Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Some thoughts just cross her mind and sink their teeth in.

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.

Cora thinks about the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the Mona Lisa, and all the beautiful women immortalized in oil paint, and wonders if they said cruel things too, if their words had mattered at all or just the roundness of their eyes and softness of their cheeks, if beautiful people are allowed to break your heart and get away with it.

she never wanted to be important anyway. She just wanted to be Delilah.

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.

I only have one life, and that’s fucking terrifying. I burned through so many lives in video games, died so many times. No one would ever make a game where you only have one chance. But that’s all any of us get. And the worst part is I know I’m losing. 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.”

There’s no such thing as a hungry ghost, not in Cora’s life, because someone that deeply and irrevocably gone can never come back.

“Imagine if all of us built crypts for our dreams.

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.”

Cora knows she should probably feel lucky, but she doesn’t. She feels like her turn is coming soon.

They only printed bullshit copaganda during the Black Lives Matter protests—of course they’re not gonna help us either.

Cora has seen this man be unmade, and now she knows what his smile used to look like,

They say it’s the city that never sleeps, but six months into this pandemic, Cora still sees pockets of darkness, places where the city closes its eyes just for a single, defenseless moment.

“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.”

Then Delilah’s jaw drops open with a crack, and she leans forward and closes her mouth around Ryan’s head.

YOOOOO!!!!!

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