six months into this pandemic, Cora still sees pockets of darkness, places where the city closes its eyes just for a single, defenseless moment.

There’s something peaceful about your worst fear coming true. Cora had hidden from the virus for the last half of a year, the fear of it chained to her at all times, the feeling of needing to cry but not being able to always lodged in her throat, choking her. Now that it’s here, Cora can live through it one minute at a time. It’s no longer the faceless entity of her nightmares. It’s been defanged, as her therapist would say, because the not knowing and guessing is always worse than the knowing. And even when Cora thinks she’s going to die, it’s not as bad as the fear that came before, the fear that might have killed her anyway.

I felt the same way

she misses the days when COVID was her biggest fear.

you can’t fear someone who has no power over you.

The end of the world lasts longer than Cora expects.