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.

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.

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.

God cannot forgive someone whose name he does not know.

Cora stares at the brick, feels a bit like one has shattered her brain as well because she was doing everything right. She was out trying to be social, to not hide away in her apartment, to eat food she didn’t prepare herself, make small talk about movies, things normal twenty-four-year-olds do. But still, no matter how hard she tries to just have a simple life, everything around her always breaks.

Closing your eyes doesn’t stop monsters from devouring you.

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.

She especially can’t imagine herself ten years from now. Even thinking about the next year of her life is like staring off the edge of a canyon. Maybe it’s a sign that she will end like Delilah—one moment she’ll be everything all at once, the next she’ll be in pieces too small to be human, not even worth saving.

“You’re stressed,” he says. “Eat a pineapple cake.” “That’s not how stress works,” Cora says. “I beg to fucking differ,” Harvey says, pushing the package toward her.

“I don’t suppose you have any bugs we can count?” “If you see any, please kill them immediately,” Cora says. “Hey, bugs have rights too.” “Not in my apartment they don’t.”

“That’s some Silent Hill shit. Cora, I think we fucked up.”

They were never supposed to be her friends, but they didn’t give Cora a choice.

Cora thinks about a time, before the pandemic, when she truly thought the worst monsters were the ones inside her own head. When she thought people were mostly good, that they would save each other.

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

She doesn’t think of herself as the kind of person who makes it through the teeth of the end of the world and ends up on the other side.