Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Her clothes go straight in the wash with two capfuls of bleach, shoes and all. Cora stands naked in the kitchen and washes her hands twice with mechanic soap—the kind meant to strip your hands of car grease—then goes straight to the shower and turns the hot water all the way up until steam fills the bathroom and she can hardly breathe. First is the rinse and scrub to dislodge any chunks, like Cora is a piece of fruit. Then the salt scrub, because that’s how you purge crawfish, how you make them vomit out all the garbage inside of them. Then comes the orange dish soap—regular bodywash always leaves a slick layer on the skin, doesn’t cut through the greasy film that Cora knows is still there.

When it’s done, Cora is wide-awake and raw and dizzy from the heat but it’s the only time in the world she truly feels Fine—that moment when she steps out of the shower and hasn’t touched anything at all.

In truth, all Cora wants is an apartment with no flat surfaces, nowhere for dust to settle. But that would be an apartment with no floor, just a perpetual abyss, a dark and endless hole.

Yet she still feels like a puppeteer dragging her wooden body through the motions, and maybe she always will. Maybe she can’t exist without being her sister’s parasite.

having her own apartment to unfold herself in, loves not having to explain what she’s eating or when she’s sleeping or why her water bill is so high.

Except, maybe Cora wants to be a prisoner. 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.

When it comes to ghost month, here is what you need to understand: On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, a door opens. The starving dead crawl out, mouths full of dust, and reach for a home that has already forgotten them. Their stomachs scream for food, but their tongues are heavy and dry, their necks as thin as needles. They lick the tears of the living from the dirt, and sometimes, it is enough to sate them. But sometimes, the hunger only yawns wider.

Cora knows her aunt thinks she’s a heathen, but she does feel bad for Jesus, who had to suffer in front of so many people. The worst part probably wasn’t bones splintering to make way for nails, or the constant tugging from his own body weight, or the hunger or thirst or hot sun over Palestine. It was probably having all his pain forced to the outside, the clean cage of his skin torn open and agony bleeding out, so many eyes and no way to hide from them. Cora cannot imagine how terrible it would feel if the typhoons in her mind were visible on the outside.

Cora only sees darkness behind her eyelids, a black wall where God is supposed to be, a locked door in a tiny room. God is not listening to her, but she can’t really blame him. It is so, so loud inside of her mind. It’s the same when she prays to Auntie Zeng’s gods, but at least there’s less pressure when it’s only Auntie Zeng and a burning trash can instead of hundreds of people who God actually listens to. I’m ready, Cora wants to scream, I’ll let you make me someone. But God doesn’t want her, no one does. Auntie Lois says one day, if she keeps praying, He will come.

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.

course nothing adds up, your mind is a labyrinth and you are lost inside

“It’s possible to have migraine auras without migraines,” he continues. “They can cause visual disturbances. Do the dots ever go away?” But Cora isn’t sure how to answer anymore, because she doesn’t know if the dots fade or if she just stops noticing them, and she doesn’t want to answer incorrectly again. “Sometimes,” she says to her lap. The doctor nods, like this is the right answer, the one he expected. “You should go to your PCP,” he says, “ask if they want to refer you to a neurologist.” His tone is kind, but Cora hears everything he’s not saying: The problem is not in your eyes. It’s in your brain. And Cora doesn’t want anyone digging around in her brain, not anymore. She already knows there are too many frayed wires up there, too many broken circuits. She knows that all organs are nothing but meat, and she knows a brain doctor isn’t any more shameful to see than an eye doctor, but she doesn’t think she can survive another medical professional telling her that her mind is a web they cannot untangle.

None of them can help her because she can’t tell them the truth. Whenever anyone gets a glimpse of what Cora’s mind is truly like, they always have one hand hovering above the panic button, ready to send her away, make her someone else’s liability. 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.

but all she feels is that the sky is a dome sinking lower and lower, trapping her in a world that she hates but can never escape.

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.

Cora knows all too well that the mangled clockwork of her mind doesn’t always respond to logical arguments, that the fact that something is objectively safe doesn’t mean her mind won’t short-circuit anyway, make her hyperventilate until her limbs lose so much oxygen she can’t stand up.

Cora knows that she’s transparent glass for anyone who actually looks at her, but most people don’t want to. They think her reticence is impenetrable, that her pale skin is poured concrete, her body a fortress. But Cora knows—and now, so does Yifei—that all of her words are full of secrets.

Nice people have the power to send Cora away if they think her mind has fractured. They’ll tie her down and tell themselves they’re doing the right thing. So Cora pointedly ignores Yifei putting dumplings on her plate. Besides, if Cora wants to be a normal person, she needs friends besides Yifei and Harvey. They’re probably the least normal friends she could possibly have.

A thought skewers Cora’s mind like a lobotomy—her therapist once said they were called intrusive thoughts, the most terrible, cruel things that you know you would never do but can’t help but think. Except her therapist has no way of knowing what Cora will or will not do, what’s an intrusive thought and what’s a wish.

“You’re my sister.” “That’s just a word,” Cora said. Delilah scrunched her face up. “All words are just words,” she said. “We’re sisters, so us being together is inevitable. It doesn’t matter how we feel about it. Just like it doesn’t matter how we feel about the sun setting. It happens anyway.”

part of her just liked being pulled, innocent and blameless when it all inevitably fell apart.

The shadows seem to soften and pale as soon as Auntie Zeng arrives, like her presence alone is starbright.

And then, in the bright tongues of fire, Cora sees something she’s not supposed to see. The searing white at the hottest point of the fire converges into a light so bright that it strips away the colors at the edges of Cora’s vision. Just as the darkness of Delilah’s shadow led into an infinite chasm of night, the bright white is another door into a place Cora doesn’t want to go. It is the unknown beyond of the doorway in the crypt; it is the secrets of the sun, the reason they tell children not to stare at it directly; it is the star explosion that will one day destroy everything and everyone. The roaring of flames devouring paper begins to sound like screams, a thousand different voices, parched throats scraped raw. Cora moves closer, sliding to her knees in front of the coffee table, and the heat of the flames scalds her face but she doesn’t care, stares deeper into the ribbons of infinite white. I am staring into hell, Cora realizes all at once, the flames lashing higher as if in agreement, the smoke blurring away the rest of the room. The flames are whispers of hands, orange silk scarves clawing at the remains of the house, dragging it down with them. They reach for Cora’s face, but the paper is nothing but withered black on the plate and the flames are growing smaller and smaller, the door closing. The flames die out in a tiny flicker of yellow light, like a last word cut off, spiraling into silent smoke. “Cora?” Harvey says somewhere behind her. Cora is still starin...

Cora begins to register the sting of smoke in her eyes, but the sensation is welcome, it sharpens her vision. “I’ve never…” She trails off. Never thought it was possible? Never wanted to trust in something beyond herself? In many ways, it doesn’t make sense. Cora would make the perfect member of any religion, the kind of person who doesn’t want to decide, who wants a textbook to tell her what to do. But Cora has always kept that kind of unwavering trust reserved for only one person. Delilah has always been Cora’s God. For one brief, sharp moment, Cora thinks of her mother singing from treetops above kale farms and wonders which of them is crazier, what part of them shattered and made them want to hand their souls to someone else. Even now, with Delilah dragged down to some sort of hell, or purgatory, Cora is still following her.

“It’s not about my gods or your Auntie Lois’s God being the right one. There are thousands of gods that open thousands of doors to anyone who knocks. It’s about deciding which doors you want to open.”

But Yifei cannot know if Cora will die. Delilah didn’t know she was going to die. It’s not something people know ahead of time, for the most part. Yet Cora feels like she’s tightrope-walking on the edge of something, especially when her breath comes tight and she sees shapes of light dancing in the corners of her eyes.

It’s been defanged, as her therapist would say, because the not knowing and guessing is always worse than the knowing.

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.

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 thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora. And Cora doesn’t know what she’ll do when she knows his name, when she’s seen his face.

pounding ache behind her eyes, air suddenly thin, her throat feeling needle-thin. “So why are the washing cylinders running?” she says. Yifei opens her mouth to respond, closes it. Her face goes slack, a grayness settling over her eyes. She pushes past Cora, shoving through the plastic bags, racing across the room. “Yifei—” But Yifei sucks in a sharp breath. Cora can’t see what she’s found, but she draws closer as she hears Yifei sink to the ground, a muffled sound like she’s cupped a hand over her mouth. The industrial washing cylinder is a great beast of a machine, twice as tall as Cora. It churns through suds that slosh against a tiny round window. Cora steps closer, shines her flashlight on the small portal. The water is bright red. It splashes against the window again and again and Cora realizes all at once that clothing should not make such a heavy thump thump thumping sound inside the machine. The water draws back as the machine churns, and the next thing that presses against the glass is not soap or blood or water, but the side of Harvey’s face.

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.