Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Most people don’t know how easy it is to end a life. In video games, you can swallow rounds of bullets before going down. But in real life, bodies are delicate. Skulls pop open like biscuits, bones shatter beyond repair, torrents of blood rush from a small wound.

Cora goes still because sometimes her desperation leaks out through her words.

Clearly, Zihan Huang had known something was inside and desperately wanted to keep it in there. Maybe she heard them dying before Yifei jostled them, heard their cries echoing down across the cold metal and shadows, the constant drip drip drip of their decay splashing down. Maybe she was too scared to stick her head inside and peer up into the darkness, so she did what Cora would do and tried to make it quieter, tried to forget about it. After enough time passes, the lying always becomes easier.

Cora doesn’t drink often. Drinking makes the world cloudy, makes her bones soft and blood heavy like treacle, her mind one foot in a dream. It feels like being buried under a great invisible weight, and Cora likes it, wishes she were always so calm, and that is why she almost never drinks. But it’s the only way she can stomach sitting on train tracks.

Maybe she will be the kind of person people like to hang out with.

“I didn’t mean to, and I know that doesn’t change anything but I feel like you should know. I hope it was fast.”

“Man, how the hell did we end up here?” Harvey says. “What kind of fucked-up job is this?”

One crawled into my ear once, and after that I felt like they were all over me as soon as I went down the stairs. Everything itched, but not from my skin, from inside me, like their little legs were tickling my brain. I sat on my beanbag and played Mortal Kombat and tried to imagine that I was there, not in the basement, and that’s the only way I could forget about the silverfish and the dark.

and I’d remember who I really was, but I wanted to go back.

it feels like I’m still in one of my games, like I have unlimited lives, everything is scripted, and I’m just pushing buttons and it’s okay if I fuck up—I can go back to my last save. Except I know that’s not true. I only have one life, and that’s fucking terrifying. 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.”

But her voice sounds clipped, like she wants to change the subject, and Cora knows too well what it sounds like when you have a secret, how much of it spills out in the words you don’t say.

That’s why she feels uneasy when the darkness of the distant train tracks converges into a silhouette, a black hole of a girl in a dress, standing as if waiting for a train that will never come.

Cora finds herself swatting at bugs that don’t exist, and even though Cora can’t see Yifei’s or Harvey’s expressions behind their face shields, she can feel them watching her, wondering.

Cora isn’t a doctor but she knows that means something is dying inside you.

Cora doesn’t like thinking of all the parts that make her up, all the glands and sacks and tendons and flaps. She wants to exist like a Lego person, with one singular body that exists in and of itself, solid, no room for anything inside.

She’s never grasped how doctors choose a specialty, how they want to understand one body part so intimately that they spend a decade studying it. How can anyone want anything that badly? What is it about eyeballs that called to this man? Why doesn’t anything in the world call to Cora?

Cora freezes, feels like he’s just peeled off his flesh, baring his exposed muscle and pulsing veins to her.

Most people don’t cross paths with the same murderer twice. Unless he’s looking for them.

Someday, Cora will remember the hands and they will be completely divorced from reality, the hands of a stranger who never once touched her sister.

Here, concentrated in the tiny lens of the machine, they form a frothing pool of black, so deep and alive that she can almost see beyond it, if she looks a bit closer…

But there is no barn. There is nothing but the endless night, which has started to coagulate into shapes. Faces stretched down into screams, jaws wrenched open, glistening black teeth—

“It’s all right,” he says, but his voice seems quieter now, like he has only just begun to realize that Cora is not the kind of patient he wants.

The problem is not in your eyes. It’s in your brain.

No one wants to help her untangle her mind; they want her to disappear. The problem can’t be in her brain. There must be some hidden corner of her eyeball the doctor hasn’t seen. Cora doesn’t think she’ll be satisfied until the doctor has removed her eyeball and mapped out its contents, memorized every vein and nerve. There is a darkness in there somewhere that he hasn’t found yet. Cora thinks of the toxoplasma, the parasite that slowly dies without its host to devour, withering into nothingness over months and months.

buys a bottle of ginger ale because she’s getting nauseous but already knows it’s the kind of sickness that starts in her brain and not her stomach.

She already knew someone had poked holes in her brain, after all.

They’re waterlogged graphics advertising a protest that’s already happened, and now the faded text looks like the ghost of a dream because Cora knows nothing has changed.

trapping her in a world that she hates but can never escape.

Cora goes very still. A strange calmness washes over her, and she is deep in a sea so cold that she can’t feel her body at all, the way she prefers.

But Cora has already been to the place that they put you when you become a liability. Where they want your mouth loose and drooling from sedatives, release you when you’re quiet and learn the answers that they like, even when they know you’re lying but don’t care. Her world focuses in on the singular determination to never, ever, go there again.

She could call her Auntie Zeng, or even Auntie Lois, but both of them already see Cora as something volatile, a rescue dog that needs to be carefully coddled or it will bite and scream and pee all over the floor.

A few unmasked people come into the stairway arguing in Cantonese and Cora backs against the wall, holds her breath until they pass.

Yifei could pass as normal in a way that Cora knows she herself never could.

Yifei shouts at them, but her accent is stronger than Cora has ever heard before. Yifei usually only has a trace of an accent on certain words, but now she’s tripping over syllables like she’s just learning English. She turns to Cora. “Don’t speak English,” she says in Mandarin.

Cora freezes up, looking to Yifei in a panic because why can’t she speak English? But the terror in her face is apparently unsurprising to Paisley, who drops her hand and turns back to the man. “Does she really not have any American friends?” she says. “No one in this whole building is American,” Ryan mumbles. Yifei ignores them, opening the fridge. “She thinks I can’t speak English,” she says, still in Mandarin, and it takes Cora a moment to process it, so unused to hearing anything but Auntie Zeng’s slow speech. “My old coworker who sublets me this place set us up as roommates. She assumed I didn’t speak English when we first met, so I just went along with it and now I don’t have to talk to her. It’s a great arrangement.”

Yifei only shrugs, popping open the tab of her drink. “It’s not like those two know the difference,” she says, jerking her head toward the couple. “Watch.” Then she raises her voice a fraction, looking at Cora earnestly. “My ears are full of bees,” she says. “I lick all the silverware before putting it away and I squeeze my roommate’s pears so they bruise and go bad faster. I also play Chinese opera music when they have sex.” Cora glances at Ryan and Paisley, who only turn the volume up on the TV. She wonders how much of that is true. Knowing Yifei, probably most of it.

Cora recognizes an acorn-shaped cookie jar from a cleanup scene and realizes that the random assortment of things is probably not random at all—these are the things Yifei has taken from crime scenes. The room is such an antithesis to Cora’s own apartment that she feels like it will reject her existence, force her back out like a key jammed into the wrong hole.

Cora is used to terror, a worry that wrings your organs out and carves holes in you like termites in wooden furniture, but if enough of you is devoured, soon there’s nothing left of you but what was, and Cora is starting to feel full of holes, like Yifei can look straight through her.

“I don’t want to be haunted by hungry ghosts. I have enough problems as it is.” Hungry.

the teeth marks on her table, the missing apples.

“I know Americans don’t like to think about this kind of thing,” Yifei says, and Cora knows that “Americans” includes her. “Frankly, I didn’t really care much about it when I was a kid. But the thing about hungry ghosts is they don’t care if you believe in them.”

Delilah is gone, not in the soft quiet way of her grandparents fading into starched white hospital sheets. From the moment of impact, Delilah was so definitively gone that the paramedics wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t even try. She was so very much gone that an open casket funeral was not an option because they couldn’t find enough pieces of her face on the train tracks. Her mama came and took all of her things that Cora hadn’t already hidden, ripped down her posters, threw her toothbrush in the trash, shut off her cell phone so Cora can’t even listen to her voicemail message. There is no religion in the world that can bring her back.

Cora shakes her head. The floaters in her eyes converge, a haze around Yifei, a dark silhouette like a living shadow behind her, dispersing when Cora tries to look at it because it’s not really there. It’s only a trick of the light.

Because something about the immense gilded ceilings of the cathedral commands fear, and Cora doesn’t like being the only one who feels it.

He laughs, the sound echoing up to the swooping arches, growing softer, sadder as it rises. Cora realizes she was also supposed to laugh and does so too quietly, too late.

“For the children they never had,” Father Thomas says, his voice low. “Imagine if all of us built crypts for our dreams. You’re too young to worry about that now, but someday maybe you’ll think about it.”

Father Thomas waves his hand as if it’s inconsequential. “People afraid of getting COVID.” “But I don’t have COVID,” Cora says. “No, but…” Father Thomas looks away, and the shadows hide his expression. “You know how people are.”

“Fear of what?” Cora says. “Of me?” Father Thomas sighs, and that is enough of an answer. Cora drops her gaze to the dusty floor, an odd heat churning in her stomach. Cora Zeng does not get angry. Not because Auntie Lois says anger is a sin, or because Delilah could never be bothered with such an emotion, or because Cora is sage enough to understand that it is a pointless, destructive feeling. Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it’s a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own flesh. She knows, on some level, that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her—she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all. At least, that’s what she used to think.

Remind them that the same thing could happen to them any day, and then let them talk about what fear really means.

She knows Father Thomas thinks of himself as a good person, that he would never turn Cora away for being Chinese. But he forgives the people who would, even though it’s not his place to dole out forgiveness on Cora’s behalf. He loves the people who would never love her.