Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

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.

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.

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.

But you can’t teach someone how to be a person. Cora was never real, she was only an echo of Delilah, and with her gone, she is no one at all.

But God doesn’t want her, no one does. Auntie Lois says one day, if she keeps praying, He will come. So Cora steadies her breath and asks God to make her normal. She opens herself to be God’s parasite instead of Delilah’s, and like always, no one answers.

But in real life, bodies are delicate. Skulls pop open like biscuits, bones shatter beyond repair, torrents of blood rush from a small wound.

It didn’t feel fair. Sometimes, when it’s really bright outside, 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.

“Eyes are beautiful organs,” he says. “There’s nowhere else in the human body that you can see a part of the central nervous system without cutting anything open.”

There is no religion in the world that can bring her back.

There are thousands of monsters in the world—not just the ones in folktales, but the ones in real life who push girls in front of trains—and yet, there are still people who think Cora Zeng is the most fearsome of all.

The sunshine has wiped the morning clean, and it is almost too easy to pretend everything was a dream. The sun is so sharp that Cora can’t fathom the shadows of last night.

Every day I clean up their brains and blood and I know that a white man coming for me isn’t an if, it’s a when.

“Horror movie shit?” Yifei says, crossing her arms. “Is that what our job is to you?” Harvey pulls back, face gray, knows he’s said too much. “Corpses aren’t Halloween decorations, dumbass,” Yifei says. “You clean up entrails but never thought about where they came from? Who they came from?”

In the end, not knowing is worse.

She doesn’t think she could forget anything this important, but she likes having something solid to look back to because sometimes her mind lies to her—that’s what everyone says.

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.

This pain is a fever that makes her feel more alive in its awfulness, the kind of ache that reminds you that you are, that there is something left inside you.

The shadows are peeling themselves from the walls like a sheet of dead skin, dropping to the floor, the carpet a black abyss yawning wider.

But now, Cora knows she’s not dying. Dying doesn’t hurt this much. Dying means there’s an endpoint to the pain.