Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

What she doesn’t like is that she can’t find any toilet paper at the end of the world.

When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.

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.