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.

But there’s no one to hear it because New York is a dead body, because no one rides the subway at the end of the world. No one but Cora Zeng.

Harvey understands blood and gore in the way of people who play a lot of video games. Finds it exciting the way you only can when it’s not yours.

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 will be damned if she makes a mess when she dies. She takes the flask, knocks back a mouthful that tastes like fire, and wishes it would keep burning.

But Cora doesn’t feel important, she feels like she’s trapped in the rotting corpse of a foreclosed house, and she never wanted to be important anyway.

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

And at the end of the world, Cora thinks, there are worse things than being too clean.

She’s used to something always burrowing in her ear, prickling at her skin.

Cora could only sit in the kitchen and stare at the black eyes of the maneki-neko cats and dissociate until she couldn’t feel her fingers, because otherwise she would scream.

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.

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.

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.

God is not listening to her, but she can’t really blame him. It is so, so loud inside of her mind.

She looks around because the only people who will see her are the other heathens who open their eyes while praying.

and why did everyone want to talk about it, to tell her what happened and what it means and what should come next, when Cora was the only one who was there. Auntie Lois hardly even knew Delilah; technically she wasn’t even her niece and Auntie Lois never called her that until she was dead.

She calls for feelings of love and grace like hauling an anchor to the surface of her mind, but it is far too heavy. All Cora can feel is that first hot splash of blood, the sharpness of it, the way it burned her eyes, the taste of its salt. If God cannot love Cora unless she forgives, then Cora will die without His love.

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned is what you’re supposed to say. Cora once asked Auntie Lois what to say if she hadn’t sinned, but her aunt only shook her head and said, You have.

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.

This man is not her father, has no power over her, yet the tone of his voice rattles her bones in a way that feels instinctual, like Cora was born to fear loud men.

Yuxi He’s single dead eye stares up at her as if saying, Of course nothing adds up, your mind is a labyrinth and you are lost inside.

“God wants us to forgive,” Auntie Lois says at last, and Cora doesn’t know if she’s talking about forgiving the man who spit on her, or forgiving Cora for being the way she is.

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.

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.”

That’s why she feels uneasy when the darkness of the distant train tracks converges into a silhouette, a black hole of a girl in a dress, standing as if waiting for a train that will never come.

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.

None of them can help her because she can’t tell them the truth. Whenever anyone gets a glimpse of what Cora’s mind is truly like, they always have one hand hovering above the panic button, ready to send her away, make her someone else’s liability. No one wants to help her untangle her mind; they want her to disappear.

A horrible part of Cora realizes that Delilah is no longer beautiful, that she has swung to the polar opposite of how she was in life, and for a single traitorous moment, Cora thinks that Delilah deserves it. To be looked at with fear instead of jealousy. Because Delilah had never known anything but adoration, and a grim part of Cora is satisfied that for once, Delilah has to occupy a body that is gross and jagged like hers.

I am not going to let anyone take away what makes me a human. 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. I know blood and guts is fun for you, but this could just as easily have been me or Cora. Would you joke around when you mopped us off the floor? Or drop your two-dollar Sonic key chain in what used to be our brains? No, I’m not going to sit back and shut up for twenty bucks an hour, which, by the way, is not enough to live in fucking Manhattan. I want every person in this whole city to keep their lights on and look for this asshole, to lock their doors and buy those handguns that you Americans love so much, because I’m tired of scrubbing Asian women off the walls. I’m so fucking tired.”

No one wants to look harder at us. To imagine that we’re real people. Every day I clean up their brains and blood and I know that a white man coming for me isn’t an if, it’s a when. And the worst part is I know no one will find out who did it, no one will write about it in the newspapers, because who cares if another Chinese girl is dead—they’ll hear me screaming and just put in their headphones and keep walking. Even now, you want to walk away from us because it’s gross, because blood and guts make you uncomfortable. But it doesn’t matter if we’re uncomfortable—we don’t get to look away. We’re dying and no one can hear us.”

Wasn’t she supposed to outgrow the childish reflex of crying when men scold her? Some part of her feels like she’s still a little girl in pigtails and overalls that her third grade teacher can put in time-out.

But when it grows louder—crisp and repetitive—and Harvey and Yifei both look up, Cora realizes that it’s not the murmurs of her anxious mind. It’s footsteps on gravel.

The footsteps grow louder, closer, and Cora’s skin prickles, her heartbeat beginning to pick up. It is the unknowing of the darkness that unnerves her. The secrets that it keeps.

It is a slow and quiet drowning, to not know your destination.

This is when she dies. The weak link, the boring character in a horror movie who nobody liked anyway, the one with no defining traits, a name no one can remember.

Tears well in her eyes and Cora knows she’s doing a good job of pretending to be a grieving widow, but the secretary doesn’t understand that you don’t have to know someone to mourn them, that Cora has seen this man be unmade, and now she knows what his smile used to look like, the smile that was blasted off his face with a machine gun.

Because maybe a hungry ghost has changed, but it is still her sister’s soul somewhere deep inside of it, suffering. If it weren’t her sister, it wouldn’t be here with her. Cora and Delilah were always drawn to each other. It was inevitable, that’s what Delilah said. At least, until the end.

Half the things she thinks aren’t even real. Thoughts are nothing at all, they come from nowhere and disappear into nothing and you can’t wade in their river as they pass by—that’s what her therapist said. But Cora knows that her therapist means Cora’s thoughts, not everyone’s thoughts.

Cora can’t help but laugh, can’t help but wonder if, under different circumstances, Harvey could be her friend and not her designated corpse-finder. Cora gave up on real friends a long time ago. All she ever had was Delilah, the one person she thought could never leave. She knows that she and Harvey are only hanging out by circumstance, because both of them are too strange for anyone else.

The mirror slips from Cora’s hands, shattering on the ground. “That’s bad luck,” Harvey says. Then he reads Cora’s expression. “What?” he says. When she doesn’t answer, he follows her gaze, turns around, and comes face-to-face with what’s left of Delilah Zeng.

I am staring into hell, Cora realizes all at once, the flames lashing higher as if in agreement, the smoke blurring away the rest of the room. The flames are whispers of hands, orange silk scarves clawing at the remains of the house, dragging it down with them. They reach for Cora’s face, but the paper is nothing but withered black on the plate and the flames are growing smaller and smaller, the door closing. The flames die out in a tiny flicker of yellow light, like a last word cut off, spiraling into silent smoke.

Cora feels a bit like she’s just showered, peeled all her skin off. Bath by white-hot flame, nothing but raw, bloody muscles and blue veins left of her. She’s more okay than she’s felt in weeks, the haze of exhaustion stripped away. Is this how her Auntie Lois feels when she talks to God?

Delilah has always been Cora’s God. For one brief, sharp moment, Cora thinks of her mother singing from treetops above kale farms and wonders which of them is crazier, what part of them shattered and made them want to hand their souls to someone else.

“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.”

She never asked for these ghosts. Delilah is dragging her across planes. Even in death, she has Cora on a string, pulling taut around her throat. This time, it’s too much.

Cora might have followed her sister to China, but all of these ghosts under her blankets, rooting through her fridge, peering through her keyholes—this is too much, even for Cora. She needs to send her sister back to wherever she came from.