Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

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 is screaming, a raw sound that begins somewhere deep inside her rib cage and tears its way up her throat and becomes a hurricane, a knife-sharp cry, the last sound that many women ever make.

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.

All are welcome in God’s house, Auntie Lois says, but she always emphasizes the all, as if God is especially generous for letting someone like Cora in, like there’s something about her that’s inherently unholy.

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.

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.

She knows Father Thomas thinks of himself as a good person, that he would never turn Cora away for being Chinese. But he forgives the people who would, even though it’s not his place to dole out forgiveness on Cora’s behalf. He loves the people who would never love her.

God cannot forgive someone whose name he does not know.

Cora prefers workdays to on-call days, because then at least she isn’t waiting by the phone all day, afraid to start doing anything real in case a call comes. Something about an impending phone call always makes Cora uneasy.

A thought skewers Cora’s mind like a lobotomy—her therapist once said they were called intrusive thoughts, the most terrible, cruel things that you know you would never do but can’t help but think. Except her therapist has no way of knowing what Cora will or will not do, what’s an intrusive thought and what’s a wish.

Closing your eyes doesn’t stop monsters from devouring you.

Every night now, she floats in shallow waters of sleep, still aware of the feeling of sheets on her skin and face pressed into her pillow, never fully submerged or unaware, and she wakes feeling like she’s been treading water rather than resting.

Cora would make the perfect member of any religion, the kind of person who doesn’t want to decide, who wants a textbook to tell her what to do.

“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.”

Cora knows it’s supposed to be a good thing, that Delilah isn’t suffering anymore. But now Cora is the only one left suffering, and somehow that doesn’t feel like a victory.

So maybe there were worlds inside Delilah that Cora never saw, will never see.

The end of the world lasts longer than Cora expects.