Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Her tone is too delicate, and it makes coldness curl around Cora’s heart. Delilah tosses words out easily, dandelion parachutes carried about by the wind. But these words have weight.

She is an echo, quieter and quieter until she’s nothing at all.

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 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.

Because that’s what this guy is doing, Harvey. You blast people to bits or hack them apart because you don’t see them as human—you take away the shape of their body and then no one else can see them as human either.

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.

“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.”

Cora had hidden from the virus for the last half of a year, the fear of it chained to her at all times, the feeling of needing to cry but not being able to always lodged in her throat, choking her. Now that it’s here, Cora can live through it one minute at a time. It’s no longer the faceless entity of her nightmares. It’s been defanged, as her therapist would say, because the not knowing and guessing is always worse than the knowing. And even when Cora thinks she’s going to die, it’s not as bad as the fear that came before, the fear that might have killed her anyway.

The only time she’s allowed to fight back is when it’s an abstract thought, when she’s already dead and reporters can speculate on what she should have done differently. But Cora Zeng does not want to die today.

Because a bat eater is the kind of person that white men want to hurt, the kind of person who tangles their fear and hate together and elicits their rage, the kind of person who scares them. And Cora knows all too well that you can’t fear someone who has no power over you.