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.

When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.

Sometimes, Cora thinks she hates her sister. It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness. It’s not something that Delilah says or does, really. Cora is used to her small annoyances. It’s that Delilah is a daydream and standing next to her makes Cora feel real.

Delilah stopped trying because everything is disposable to her, right down to her dreams.

Because even if Delilah tends to extinguish her own dreams too fast, Cora believes in them for all of their brief, brilliant lives. If Cora ever found a dream of her own, she would nurture it in soft soil, measure out each drop of water, each sunbeam, give it a chance to become. So Cora will not squash her sister’s dreams, not for anything.

Brains pool in the bathtub around her feet, but Cora is swaddled deep in the cocoon of her hazmat suit, and somehow she feels safer here than at home wearing only her own skin.

hardly anyone needs their dry cleaning done during a pandemic, but a surprising number of people need brains scrubbed off their walls

She’s tried to metamorphosize herself into someone else—a box beneath her bed is stuffed with yarn from when she tried to be the kind of person who crochets, her bookshelf is mostly cookbooks from when she attempted to be the kind of person who likes cooking, and of course there was that night she watched intricate nail art videos until dawn. But everything sloughs off Cora like dead skin because she is not the kind of person who creates things, who makes a mark on the world. She is an echo, quieter and quieter until she’s nothing at all.

Cora has always moved through the world like a child in a fine art museum, afraid to touch.

A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter.

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.

If you want someone dead, you should have to sink your fingers into their eyes, feel their trachea collapse under your hands, let them scratch your arms and pull your hair and cry and beg. Because if you kill someone, you should want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted before. It shouldn’t be easy.

Even when I was a kid and saw roadkill—raccoons with bugs in their brains or squirrels who fell out of trees and broke their skulls on the ground and bled out—it felt the same as everything else. There’s trees that get sticky with sap and grass that needs to be cut and beehives under the porch and squirrel blood on the sidewalk, and it’s all part of the world, you know? It wasn’t shocking, it just was.”

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. 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 all it takes is a single moment to cross into the broken reality, the bad one.

No one wants to help her untangle her mind; they want her to disappear.

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 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.

Sometimes the unknowing is worse than the knowing. But other times, Cora cannot bridge the distance between the two.

But Cora doesn’t feel forgiven, renewed, or reborn the way Auntie Lois says she should feel. God cannot forgive someone whose name he does not know.

lots of people are nice—surface-level niceness is meaningless. 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.

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.

Closing your eyes doesn’t stop monsters from devouring you.

“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.”