Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Apparently, people do strange things when they’re scared of dying, and one of them is hoarding toilet paper.

She’s trying to be nice, Cora knows that, but she doesn’t want this olive branch. She wishes she was a mollusk, something with a hard shell, dark on the inside.

He just wants her quiet and far away from his new family. Cora knows this, but she isn’t above taking hush money, not in this economy.

She looks around because the only people who will see her are the other heathens who open their eyes while praying. But Cora is the only sinner today.

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 pays, puts it all on her credit card to deal with later because state marketplace insurance inexplicably doesn’t cover eyeballs.

Cora’s knees shake, and she doesn’t know why this is a more terrifying prospect to her than a ghost grabbing her ankle. Wasn’t she supposed to outgrow the childish reflex of crying when men scold her?

She wonders if this is how her high school classmates felt when they snuck out to drink on rooftops and smoke in parks and make out at house parties when their parents thought they were fast asleep. Cora spent those years reading under the covers with a flashlight, being a Good Kid, and in some ways she looks back on her life and thinks it’s much paler for it.

But Cora doesn’t feel like she’s decided anything. She feels like someone has grabbed her chin and taped her eyelids open and forced her to stare at something she never wanted to see.

but you’re so hardwired to be a people pleaser, to cooperate, to cower at men with loud voices and guns,

“Why would I have a gun?” Cora says. “Don’t most Americans have guns?”