Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned. Someone to wake her up and tell her what to eat, what to dream about, what to cry about, who to pray to. Because Cora somehow feels that every choice she’s made has been wrong, that every choice she will ever make will lead her deeper and deeper into a life that feels like a dark, airless box, and when she peers through the slats in the wood she’ll see the pale light of who she might have been, so bright that it blinds her.

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 cannot imagine how terrible it would feel if the typhoons in her mind were visible on the outside.

Cora only sees darkness behind her eyelids, a black wall where God is supposed to be, a locked door in a tiny room. God is not listening to her, but she can’t really blame him. It is so, so loud inside of her mind.

But God doesn’t want her, no one does. Auntie Lois says one day, if she keeps praying, He will come.

If God cannot love Cora unless she forgives, then Cora will die without His love.

“Your uncle doesn’t pay me enough to keep quiet about something like this,” Yifei says. “People need to know, Harvey. I didn’t come to America by myself when I was fifteen just to end up gutted in my own bed with a bat shoved down my throat. I am not going to be one of those bodies that we have to scrape off the ceiling, okay? Because you know damn well that when that happens, all anyone sees you as is a mess, a biohazard, something no one wants to touch. Or worse, I’ll turn into gore porn for weirdos who spend all night on Reddit reading about how another pretty Asian girl got chopped up, and then nothing I did before in my life will matter at all, just the death that I didn’t choose. I am not going to let anyone take away what makes me a human.

Cora thinks about a time, before the pandemic, when she truly thought the worst monsters were the ones inside her own head. When she thought people were mostly good, that they would save each other.