Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

is a little bit afraid that it will and she’ll have to start carrying her own flask around.

Maybe Cora wouldn’t be anyone remarkable, but at least she’d be someone.

It’s just another way to carve out the chunk of her brain that still holds Delilah inside. Cora is only alive right now because the story of Delilah Zeng is behind aquarium glass in her mind.

Cora will be damned if she makes a mess when she dies.

But Cora doesn’t feel important, she feels like she’s trapped in the rotting corpse of a foreclosed house, and she never wanted to be important anyway. She just wanted to be Delilah. A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter. The CDC says to wash your hands, so Cora is just being a Good American by washing her hands twice. If she empties her purse into a UV light box to sterilize everything inside, if she has three air purifiers for her tiny apartment, if she wears gloves on the subway—all of it is reasonable now.

It is the dirtiness itself, not what comes after it.

Delilah always said Cora was the good kind of crazy, the kind that didn’t hurt anyone, that did good things but just too much of them. But now Cora has forgotten something, has gaps in her memory, empty holes in the grout of her brain where something used to be, and that doesn’t feel like the good kind of crazy anymore.

Extricating Delilah Zeng from your mind is probably a lot more difficult than it seems, like pulling out a tumor that’s grown into all of your brain’s crevices—getting rid of it means ripping out healthy tissue too.

Cora is doing all the right things.

Yet she still feels like a puppeteer dragging her wooden body through the motions, and maybe she always will.

Cora imagines if she herself were someone’s one and only source of American culture, how they would find it strange that Americans take such long showers and have such smelly jobs and cry so much.

Cora knows this, but she isn’t above taking hush money, not in this economy.

Cora suspects that one day it will open its mouth and swallow the entire world like a black hole.

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.

The starving dead crawl out, mouths full of dust, and reach for a home that has already forgotten them.

Sunday is the day of Auntie Lois’s God, the kind that asks for Cora’s money in a golden dish but won’t let her drink wine because she was never baptized and she’s embarrassingly old to be baptized now. All are welcome in God’s house, Auntie Lois says, but she always emphasizes the all, as if God is especially generous for letting someone like Cora in, like there’s something about her that’s inherently unholy.

But Auntie Lois is more of a god to Cora than the one in heaven because she pays half of her student loans every month, and when God calls, you have to answer.

I’m ready, Cora wants to scream, I’ll let you make me someone. But God doesn’t want her, no one does.

So Cora steadies her breath and asks God to make her normal.

Cora had stared at the sunlight through the stained glass until her vision went blurry, had contemplated the sharpness of each cut piece, how easily they could split skin, how she could slice the whole congregation into hunks of meat just like Delilah and see how easy it would be for them to forgive her then, and why did everyone want to talk about it, to tell her what happened and what it means and what should come next, when Cora was the only one who was there. Auntie Lois hardly even knew Delilah; technically she wasn’t even her niece and Auntie Lois never called her that until she was dead. Cora doesn’t even think her aunt loves her that much, yet she loves Delilah’s murderer.

If God cannot love Cora unless she forgives, then Cora will die without His love.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned is what you’re supposed to say. Cora once asked Auntie Lois what to say if she hadn’t sinned, but her aunt only shook her head and said, You have.

Cora asked once why fear is a sin. Auntie Lois said that it shows distrust in God, that one should not fear men and only fear God. But Auntie Lois lives in Staten Island, on a quiet street where cops have nothing to do but stop teens from making out in cars. She may think she’s met fear, when walking alone in a parking lot at night, or when a car swerves too close to her on the highway. But Cora knows that the face of fear is not an abstract what-if. 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. Anyone who has seen the face of fear knows you should damn well be afraid. Cora feels it now, in the closed space of the confessional booth. She thinks the darkness and tight walls are supposed to feel safe and private. But the darkness expands outward in all directions. It listens.

Cora grows smaller at the tone of his voice. She is six years old and Dad is yelling at her for reorganizing his pantry. This man is not her father, has no power over her, yet the tone of his voice rattles her bones in a way that feels instinctual, like Cora was born to fear loud men.

All eyes are focused on her as her scream repeats itself up to the ceiling, floating up to God.

She was eight, and her mom was crying in the pantry, sitting on top of spilled cornflakes and telling Auntie Lois how being a mom was so hard, and together they brainstormed ways to get Cora out of the house.

you’ll only have to see her from dinner until bedtime.

Cora thinks her Auntie Lois maybe loved her when she was small enough to be dressed up in tulle skirts and giant hair bows, when

called Cora her Little China Doll.

food. After that, Auntie Lois decided Cora’s dad was her baby sister’s evil ex and Cora was a raggedy sweater he’d left behind, a curse of single motherhood she’d never asked for.

Around her, all of Cora’s emotions felt as dirty as her hands, something that didn’t afflict people like Delilah. No, Delilah would never be angry on Cora’s behalf. If Cora were the one beheaded by a train, Delilah would probably have shrugged and said something like, It was meant to be.

Cora chokes on a breath, backed against the car. He is going to rip my face off, she thinks. She’s read about dogs and chimps ripping people’s faces off. Surely angry white men could find a way. But his fingers hook over the edge of her masks, brushing her lips, the gesture so horrifyingly intimate that Cora’s mind grinds to a halt, every thought gone except the scratch of his rough knuckles on her lips. He pulls down her masks, casts them to the ground, and spits in her face.

Her whole body goes on lockdown, jaw clenched and lips pressed together, Don’t let anything in. She stays perfectly still as warm saliva tracks down her chin, her throat, pooling

The man tells her to go home to China, but China is not her home—if

She wishes the man had just peeled her face off like she thought he would.

the home of the God who does not want her. She came here for God, to be normal, to be Good, and now there’s someone else’s spit in her mouth and God’s door is still shut in her face.

Cora will always have to live with the knowledge that she can never wash this man away, not completely.

Someone recounts what happened and Auntie Lois sighs at the great inconvenience.

When Cora goes still, she releases her, pulls a few tissues out of her bag and hands them to Cora, as if something like this can just be wiped away with a Kleenex, as if it’s not already inside of her.

“God wants us to forgive,” Auntie Lois says at last, and Cora doesn’t know if she’s talking about forgiving the man who spit on her, or forgiving Cora for being the way she is.

All that’s left is raw wood, rough and unpolished, but that’s what the landlord wants, isn’t it? All traces gone. No memory of Zihan Huang left. A bare apartment to resell.

Cora wishes her body was sealed tight like a snow globe, that nothing could ever penetrate the inside.

She goes to work and says nothing about it even though her body feels foreign, a ship that she can no longer steer.

But there are two axe marks in the wall and at least ten on the floor, so whoever did this needed—maybe just wanted—more than one swing. Cora thinks it must take an incredible amount of anger to kill someone with an axe in 2020.

In a way, Cora doesn’t think that should be allowed. 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. Whoever killed Zihan Huang wanted it. There are stray ribs and intestines and even a lock of hair floating in all the blood. There’s so much of it—the downstairs neighbors called in a mysterious stain on their ceiling, and that was how the police found her.

She reaches out and Cora wants to tell her to stop, that Cora has been struck with the sudden nausea of touching something that she absolutely shouldn’t, something that was hidden and meant to stay that way.

All three of them freeze, turning to the small metal grill beside the TV stand, where a sheet of plexiglass has been duct-taped over the air vent. In a normal living room—one not covered in entrails—the strangeness of it might have been louder, maybe even the first thing Cora noticed.

“Wait,” Cora says. Because whatever is inside that vent, Zihan Huang wanted to keep it inside.

Cora is reminded of popped balloons and how little they resemble their perfect round forms, all jagged at the edges.

Bat eater. “What is it with bat infestations this week?” Harvey says. Neither Cora nor Yifei respond. Cora knows this isn’t an infestation but doesn’t say it out loud. She knows because the wings are ripped like old cheesecloth, tattered sails, flightless birds. This bat has been shredded by something. It was never meant to fly again. It was supposed to starve to death, trapped in Zihan Huang’s vents until the smell of rot filled her house. Cora turns to the vent, where there are several other bat corpses, some already melting into the metal.