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.

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.

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. There are safe ways to touch her surroundings—her elbow jamming down a doorknob, the sole of her shoe on a toilet lever, her house key poking an elevator button. But Cora hates touching New York with her bare hands, because it is a city that sweats in the summer and oozes pizza grease from its pores and vomits sodden trash bags onto sidewalks.

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.

Cora doesn’t like thinking of all the parts that make her up, all the glands and sacks and tendons and flaps. She wants to exist like a Lego person, with one singular body that exists in and of itself, solid, no room for anything inside.

But no one hears Cora, no one ever hears Cora, because her thoughts are only half out loud and half in her mind, anxious sounds that haven’t quite coagulated into words.