Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

she never wanted to be important anyway. She just wanted to be Delilah.

Because the alternative is that someone has been in her apartment. She doesn’t know which possibility is worse.

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.

Her table has bite marks. The crescent shape of a human mouth has bitten through the varnish of her table, split the wood.

Maybe God’s heart is just a locked door that someone has to open for you,

God cannot forgive someone whose name he does not know.

She has a history, after all. She’s the perfect person to haunt because no one will trust the things she says ever again.

“I beg to fucking differ,” Harvey says, pushing the package toward her. “If anyone deserves a pineapple cake at three a.m., it’s you, Cora.”

Some asylums have decorations, but of course Harvey Chen doesn’t know that.

but Cora is still thinking about little Harvey counting silverfish in the basement, about what else he saw down there. “Harvey,” she says. “You said you saw a ghost in the basement.” Cora isn’t looking at Harvey, but she hears his breathing stop. “You remember that? You were trashed.”

She imagines young Harvey in the basement with the vivid image of a corpse at his feet, crying out for a dad who wouldn’t—couldn’t—believe him because there was nothing to see.

“Maybe someone died in your basement,” Cora says. “Yeah,” Harvey says softly, “someone did.”

Cora suddenly feels very tired. Something about Harvey’s story makes her feel heavy, seasick. She falls asleep imagining a staircase with a terrible monster at the bottom, but the staircase winds farther and farther down into the darkness and still she can’t see it. Only when she reaches the bottom stair and hears the door far above her click shut does she truly understand.

Is Cora a ghost???

She doesn’t think she could forget anything this important, but she likes having something solid to look back to because sometimes her mind lies to her—that’s what everyone says.

Cora thinks of her mother singing from treetops above kale farms and wonders which of them is crazier, what part of them shattered and made them want to hand their souls to someone else.

Her words taste jagged, and she knows she’s talking in the way her aunts don’t like, that her eyes are probably fever bright. This is why Cora is always quiet—when something actually matters, it matters too much, and everyone can taste it in her words. It scares them, how much it matters to her.

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.

Cora lets out a sharp laugh. “I have paperwork explicitly stating that I can’t buy a gun,” she says. That’s one of the many things that happens when you’re involuntarily committed in New York. Cora had laughed when she first learned this, never imagining that she’d ever want a gun.

“Because,” her aunt says, “that’s not Delilah.”