Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Guns are easy and impersonal, a quiet click from across a room, and you can explode someone’s brains without even touching them. In a way, Cora doesn’t think that should be allowed. 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.

and then nothing I did before in my life will matter at all, just the death that I didn’t choose. I am not going

I’m so fucking scared of dying, Cora. I’m the kind of person who runs and lets other people die for her, and it doesn’t matter how much they mean to me. It’s not even like my life is worth all that much. I’m alone, I have no family, no friends, so it’s not like I’d be losing that much if I died. But the idea of never waking up again scares me so fucking much. I don’t even like going to sleep because I hate not being fully there in my dreams—I’m afraid I’ll never resurface.

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