Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Delilah chooses the things she wants to believe, while Cora’s thoughts are bear traps snapping closed around her ankles.

Harvey understands blood and gore in the way of people who play a lot of video games. Finds it exciting the way you only can when it’s not yours. Cora knows it’s not his fault—he’s just a horror movie junkie trying to make rent, and there’s no harm in finding what joy you can in a dirty and depressing job that someone has to do.

They like the way she hunches her shoulders and avoids eye contact and presses close to Harvey’s back when she sees them; they smile because they know weakness when they see it and Cora can lie with her words but never with her eyes.

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

Except, maybe Cora wants to be a prisoner. 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.

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 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.”

A sharp laugh forces its way out of Cora’s throat. Those people should see what fear truly is. Let them taste their sister’s blood, watch her headless body twitch, hear her throat still wheezing for breaths that won’t come, gurgling as the blood drowns down the wrong pipe. Let them remember it every time they close their eyes, whenever they hear the sound of a train, whenever salt stings their lips. Remind them that the same thing could happen to them any day, and then let them talk about what fear really means.

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. Nice people have the power to send Cora away if they think her mind has fractured. They’ll tie her down and tell themselves they’re doing the right thing.

her therapist has no way of knowing what Cora will or will not do, what’s an intrusive thought and what’s a wish.

Normally, these crime scenes feel like a distant echo of a scream, but this one is wailing in Cora’s ears.

In many ways, it doesn’t make sense. Cora would make the perfect member of any religion, the kind of person who doesn’t want to decide, who wants a textbook to tell her what to do. But Cora has always kept that kind of unwavering trust reserved for only one person. Delilah has always been Cora’s God. For one brief, sharp moment, Cora thinks of her mother singing from treetops above kale farms and wonders which of them is crazier, what part of them shattered and made them want to hand their souls to someone else.

Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.

Objectively, Cora thought watching someone she cares about die would be easier the second time. But it feels exactly the same. This is the hot bath of blood over her face in the train station, the coldness that sinks all the way down to her bones, a lost sound trying to force its way up her throat, a dying animal’s last cry. But now, Cora knows she’s not dying. Dying doesn’t hurt this much. Dying means there’s an endpoint to the pain.

Cora wonders if it would have been the same if all the victims had blond hair, blue eyes, American names. If they hadn’t been bat eaters, disease carriers, responsible for the deaths of New Yorkers and the refrigerated body trucks in the streets. Would Officer Wang have gotten his backup then? Would those people be worth saving? Clearly, Delilah Zeng wasn’t worth the tax dollars. Not to anyone but Cora.

But the White Spider in Cora’s dreams was a million different people—the man who spit in Cora’s face, the one who grabbed Yifei’s arm, the ones who called Delilah a Chink and threw garbage at her, the quiet ones on buses who glared at Cora for wearing a mask, who crossed the street to avoid her like she was a living breathing virus even though she was cleaner than any of them, the words China virus like a poison promise, go back home, repent for killing Americans.

Because a bat eater is the kind of person that white men want to hurt, the kind of person who tangles their fear and hate together and elicits their rage, the kind of person who scares them. And Cora knows all too well that you can’t fear someone who has no power over you.