Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

But maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora. And Cora doesn’t know what she’ll do when she knows his name, when she’s seen his face.

She never told Delilah about the way she knows things, about the thoughts that leech onto her skin and drink her dry. So maybe there were worlds inside Delilah that Cora never saw, will never see.

“I tested negative but this cough won’t go away, and now Harvey is making me stand out in the rain.”

wants to offer to drive but she doesn’t have a fucking license, never learned to drive because she was too much of a nervous wreck in high school to even ride a bike much less operate machinery

The thought feels worse than any dirt or germ or contamination Cora has ever imagined. The person she fed from her hand, let into her apartment, hugged and cried to, wasn’t even her sister.

Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase. Any kind of wanting leaves a scar. The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget. Auntie Z

She knows that maybe this started with one person, one man she could hate for everything he’d taken from her, one single villain she could channel all her rage into, turn over to the police, hunt down and kill if she worked up the courage. But it wasn’t just one person anymore. It was a movement.

Cora meets her gaze across the dark room, Yuxi’s neck drooping like a wilted flower, and she wonders how Yuxi would look if she had a face left that could cry or scream or talk, if someone hadn’t stripped away what made her a person. Everyone wants Asian girls to look pretty. No one wants them to talk.

Yuxi He moved to America to become a doctor, worked during a pandemic, got blasted to pieces in her bathtub, and Cora would bet that no one even contacted her family. No one knew to burn joss paper for her, leaving her ghost starving and suffering because there couldn’t be peace even in death, not for someone like her. “I’m sorry,” Cora whispers, tears hitting the trackpad. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

to kill her right now if she wanted to, just walk over and pop her skull off her shoulders and eat it, and Cora wouldn’t even fight it because Yuxi deserves her anger, should be allowed to raze the city to ashes if she wants to, rip Cora’s life from her chest and take it for herself. But the ghost just stands in the corner and watches her, and Cora feels truly pathetic crying in front of someone who understands suffering better than she ever will.

Cora Zeng decides in that moment, with the whole block staring at her and headlights searing her vision and a hungry ghost looming behind her, that this is the kind of person she will be. The dirty street urchin who eats dogs and cats and bats raw, the communist spy who wants to kill Americans, the virgin in a schoolgirl skirt that will seduce him and ruin his life—all of his crooked fantasies can be true for all she cares. 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.

But the man is stunned, out of words to say. Sex dolls aren’t supposed to talk back.

Instead of terror, she feels an ache bloom in her chest. Another person who was forgotten.

Cora turns around. The tunnel, as far back as Cora can see, is filled with hungry ghosts. Like a field of gray flowers, their heads gently bob and sway, their shapes growing hazy the farther back they go. Hundreds of them. And for a single moment, Cora does not see their withered faces and empty eyes. She sees the faces in Officer Wang’s photographs, back when they had skin and eyes. The hundreds of girls torn apart, stripped of their dreams and then their bodies, suffering even in death. Cora wipes her face on her sleeve, then tightens her grip on the tanks and moves forward, the parade of footsteps shuffling behind her, an ocean of gravel scraping across the tracks. It’s hard to breathe, but she keeps going, imagines that one of the ghosts is her sister, even though she’ll never know because both life and death stripped her body from her.

The smoke stings Cora’s eyes, so she closes them and feels the rumble of flames and the screams and the sirens and for the first time in her life, Cora prays and means it. She prays that this is enough. That this will placate the suffering dead. Even if it only gives them a moment of peace, it’s worth it. Cora can never give them everything they deserve, can never make up for what’s been done. But she can see them, she can hear them, she can give them this much.

In silence, they light the lanterns, feed them into the river’s mouth, watch them disappear into beyond. Cora’s fingers tremble as she strikes the matches, her aunt’s bag seemingly never-ending. White sheets begin to bloom in the dark waters, like butterflies rising to the surface. The ghosts tear through the water, chasing after the lanterns, walking through the river like it’s deep sand. At last, there is only one lantern left. Cora holds it in both hands, looks across the river at a single ghost swaying along with the river’s pull. She wonders if Delilah can hear her from across whatever expanse she has crossed. If she has heard her this whole time, or if the doors between them are sealed shut. Would you have come back for me? she wants to ask, face turned toward the sky. But she will never know the answer.

But for the first time in a long time, she can start to see her life in terms of things she likes instead of things she hates.