Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

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.

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 thinks about the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the Mona Lisa, and all the beautiful women immortalized in oil paint, and wonders if they said cruel things too, if their words had mattered at all or just the roundness of their eyes and softness of their cheeks, if beautiful people are allowed to break your heart and get away with it.

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.

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.

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

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.

In a strange way, Cora feels bad for Harvey. Most people don’t know how easy it is to end a life. In video games, you can swallow rounds of bullets before going down. But in real life, bodies are delicate. Skulls pop open like biscuits, bones shatter beyond repair, torrents of blood rush from a small wound.

There are thousands of monsters in the world—not just the ones in folktales, but the ones in real life who push girls in front of trains—and yet, there are still people who think Cora Zeng is the most fearsome of all.

is all too easy to sink into a trance of peeling away the layers, because this is the part of cleaning that Cora likes the most—the part where you rip off the skin and what’s left is unrecognizable, transformed.

“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.”

White women are good at handling crimes, right? They call the cops, who listen to them. They get the bad guys thrown in jail. The cops will protect someone who looks like Auntie Lois, who lives in the kind of house she lives in.

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.