Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

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

imagining is sometimes worse than seeing.

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

She wants to believe in a world where the police always catch the bad guys, where they get thrown in jail for the rest of their lives, where the survivors can mourn and move on and learn to be happy again. But only children can believe in that world.

It is a slow and quiet drowning, to not know your destination.

Half the things she thinks aren’t even real. 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 what her therapist said. But Cora knows that her therapist means Cora’s thoughts, not everyone’s thoughts.

But she can also feel something new, joss paper burning in her chest, a kind of hurt that she wants to lean into, to feel more brilliantly. It is different from the kind of hurt that makes her want to scratch off her own skin. This pain is a fever that makes her feel more alive in its awfulness, the kind of ache that reminds you that you are, that there is something left inside you.