Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Someone should probably fix that, but it’s the end of the world, and New York has bigger problems than a soggy train station that no one should be inside of anyway. No one takes the subway at the end of the world. No one except Cora and Delilah Zeng.

the abyss of the tracks that unlatches its jaws, waiting.

the darkness clenches its teeth.

no one anything more than a bright little square in the sky.

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

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

stopped shame from creeping in like black mold and coating her lungs

her sleep.

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 Zeng thinking something is dirty doesn’t mean the average human agrees—at least, that’s what everyone tells her.

Cora’s mind flashes with the image of both their skeletons standing at the station, waiting for a train that never comes, while the world crumbles around them.

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

triggers a thought that Cora doesn’t want to think, but it bites down all the same.

It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.

It’s that Delilah is a daydream and standing next to her makes Cora feel real.

The things Cora thinks she knows are too often just bad dreams bleeding into her waking hours.

her father hasn’t given her the words she needs.

Because even if Delilah tends to extinguish her own dreams too fast, Cora believes in them for all of their brief, brilliant lives.

Then Cora understands, all at once, like a knife slipped between her ribs, that Delilah isn’t inviting Cora to come with her.

Delilah could do it for her, but she doesn’t want to.

and you call for a mom who will never come.

You can’t string someone along their whole life and then just leave them alone one day holding your toilet paper in a soggy train station.

Delilah has decided that this is Cora’s life, and Delilah is the one who makes decisions.

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.

Because he doesn’t pull her close. He pushes her away.

All at once, Cora’s skin is scorched with something viscous and salty. Brakes scream and blue sparks fly and the wind blasts her hair back, the liquid rushing across her throat, under her shirt. Her first thought is that the train has splashed her in some sort of track sludge, and for half a second that is the worst thought in the entire world. The toilet paper falls from Cora’s arms and splashes into a puddle when it hits the ground and There goes the whole point of the trip, she thinks.

Cora is screaming, a raw sound that begins somewhere deep inside her rib cage and tears its way up her throat and becomes a hurricane, a knife-sharp cry, the last sound that many women ever make. But there’s no one to hear it because New York is a dead body, because no one rides the subway at the end of the world. No one but Cora Zeng.

somehow she feels safer here than at home wearing only her own skin.

Memories of the final gunshot.

They can imagine it, and imagining is sometimes worse than seeing.

but a surprising number of people need brains scrubbed off their walls and even cheapskate families don’t like doing that kind of thing themselves.

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.

In her four months working as a crime scene cleaner, Cora has never once seen a corpse. She has only seen one corpse in her whole life.

And Cora won’t have answers because Cora isn’t a person, not really.

That’s all she can come up with, because if Cora died today, she would die being nothing more than Delilah’s sister, the only fact that matters. She’s tried to metamorphosize herself into someone else—a box beneath her bed is stuffed with yarn from when she tried to be the kind of person who crochets, her bookshelf is mostly cookbooks from when she attempted to be the kind of person who likes cooking, and of course there was that night she watched intricate nail art videos until dawn. 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.

the cleanup crew. But Cora saw the broken lock on the front door, so she very much doubts it was suicide.

The one Cora doesn’t want to let float around in her mind too long, lest it latch on.

Yuxi He is the fifth Asian woman they’ve scraped off the walls this week, a...

that it’s a shift in business and not in crime.

Cora always tries to tear them up before she can see anything.

because the unknowing is worse than knowing,

and Cora feels the sudden urge to dispose of it the way people need to vomit—it has to happen now.

Bat eater, bat eater, the man says. Cora has never once felt sick at all the gore she’s cleaned up—no corpse, no problem—but all at once nausea closes her throat and her stomach clenches and the sheer terror of puking inside a hazmat suit and not being able to escape from her own bile makes her want to die.

Cora shakes her head, cannot imagine consuming anything in this apartment. There is blood everywhere, even if Harvey and Yifei can’t see it.

they smile because they know weakness when they see it and Cora can lie with her words but never with her eyes.

Thin, white fingers.

A roaring rises in her ears.

In her dreams, the hand is a white spider.

Cora wonders at what point a person stops being one singular person and becomes a collection of parts. 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?