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When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.
It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.
That’s all she can come up with, because if Cora died today, she would die being nothing more than Delilah’s sister, the only fact that matters.
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 there is anything that Cora Zeng wants less than dying, it’s dying and rotting until her body seeps into the carpet and drips through the ceiling of the apartment below. Bodies melt in the summer like cheese in a microwave, and a heat wave is coming next week. Cora will be damned if she makes a mess when she dies.
A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter.
Delilah said it was because Cora got pneumonia in third grade and had to go to the hospital and something about repressed trauma, but the thought of pneumonia does not scare Cora. Even COVID-19 does not particularly scare Cora. It is the dirtiness itself, not what comes after it.
Maybe she can’t exist without being her sister’s parasite.
“Ghost chair,” Auntie Zeng says. “For your uncle.” “You hated my uncle,” Cora says, but she switches seats all the same. “That’s why I feed his ghost,” Auntie Zeng says. “I had enough of him in one life. I don’t need him haunting me in the afterlife.”
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.
On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, a door opens. The starving dead crawl out, mouths full of dust, and reach for a home that has already forgotten them. Their stomachs scream for food, but their tongues are heavy and dry, their necks as thin as needles. They lick the tears of the living from the dirt, and sometimes, it is enough to sate them. But sometimes, the hunger only yawns wider.
Cora knows her aunt thinks she’s a heathen, but she does feel bad for Jesus, who had to suffer in front of so many people. The worst part probably wasn’t bones splintering to make way for nails, or the constant tugging from his own body weight, or the hunger or thirst or hot sun over Palestine. It was probably having all his pain forced to the outside, the clean cage of his skin torn open and agony bleeding out, so many eyes and no way to hide from them. Cora cannot imagine how terrible it would feel if the typhoons in her mind were visible on the outside.
It is so, so loud inside of her mind.
I’m ready, Cora wants to scream, I’ll let you make me someone. But God doesn’t want her, no one does.
Cora grows smaller at the tone of his voice. She is six years old and Dad is yelling at her for reorganizing his pantry. This man is not her father, has no power over her, yet the tone of his voice rattles her bones in a way that feels instinctual, like Cora was born to fear loud men.
There are thousands of monsters in the world—not just the ones in folktales, but the ones in real life who push girls in front of trains—and yet, there are still people who think Cora Zeng is the most fearsome of all.
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.
God cannot forgive someone whose name he does not know.
A thought skewers Cora’s mind like a lobotomy—her therapist once said they were called intrusive thoughts, the most terrible, cruel things that you know you would never do but can’t help but think. Except her therapist has no way of knowing what Cora will or will not do, what’s an intrusive thought and what’s a wish.
The creature has no eyes, but Cora knows it sees her—Cora has a prey sense for when she’s being watched. She has always been a white rabbit ready to dart away, knows all too well the prickle of eyes on skin, the cold rush of blood, the clench of her heart.
She did this to Delilah. She didn’t burn joss paper, she didn’t pray for her. She never even went to her grave after the funeral. It felt easier that way, to try to spackle over all the holes Delilah had left behind as quickly as possible. Cora was supposed to be the one who suffered. Cora was good at suffering, it was nothing new to her. Nothing she did was supposed to hurt Delilah anymore. Because even if Cora thought she hated her sister sometimes, even if she hated her even more for dying, she didn’t want her to suffer.
Cora sleeps with the lights on.
girl me too
A horrible part of Cora realizes that Delilah is no longer beautiful, that she has swung to the polar opposite of how she was in life, and for a single traitorous moment, Cora thinks that Delilah deserves it. To be looked at with fear instead of jealousy. Because 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.
“Your uncle doesn’t pay me enough to keep quiet about something like this,” Yifei says. “People need to know, Harvey. I didn’t come to America by myself when I was fifteen just to end up gutted in my own bed with a bat shoved down my throat. I am not going to be one of those bodies that we have to scrape off the ceiling, okay? Because you know damn well that when that happens, all anyone sees you as is a mess, a biohazard, something no one wants to touch. Or worse, I’ll turn into gore porn for weirdos who spend all night on Reddit reading about how another pretty Asian girl got chopped up, and
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This is the difference between Yifei and Cora—Yifei turns her pain into a plan, while Cora scrubs her pain away with Blood Buster.
“Hey, I’ve never burned joss paper before and no ghosts are tailing me,” Harvey says. “Probably because you’d annoy them to double-death,” Yifei says.
Cora would make the perfect member of any religion, the kind of person who doesn’t want to decide, who wants a textbook to tell her what to do. But Cora has always kept that kind of unwavering trust reserved for only one person. Delilah has always been Cora’s God.
Even now, with Delilah dragged down to some sort of hell, or purgatory, Cora is still following her.
“Auntie Lois will hate this,” she says. “She’s tried so hard to make me a Christian.” “You can’t make someone believe,” Auntie Zeng says, frowning. “But you still can be a Christian, if you want to.” “How?” Cora says. Auntie Zeng’s eyes water. She rises to her feet, opens a window, lets plumes of smoke into the sky. “It’s not about my gods or your Auntie Lois’s God being the right one. There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.”
