Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

What she doesn’t like is that she can’t find any toilet paper at the end of the world.

Apparently, people do strange things when they’re scared of dying, and one of them is hoarding toilet paper.

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.

Cora has never once eaten a bat, but it has somehow become common knowledge that Chinese people eat bats just to start plagues.

In her dreams, the hand is a white spider. Its legs are translucent, its body the color of bones. It latches its fangs into Delilah and her arm falls from her body like a cut of meat. Delilah collapses into parts, a puzzle coming undone, and Cora wonders at what point a person stops being one singular person and becomes a collection of parts. An arm is not a person, so if Delilah is an arm underneath a train and a leg on a subway platform and a head lost in the crevices of the tracks, which part is the real Delilah?

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.

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

The CDC says to wash your hands, so Cora is just being a Good American by washing her hands twice. If she empties her purse into a UV light box to sterilize everything inside, if she has three air purifiers for her tiny apartment, if she wears gloves on the subway—all of it is reasonable now.

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

Cora never intended to live alone, not in New York. But she learned very quickly that most roommates do not take kindly to the constant smell of Clorox and all-night whirring of air purifiers.

and a bookshelf full of books that Cora plans to read one day—books

Yet she still feels like a puppeteer dragging her wooden body through the motions, and maybe she always will. Maybe she can’t exist without being her sister’s parasite.

She knows that even if the grainy MTA footage of the man’s face could be used to find him, his lawyers would talk about how he was a good father and a responsible worker and was probably just having a bad day. Then they would comb through Delilah’s diaries and Instagram and try to prove that she was the kind of girl who would throw herself in front of a train. And when that didn’t work, they would turn to Cora, crack her open, learn all her secrets, and try to say that Cora pushed her.

Her sister’s body has already been destroyed. All Cora has left are memories, and the lawyers would rip those apart too.

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.

On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, a door opens. The starving dead crawl out, mouths full of dust, and reach for a home that has already forgotten them. Their stomachs scream for food, but their tongues are heavy and dry, their necks as thin as needles. They lick the tears of the living from the dirt, and sometimes, it is enough to sate them. But sometimes, the hunger only yawns wider.

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.

He pulls down her masks, casts them to the ground, and spits in her face.

Ohhhh hellll to the fuckin naw!!!!! This bitch would b skewered!!!!! SKEWERED!!!!

People are asking if she’s okay, drawn by the car alarm, but Cora can’t answer without opening her mouth, so she just cries and scrubs her mouth with her sleeve and hopes that the tears will wash her eyes out even though she knows you can’t sterilize eyes without blinding yourself. Cora will always have to live with the knowledge that she can never wash this man away, not completely.

Cora thinks it must take an incredible amount of anger to kill someone with an axe in 2020.

In a way, Cora doesn’t think that should be allowed. 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.

So either the dots are completely harmless floaters or her retina has detached and she’s going blind, and only a doctor can tell her which it is. Cora worries until she’s dry heaving over a trash can and finally decides to call an optometrist.

And Cora doesn’t want anyone digging around in her brain, not anymore. She already knows there are too many frayed wires up there, too many broken circuits. 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.

A sharp laugh forces its way out of Cora’s throat. Those people should see what fear truly is. Let them taste their sister’s blood, watch her headless body twitch, hear her throat still wheezing for breaths that won’t come, gurgling as the blood drowns down the wrong pipe. Let them remember it every time they close their eyes, whenever they hear the sound of a train, whenever salt stings their lips. Remind them that the same thing could happen to them any day, and then let them talk about what fear really means.

the fact that something is objectively safe doesn’t mean her mind won’t short-circuit anyway, make her hyperventilate until her limbs lose so much oxygen she can’t stand up.

But clearly, it’s not a choice anymore. Closing your eyes doesn’t stop monsters from devouring you.

She would later learn that this was just another intrusive thought, but in that moment, it felt realer than anything in her so-called life.

“You’re my sister.” “That’s just a word,” Cora said. Delilah scrunched her face up. “All words are just words,” she said. “We’re sisters, so us being together is inevitable. It doesn’t matter how we feel about it. Just like it doesn’t matter how we feel about the sun setting. It happens anyway.”

It didn’t feel that way at the time, but it was one of the kindest things Delilah ever said. She gave Cora something better than an abstract idea of love: a promise. That whenever Cora drew too close to the ledge, Delilah would be there.

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.”

This is the difference between Yifei and Cora—Yifei turns her pain into a plan, while Cora scrubs her pain away with Blood Buster. Cora is aware all at once that she should be the one fighting. She’s the one whose sister died because of people like the one Harvey calls Batman. All that anger should be hers. But instead, she’s hiding behind two masks and a baggy hazmat suit because the thought that she could do anything meaningful never even occurred to her. Cora cannot fathom her actions mattering beyond her own mind. She feels herself slump smaller, as if her hazmat suit is eating her alive.

Cora has not been to a bar since the Before Times. It’s only been a month since bars were cleared to reopen, and Cora still feels a bit like she’s standing on a land mine. Even though they’re technically outdoors, the temporary plywood plexiglass structure feels like a tiny room and she can taste the spit of all the other customers in the air. The bartender wears a mask and makes a show of sterilizing the glasses in a blue light box, but Cora still hates the grime of the barstool seat against her bare legs, the greasy table under her elbows. She sanitizes her hands again, even though she isn’t putting any food directly from her hands into her mouth, but she thinks maybe the scent of alcohol will purify the air if she uses enough of it.

But Yifei had suggested the bar and Harvey hadn’t seemed the least bit bothered, so Cora couldn’t just say that the air was full of COVID, because two out of three people thought it was fine and Cora is always too careful.

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.”

In that moment, she wishes that Delilah—however she is—were here. Cora knows how pathetic that makes her. She’s twenty-four, not fourteen, and she should know how to navigate without her sister. But she has always felt like she’s out at sea with only a star map and no stars at all overhead, voyaging somewhere far and nameless, and Delilah always knew where to go. All Cora can do is tread water until her arms grow numb, and float on her back and let the current rock her like a piece of garbage. It is a slow and quiet drowning, to not know your destination.

I don’t want to die here, Cora thinks, and the loudness of the thought shocks her, because it’s been a long time since she’s wanted anything this badly. But the thought sinks its teeth in, and the thought that comes after is an electric current zapping through her veins: I will not die like my sister in this disgusting train station.

“You better be fucking dying!” Yifei says. “You know when you call more than once, it pushes the call through even if I have Do Not Disturb on? You called four times!

“You were with Cora last night at four a.m.?” she says. “Harvey, I swear to god if you two are fucking—

We are going to feed these hungry ghosts actual food, not whatever disrespectful shit you two threw at them last night, and they are going to go away because this isn’t a goddamn kung fu movie and this is how it works in real life.

“She would have liked this,” Cora says. “People staring at a picture of her in her underwear. Too bad now all her flesh is gone.”

“I think that’s what she hates more than anything,” Cora says. “Not being pretty anymore.”

Harvey and Yifei say nothing, and Cora knows she has broken a rule: don’t speak ill of the dead. But their sympathy makes her skin crawl. She doesn’t want it.

It won’t fit, Cora thinks. Ryan’s body resists, limbs twitching as Delilah’s bony hands grab at it, angling, twisting, forcing it down. Cora thinks that surely Delilah’s thin throat will break and her head will roll to the floor, but piece by piece, Ryan is crushed into her trash-compactor jaw, rammed down into her stomach. Other ghosts begin crawling out of Delilah’s shadow, shredding through couch cushions, licking hot oil splashes from the floor by the oven, tearing off the hinges of the fridge. But Delilah is the only one standing, the only one who was invited to the feast.

She clambers across the couch like a spider, jaw clamping around Paisley’s head, screams swallowed in the chamber of Delilah’s throat. Paisley’s body snaps in half at the rib cage, legs flopping down to the carpet, ribbons of organs twitching as the upper half of her body pulses down Delilah’s throat. Delilah grabs a leg in each hand and holds the rest of Paisley up in the air, feeds her into her mouth with a wet slurp.

Delilah’s neck pulls back, a fishing line reeled in, examining her plate. She shoves the dumpling into her mouth, the round form rolling down her throat. Then she plants both hands on the edge of the table, lifts it up, and slides the entire feast into her mouth. All of the bowls and plates rush toward her gaping mouth, disappearing into its dark chasm. She crunches down on porcelain and candles and meat knives and napkins. Harvey raises his hands and slides his chair back as if afraid she’ll inhale his fingers too. All around them the other ghosts murmur, the kitchen cabinets shuddering open and shut, spices falling and bursting on the ground where the other ghosts lick them up.

“She ate all my plates,” Yifei whispers. “She ate your roommate!” Harvey says. “Isn’t that the bigger problem?” Then he folds forward onto the table, groaning. “I’m gonna pass out.”

The shadows on the wall feel quieter, a soft, flat gray. These past few weeks, shadows have been making Cora’s skin itch like her bones want to escape, her prey sense choking her heartbeat in her throat. But now, in the silent aftermath, Cora doesn’t sense Delilah anymore.

because the not knowing and guessing is always worse than the knowing.