Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

Harvey’s uncle owns a dry-cleaning shop in Chinatown that expanded into crime scene cleanup, since hardly anyone needs their dry cleaning done during a pandemic, but a surprising number of people need brains scrubbed off their walls and even cheapskate families don’t like doing that kind of thing themselves.

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.”

She knows that memories are not like turning pages in a photo album until you find the right one—every time you recall something, your brain rebuilds it from scratch, and every time it’s just a little bit different.

Cora closes her eyes for a moment, takes a steadying breath, and closes the image she has open. But all the icons have loaded now, and she can see small red squares in the thumbnails of Asian girls drowning in blood. All 374 of them.