Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

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.

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.

She knows Father Thomas thinks of himself as a good person, that he would never turn Cora away for being Chinese. But he forgives the people who would, even though it’s not his place to dole out forgiveness on Cora’s behalf. He loves the people who would never love her.

She imagines the side mirror of a pickup truck clipping the back of her head and making a crater in her skull.

I appreciate all the depictions of intrusive thoughts

Delilah had never known anything but adoration, and a grim part of Cora is satisfied that for once, Delilah has to occupy a body that is gross and jagged like hers.

You blast people to bits or hack them apart because you don’t see them as human—you take away the shape of their body and then no one else can see them as human either.

Cora knows that she’s scared him, said something normal people don’t say—she knows that look in his eyes. But the words come out unstopped and she doesn’t care, not five shots deep into the night, not with a ragged echo of her sister looming in the doorway, not when she’s standing in a bar in the middle of a goddamn pandemic just to beg a white man to listen to her.

Even now, you want to walk away from us because it’s gross, because blood and guts make you uncomfortable. 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.”

But Delilah wants this badly, enough to claw her way back from hell for it. And Cora always does what Delilah wants.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Cora says. Half the things she thinks aren’t even real. Thoughts are nothing at all, they come from nowhere and disappear into nothing and you can’t wade in their river as they pass by—that’s what her therapist said. But Cora knows that her therapist means Cora’s thoughts, not everyone’s thoughts.

She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness.

Any kind of wanting leaves a scar. The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget.

Everyone wants Asian girls to look pretty. No one wants them to talk.