Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

You can scream and the ghost of your voice will carry for blocks and blocks. The sound of footsteps lasts forever, the low hum of streetlights a warm undercurrent that was always there, waiting, but no one could hear it until now.

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

But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are, the way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest of the world moving around them.

there are worse things than leaning a little bit into the crazy parts of you. Isn’t that what artists do, after all?

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.

Delilah is a daydream and standing next to her makes Cora feel real.

Cora has never once eaten a bat, but it has somehow become common knowledge that Chinese people eat bats just to start plagues.

Cora is swaddled deep in the cocoon of her hazmat suit, and somehow she feels safer here than at home wearing only her own skin.

And Cora won’t have answers because Cora isn’t a person, not really.

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.

“Girls always leave hair balls as big as hamsters in the shower.” “Don’t say that like you’ve ever lived with a girl,”

The three of them still smell like sweat and inside-out human,

Cora has always moved through the world like a child in a fine art museum, afraid to touch.

Cora doesn’t feel important, she feels like she’s trapped in the rotting corpse of a foreclosed house, and she never wanted to be important anyway.

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

She makes these plans so her fruit never goes bad, because once it starts to bruise, Cora refuses to eat it and into the trash it goes, wasted.

Cora is doing all the right things.

Yet she still feels like a puppeteer dragging her wooden body through the motions, and maybe she always will. Maybe she can’t exist without being her sister’s parasite.

Other people don’t know how to scrub vegetables like Cora does, don’t wash their hands enough after handling raw meat.

So she puts a dumpling in her mouth right when her aunt crosses into the kitchen, makes sure she sees her eat, reminds herself that Auntie Zeng’s food has never once made her sick and it’s statistically unlikely that today will be the first time.

She knows that even if the grainy MTA footage of the man’s face could be used to find him, his lawyers would talk about how he was a good father and a responsible worker and was probably just having a bad day.

they would comb through Delilah’s diaries and Instagram and try to prove that she was the kind of girl who would throw herself in front of a train.

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.

All are welcome in God’s house, Auntie Lois says, but she always emphasizes the all, as if God is especially generous for letting someone like Cora in, like there’s something about her that’s inherently unholy.

hears her voice and nods and hums in all the right places but the words never seem to sink in—and Cora knows that her thoughts don’t reach anyone at all. Cora only sees darkness behind her eyelids, a black wall where God is supposed to be, a locked door in a tiny room. God is not listening to her, but she can’t really blame him. 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.

If God cannot love Cora unless she forgives, then Cora will die without His love.

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.

She was a very reap-what-you-sow, karma-comes-for-us-all kind of person. She thought the starry sky was symmetrical and that every wrong would be righted in turn and that none of them could understand the cosmic timing of justice but that it would come one day.

The man tells her to go home to China, but China is not her home—if

someone, you should want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted before. It shouldn’t be easy.

Sometimes, when it’s really bright outside, it feels like I’m still in one of my games, like I

have unlimited lives, everything is scripted, and I’m just pushing buttons and it’s okay if I fuck up—I can go back to my last save. Except I know that’s not true. I only have one life, and that’s fucking terrifying.

No one would ever make a game where you only have one chance. But that’s all any of us get. And the wo...

Cora doesn’t like thinking of all the parts that make her up, all the glands and sacks and tendons and flaps. She wants to exist like a Lego person, with one singular body that exists in and of itself, solid, no room for anything inside.

every time you recall something, your brain rebuilds it from scratch, and every time it’s just a little bit different.

She is sure that if her footsteps are too loud, the bells will clamor and the doors will fly open and God will force Cora to her knees.

But now, in this dark, moldy crypt, Father Thomas is telling her that there are people in his congregation who fear her. 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.

But Cora doesn’t feel forgiven, renewed, or reborn the way Auntie Lois says she should feel. God cannot forgive someone whose name he does not know.

Cora knows that she’s transparent glass for anyone who actually looks at her, but most people don’t want to. They think her reticence is impenetrable, that her pale skin is poured concrete, her body

a fortress. But Cora knows—and now, so does Yifei—that all of her words are full of secrets.

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.

Cora sees herself holding Harvey’s bat in one hand, jamming her fist into the white man’s mouth, down his throat, punching into his stomach. She sees the bat living inside him, scratching at his stomach lining, trying to claw its way back up, scraping his insides raw.

Who’s the bat eater now?

Even when she is no one at all, just an echo of a dead person, she’s still Chinese and no one will let her forget it. That’s all anyone cares about, all anyone wants to see.

prickly, sure there’s glass lodged somewhere she can’t see, like inside her ear canal. It will slide deeper and deeper while she lies on her side in bed, carve paths in her brain, as if her mind isn’t already an egg over easy.