Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

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.

Cora thinks a church is not the best place to go during a deadly pandemic, that surely God would understand the extenuating circumstances. But Auntie Lois is more of a god to Cora than the one in heaven because she pays half of her student loans every month, and when God calls, you have to answer. Auntie Lois writes the check exactly at noon, after Cora has confessed.

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 asked once why fear is a sin. Auntie Lois said that it shows distrust in God, that one should not fear men and only fear God. But Auntie Lois lives in Staten Island, on a quiet street where cops have nothing to do but stop teens from making out in cars. She may think she’s met fear, when walking alone in a parking lot at night, or when a car swerves too close to her on the highway. 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.

“What made you want to be an optometrist?” she says. “I don’t know anyone who’s that excited about eyeballs.” Dr. Robinson laughs. “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.”

She knows that memories are not like turning pages in a photo album until you find the right one—every time you recall something, your brain rebuilds it from scratch, and every time it’s just a little bit different. It has to be, because brains are not video cameras; they don’t have that much empty space for unnecessary details.

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.

Cora prefers workdays to on-call days, because then at least she isn’t waiting by the phone all day, afraid to start doing anything real in case a call comes. Something about an impending phone call always makes Cora uneasy.

“She ate all my plates,” Yifei whispers. “She ate your roommate!” Harvey says. “Isn’t that the bigger problem?”

Briefly, she wonders if she’s going to die and finds that she cares less and less by the hour but needs to know someone will find her body. She texts Yifei to come find her if she doesn’t text back within twenty-four hours, and Yifei promptly responds, I couldn’t leave my bed even if my apartment was on fire, tell someone else to find your corpse. Followed quickly by: That was a joke, you’re not gonna die, dumbass. Followed once more by: But please call 911 if you actually think you might.

That is the one mercy of sickness: Cora cannot bring herself to worry about being arrested when she’s too busy worrying about breathing.