Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are, the way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest of the world moving around them.

Cora is doing all the right things. She has a new job. She speaks to her coworkers. She tries new hobbies. She is doing all the things normal people do. Yet she still feels like a puppeteer dragging her wooden body through the motions, and maybe she always will.

Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned.

After enough time passes, the lying always becomes easier.

Cora also isn’t sure how to begin to translate her thoughts to someone who doesn’t live inside her head, isn’t privy to the carousel of worries constantly blurring together.

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.

Something about an impending phone call always makes Cora uneasy.

Nice people have the power to send Cora away if they think her mind has fractured.

When nothing changes, she tries to cast her consciousness out somewhere far away, to go numb the way she sometimes does when the world is too loud, but she stays locked in the prison of her own trembling bones.

Even thinking about the next year of her life is like staring off the edge of a canyon.

“There,” Cora repeats, as if testing the word. That’s how Cora feels—like she’s just passively existing while the world turns around her.

But for the first time in a long time, she can start to see her life in terms of things she likes instead of things she hates.