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.

Cora has always moved through the world like a child in a fine art museum, afraid to touch. There are safe ways to touch her surroundings—her elbow jamming down a doorknob, the sole of her shoe on a toilet lever, her house key poking an elevator button. But Cora hates touching New York with her bare hands, because it is a city that sweats in the summer and oozes pizza grease from its pores and vomits sodden trash bags onto sidewalks.

A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter.

In truth, all Cora wants is an apartment with no flat surfaces, nowhere for dust to settle. But that would be an apartment with no floor, just a perpetual abyss, a dark and endless hole.

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. But you can’t teach someone how to be a person. Cora was never real, she was only an echo of Delilah, and with her gone, she is no one at all. She gets home and unzips her bag only to find a package of joss paper stuffed inside. Auntie Zeng must have slipped it in when she wasn’t looking. Cora takes it out, deposits it directly into the trash can, and closes the lid.

Fear is born in the after, when the world peels back its skin and shows you its raw, pulsing innards, when it forces you to remember its name. Anyone who has seen the face of fear knows you should damn well be afraid.

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.

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

Cora goes still because sometimes her desperation leaks out through her words.

You get a sense for it in games when things aren’t going your way, when it’s better to just start over. But this is my only life and I’m losing already, and I don’t know how to make it stop.”

Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it’s a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own flesh. She knows, on some level, that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her—she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all.

Yifei is nice, at least nice enough to worry about Cora. But Father Thomas is nice, Auntie Lois is mostly nice, lots of people are nice—surface-level niceness is meaningless.

the unknowing is worse than the knowing.

This is the difference between Yifei and Cora—Yifei turns her pain into a plan, while Cora scrubs her pain away with Blood Buster. Cora is aware all at once that she should be the one fighting. She’s the one whose sister died because of people like the one Harvey calls Batman. All that anger should be hers. But instead, she’s hiding behind two masks and a baggy hazmat suit because the thought that she could do anything meaningful never even occurred to her. Cora cannot fathom her actions mattering beyond her own mind. She feels herself slump smaller, as if her hazmat suit is eating her alive.

but the secretary doesn’t understand that you don’t have to know someone to mourn them,

“But you didn’t think so?” “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. “How can that not matter?” Harvey says. But Cora doesn’t know how to answer that in a way Harvey will understand, so she takes another bite of the bun.

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.

Auntie Zeng said there are thousands of doors that will open to anyone who knocks. This is the door that Cora chooses—the one that opens up in the starbright fires of hell.

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.

Delilah never showed up in photographs the way Cora saw her, the way her presence was sometimes a whisper and sometimes a tsunami.

There’s something peaceful about your worst fear coming true.

Now that it’s here, Cora can live through it one minute at a time. It’s no longer the faceless entity of her nightmares. 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.

But now, Cora knows she’s not dying. Dying doesn’t hurt this much. Dying means there’s an endpoint to the pain.

And Cora knows all too well that you can’t fear someone who has no power over you.