Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

The feeling in Cora is not quite sadness. She remembers, back in her worst days, watching a video about black salve, a substance so caustic that it eats through flesh overnight, leaving holes Swiss-cheesed through your body. Cora never bought it, of course, but the thought haunted her for weeks, for all the spots she could never clean deep enough, the spots she wanted to hole-punch out of herself.

Delilah was never there when it was that bad. Emotions were a mess she couldn’t dirty her hands with. Instead, she was a lighthouse for Cora to look to in the distance, a reward at the end of it all. When you’re normal, you get your sister back.

Cora realizes, belatedly, that she’s not sure if she’s actually conveyed the essence of Delilah, or if she’s just made herself sound insane. Delilah was a study in contradictions, and that was why Cora never talked about her when she was alive. It seems impossible to explain her now when they’ll never actually meet her, see how she is, was.

It’s not the kind of story people like, the kind where you know what to say afterward.

“Maybe she hates Yifei’s cooking,” Harvey says. “She ate my coffee table,” Cora says. “I don’t think the food is the problem.”

“She ate all my plates,” Yifei whispers. “She ate your roommate!” Harvey says.

But now, in the silent aftermath, Cora doesn’t sense Delilah anymore. “I think it worked,” Cora whispers. Cora knows it’s supposed to be a good thing, that Delilah isn’t suffering anymore. But now Cora is the only one left suffering, and somehow that doesn’t feel like a victory.

There’s something peaceful about your worst fear coming true.

she is fine. She has survived her worst fear, and there is a sad kind of confidence that comes from it, which she hopes will endure.

She boards the train, mind scraped raw, and considers that she might not want to know what Harvey has to say. Giving the White Spider a face will defang him, Cora knows this. But maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish.

The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness.

Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a th...

Delilah never seemed the vengeful type. She drifted around life like she was riding a pool float, bumping into obstacles that gently nudged her to a new path but never overturned her into the water. There was nothing to be that angry about when you were Delilah Zeng. Or maybe she just never showed Cora her anger.

There are many things Cora never showed Delilah either. She never told Delilah about the way she knows things, about the thoughts that leech onto her skin and drink her dry. So maybe there were worlds inside Delilah that Cora never saw, will never see.

Each step brings her closer to the answer Delilah wanted her to see, and each step she wants to know less and less. As long as Cora doesn’t know, she can keep all the fear and rage trapped inside the cage of her heart, doesn’t have to decide what to do with it. Because when it’s gone, the last piece of Delilah will be gone too.

It’s almost startlingly easy to rattle off the facts, to tell Yifei about chemicals instead of acknowledging what’s in front of them. Cora thinks of Harvey sleeping on her floor, the strange familiarity of his breathing, imagining a life where both of them hadn’t been broken before they met. She thinks of him catching her as she jumped onto the train tracks, her hands on his shoulders, and she has to close her eyes, turn away from the machine, can’t comprehend that that person is gone. He’d done so much for her, because of her, and this is where it led him.

Objectively, Cora thought watching someone she cares about die would be easier the second time. But it feels exactly the same. This is the hot bath of blood over her face in the train station, the coldness that sinks all the way down to her bones, a lost sound trying to force its way up her throat, a dying animal’s last cry.

Because Cora knows what happens when you see someone die and call the cops. They keep you there for hours, hours that she and Yifei really can’t spare if they want to get out of here before a killer catches up to them. And you try to leave and they throw around phrases like “impeding an investigation” and you know it’s bullshit but you’re so hardwired to be a people pleaser, to cooperate, to cower at men with loud voices and guns, that you sit there and drink water from a Styrofoam cup even though it never feels like enough. You cry and they push tissue boxes at you and say nice things but you know there’s a camera in the room, and they ask all sorts of why didn’t you questions and you don’t know the answers and they finally let you go after wringing you out, no water left in your body, no money to get home, all alone and made of tissue paper.

Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase. Any kind of wanting leaves a scar.

The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget.

and Cora doesn’t understand who could look at this and see a joke, see anything but the worst pain they’ve ever felt, would ever feel.

Cora bites back the urge to slam the laptop shut. It wouldn’t help because the words are burned into her brain, worse than the picture itself, the people who look at a dead body and somehow don’t see a person at all.

Maybe Cora has seen too much, but the nausea has all but disappeared, a strange emptiness in her stomach, almost like hunger, but sharper, deeper. She isn’t even surprised anymore, the words meaningless, painless as she takes them in. She knows that half the world sees Asian girls as pretty dolls, tiny trophies to parade around and fuck and then discard because you can’t love someone who isn’t a real person to you. She knows this, none of this is new, this is all just fingers running over scar tissue.

Everyone wants Asian girls to look pretty. No one wants them to talk.

Yuxi He moved to America to become a doctor, worked during a pandemic, got blasted to pieces in her bathtub, and Cora would bet that no one even contacted her family. No one knew to burn joss paper for her, leaving her ghost starving and suffering because there couldn’t be peace even in death, not for someone like her. “I’m sorry,” Cora whispers, tears hitting the trackpad. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

It would be so damn easy for Yuxi to kill her right now if she wanted to, just walk over and pop her skull off her shoulders and eat it, and Cora wouldn’t even fight it because Yuxi deserves her anger, should be allowed to raze the city to ashes if she wants to, rip Cora’s life from her chest and take it for herself. But the ghost just stands in the corner and watches her, and Cora feels truly pathetic crying in front of someone who understands suffering better than she ever will.

All this time, Cora thought Delilah was leading her to her killer. She thought she’d have her chance at vengeance, or closure, or something meaningful. That secret was supposed to arm Cora, give her a choice, let her be the kind of person who forgives or the kind of person who calls the fires of hell or someone, anyone besides just Cora Zeng.

But the White Spider in Cora’s dreams was a million different people—the man who spit in Cora’s face, the one who grabbed Yifei’s arm, the ones who called Delilah a Chink and threw garbage at her, the quiet ones on buses who glared at Cora for wearing a mask, who crossed the street to avoid her like she was a living breathing virus even though she was cleaner than any ...

Cora doesn’t hold her breath waiting for justice. She knows better now.

Do not let your empathy stop at the borders of your own community.