Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

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

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.

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.

Lots of men grab Delilah because she is the kind of girl that men want to devour.

But there’s no one to hear it because New York is a dead body,

An arm is not a person, so if Delilah is an arm underneath a train and a leg on a subway platform and a head lost in the crevices of the tracks, which part is the real Delilah?

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.

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.

surface-level niceness is meaningless.

Thoughts are nothing at all, they come from nowhere and disappear into nothing and you can’t wade in their river as they pass by—that’s