Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers

Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers was first published in the October 2015 QUEERS DESTROY HORROR! special issue of Nightmare Magazine.

As my date—Harvey? Harvard?—brags about his alma mater and Manhattan penthouse, I take a bite of overpriced kale and watch his ugly thoughts swirl overhead. It’s hard to pay attention to him with my stomach growling and my body ajitter, for all he’s easy on the eyes. Harvey doesn’t look much older than I am, but his thoughts, covered in spines and centipede feet, glisten with ancient grudges and carry an entitled, Ivy League stink.

“My apartment has the most amazing view of the city,” he’s saying, his thoughts sliding long over each other like dark, bristling snakes. Each one is as thick around as his Rolex-draped wrist. “I just installed a Jacuzzi along the west wall so that I can watch the sun set while I relax after getting back from the gym.”

I nod, half-listening to the words coming out of his mouth. I’m much more interested in the ones hissing through the teeth of the thoughts above him.

She’s got perfect tits, lil’ handfuls just waiting to be squeezed. I love me some perky tits.

I’m gonna fuck this bitch so hard she’ll never walk straight again.

Gross. “That sounds wonderful,” I say as I sip champagne and gaze at him through my false eyelashes, hoping the dimmed screen of my iPhone isn’t visible through the tablecloth below. This dude is boring as hell, and I’m already back on Tindr, thumbing through next week’s prospective dinner dates.

She’s so into me, she’ll be begging for it by the end of the night.

I can’t wait to cut her up.

My eyes flick up sharply. “I’m sorry?” I say.

Harvey blinks. “I said, Argentina is a beautiful country.”

Pretty little thing. She’ll look so good spread out all over the floor.

“Right,” I say. “Of course.” Blood’s pulsing through my head so hard it probably looks like I’ve got a wicked blush.

I’m so excited, I’m half hard already.

You and me both, I think, turning my iPhone off and smiling my prettiest smile.

The waiter swings by with another bottle of champagne and a dessert menu burned into a wooden card, but I wave him off. “Dinner’s been lovely,” I whisper to Harvey, leaning in and kissing his cheek, “but I’ve got a different kind of dessert in mind.”

Ahhh, go the ugly thoughts, settling into a gentle, rippling wave across his shoulders. I’m going to take her home and split her all the way from top to bottom. Like a fucking fruit tart.

That is not the way I normally eat fruit tarts, but who am I to judge? I passed on dessert, after all.

When he pays the bill, he can’t stop grinning at me. Neither can the ugly thoughts hissing and cackling behind his ear.

“What’s got you so happy?” I ask coyly.

“I’m just excited to spend the rest of the evening with you,” he replies.

The fucker has his own parking spot! No taxis for us; he’s even brought the Tesla. The leather seats smell buttery and sweet, and as I slide in and make myself comfortable, the rankness of his thoughts leaves a stain in the air. It’s enough to leave me light-headed, almost purring. As we cruise uptown toward his fancy-ass penthouse, I ask him to pull over near the Queensboro Bridge for a second.

Annoyance flashes across his face, but he parks the Tesla in a side street. I lurch into an alley, tottering over empty cans and discarded cigarettes in my four-inch heels, and puke a trail of champagne and kale over to the dumpster shoved up against the apartment building.

“Are you all right?” Harvey calls.

“I’m fine,” I slur. Not a single curious window opens overhead.

His steps echo down the alley. He’s gotten out of the car, and he’s walking toward me like I’m an animal that he needs to approach carefully.

Maybe I should do it now.

Yes! Now, now, while the bitch is occupied.

But what about the method? I won’t get to see her insides all pretty everywhere—

I launch myself at him, fingers digging sharp into his body, and bite down hard on his mouth. He tries to shout, but I swallow the sound and shove my tongue inside. There, just behind his teeth, is what I’m looking for: ugly thoughts, viscous as boiled tendon. I suck them howling and fighting into my throat as Harvey’s body shudders, little mewling noises escaping from his nose.

I feel decadent and filthy, swollen with the cruelest dreams I’ve ever tasted. I can barely feel Harvey’s feeble struggles; in this state, with the darkest parts of himself drained from his mouth into mine, he’s no match for me.

They’re never as strong as they think they are.

By the time he finally goes limp, the last of the thoughts disappearing down my throat, my body’s already changing. My limbs elongate, growing thicker, and my dress feels too tight as my ribs expand. I’ll have to work quickly. I strip off my clothes with practiced ease, struggling a little to work the bodice free of the gym-toned musculature swelling under my skin.

It doesn’t take much time to wrestle Harvey out of his clothes, either. My hands are shaking but strong, and as I button up his shirt around me and shrug on his jacket, my jaw has creaked into an approximation of his and the ridges of my fingerprints have reshaped themselves completely. Harvey is so much bigger than me, and the expansion of space eases the pressure on my boiling belly, stuffed with ugly thoughts as it is. I stuff my discarded outfit into my purse, my high heels clicking against the empty glass jar at its bottom, and sling the strap over my now-broad shoulder.

I kneel to check Harvey’s pulse—slow but steady—before rolling his unconscious body up against the dumpster, covering him with trash bags. Maybe he’ll wake up, maybe he won’t. Not my problem, as long as he doesn’t wake in the next ten seconds to see his doppelganger strolling out of the alley, wearing his clothes and fingering his wallet and the keys to his Tesla.

There’s a cluster of drunk college kids gawking at Harvey’s car. I level an arrogant stare at them—oh, but do I wear this body so much better than he did!—and they scatter.

I might not have a license, but Harvey’s body remembers how to drive.

The Tesla revs sweetly under me, but I ditch it in a parking garage in Bedford, stripping in the relative privacy of the second-to-highest level, edged behind a pillar. After laying the keys on the driver’s seat over Harvey’s neatly folded clothes and shutting the car door, I pull the glass jar from my purse and vomit into it as quietly as I can. Black liquid, thick and viscous, hits the bottom of the jar, hissing and snarling Harvey’s words. My body shudders, limbs retracting, spine reshaping itself, as I empty myself of him.

It takes a few more minutes to ease back into an approximation of myself, at least enough to slip my dress and heels back on, pocket the jar, and comb my tangled hair out with my fingers. The parking attendant nods at me as I walk out of the garage, his eyes sliding disinterested over me, his thoughts a gray, indistinct murmur.

The L train takes me back home to Bushwick, and when I push open the apartment door, Aiko is in the kitchen, rolling mochi paste out on the counter.

“You’re here,” I say stupidly. I’m still a little foggy from shaking off Harvey’s form, and strains of his thoughts linger in me, setting my blood humming uncomfortably hot.

“I’d hope so. You invited me over.” She hasn’t changed out of her catering company clothes, and her short, sleek hair frames her face, aglow in the kitchen light. Not a single ugly thought casts its shadow across the stove behind her. “Did you forget again?”

“No,” I lie, kicking my shoes off at the door. “I totally would never do something like that. Have you been here long?”

“About an hour, nothing unusual. The doorman let me in, and I kept your spare key.” She smiles briefly, soft compared to the brusque movements of her hands. She’s got flour on her rolled-up sleeves, and my heart flutters the way it never does when I’m out hunting. “I’m guessing your date was pretty shit. You probably wouldn’t have come home at all if it had gone well.”

“You could say that.” I reach into my purse and stash the snarling jar in the fridge, where it clatters against the others, nearly a dozen bottles of malignant leftovers labeled as health drinks.

Aiko nods to her right. “I brought you some pastries from the event tonight. They’re in the paper bag on the counter.”

“You’re an angel.” I edge past her so I don’t make bodily contact. Aiko thinks I have touch issues, but the truth is, she smells like everything good in the world, solid and familiar, both light and heavy at the same time, and it’s enough to drive a person mad.

“He should have bought you a cab back, at least,” says Aiko, reaching for a bowl of red bean paste. I fiddle with the bag of pastries, pretending to select something from its contents. “I swear, it’s like you’re a magnet for terrible dates.”

She’s not wrong; I’m very careful about who I court. After all, that’s how I stay fed. But no one in the past has been as delicious, as hideously depraved as Harvey. No one else has been a killer.

I’m going to take her home and split her all the way from top to bottom.

“Maybe I’m too weird,” I say.

“You’re probably too normal. Only socially maladjusted creeps use Tindr.”

“Gee, thanks,” I complain.

She grins, flicking a bit of red bean paste at me. I lick it off of my arm. “You know what I mean. Come visit my church with me sometime, yeah? There are plenty of nice boys there.”

“The dating scene in this city depresses me,” I mutter, flicking open my Tindr app with my thumb. “I’ll pass.”

“Come on, Jen, put that away.” Aiko hesitates. “Your mom called while you were out. She wants you to move back to Flushing.”

I bark out a short, sharp laugh, my good mood evaporating. “What else is new?”

“She’s getting old,” Aiko says. “And she’s lonely.”

“I bet. All her mahjong partners are dead, pretty much.” I can imagine her in her little apartment in Flushing, huddled over her laptop, floral curtains pulled tight over the windows to shut out the rest of the world. My ma, whose apartment walls are alive with hissing, covered in the ugly, bottled remains of her paramours.

Aiko sighs, joining me at the counter and leaning back against me. For once, I don’t move away. Every muscle in my body is tense, straining. I’m afraid I might catch fire, but I don’t want her to leave. “Would it kill you to be kind to her?”

I think about my baba evaporating into thin air when I was five years old, what was left of him coiled in my ma’s stomach. “Are you telling me to go back?”

She doesn’t say anything for a bit. “No,” she says at last. “That place isn’t good for you. That house isn’t good for anyone.”

Just a few inches away, an army of jars full of black, viscous liquid wait in the fridge, their contents muttering to themselves. Aiko can’t hear them, but each slosh against the glass is a low, nasty hiss:

who does she think she is, the fucking cunt

should’ve got her when I had the chance

I can still feel Harvey, his malice and ugly joy, on my tongue. I’m already full of things my ma gave me. “I’m glad we agree.”

Over the next few weeks, I gorge myself on the pickup artists and grad students populating the St. Marks hipster bars, but nothing tastes good after Harvey. Their watery essences, squeezed from their owners with barely a whimper of protest, barely coat my stomach. Sometimes I take too much. I scrape them dry and leave them empty, shaking their forms off like rainwater when I’m done.

I tell Aiko I’ve been partying when she says I look haggard. She tells me to quit drinking so much, her face impassive, her thoughts clouded with concern. She starts coming over more often, even cooking dinner for me, and her presence both grounds me and drives me mad.

“I’m worried about you,” she says as I lie on the floor, flipping listlessly through pages of online dating profiles, looking for the emptiness, the rot, that made Harvey so appealing. She’s cooking my mom’s lo mien recipe, the oily smell making my skin itch. “You’ve lost so much weight and there’s nothing in your fridge, just a bunch of empty jam jars.”

I don’t tell her that Harvey’s lies under my bed, that I lick its remnants every night to send my nerves back into euphoria. I don’t tell her how often I dream about my ma’s place, the shelves of jars she never let me touch. “Is it really okay for you to spend so much time away from your catering business?” I say instead. “Time is money, and Jimmy gets pissy when he has to make all the desserts without you.”

Aiko sets a bowl of lo mein in front of me and joins me on the ground. “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than here,” she says, and a dangerous, luminous sweetness blooms in my chest.

But the hunger grows worse every day, and soon I can’t trust myself around her. I deadbolt the door, and when she stops by my apartment to check on me, I refuse to let her in. Texts light up my phone like a fleet of fireworks as I huddle under a blanket on the other side, my face pressed against the wood, my fingers twitching.

“Please, Jen, I don’t understand,” she says from behind the door. “Did I do something wrong?”

I can’t wait to cut her up, I think, and hate myself even more.

By the time Aiko leaves, her footsteps echoing down the hallway, I’ve dug deep gouges in the door’s paint with my nails and teeth, my mouth full of her intoxicating scent.

My ma’s apartment in Flushing still smells the same. She’s never been a clean person, and the sheer amount of junk stacked up everywhere has increased since I left home for good. Piles of newspapers, old food containers, and stuffed toys make it hard to push the door open, and the stench makes me cough. Her hoard is up to my shoulders, even higher in some places, and as I pick my way through it, the sounds that colored my childhood grow louder: the constant whine of a Taiwanese soap opera bleeding past mountains of trash, and the cruel cacophony of many familiar voices:

Touch me again and I swear I’ll kill you—

How many times have I told you not to wash the clothes like that, open your mouth—

Hope her ugly chink daughter isn’t home tonight—

Under the refuse she’s hoarded the walls are honeycombed with shelves, lined with what’s left of my ma’s lovers. She keeps them like disgusting, mouthwatering trophies, desires pickling in stomach acid and bile. I could probably call them by name if I wanted to; when I was a kid, I used to lie on the couch and watch my baba’s ghost flicker across their surfaces.

My ma’s huddled in the kitchen, the screen of her laptop casting a sickly blue glow on her face. Her thoughts cover her quietly like a blanket. “I made some niu ro mien,” she says. “It’s on the stove. Your baba’s in there.”

My stomach curls, but whether it’s from revulsion or hunger I can’t tell. “Thanks, ma,” I say. I find a bowl that’s almost clean and wash it out, ladling a generous portion of thick noodles for myself. The broth smells faintly of hongtashan tobacco, and as I force it down almost faster than I can swallow, someone else’s memories of my childhood flash before my eyes: pushing a small girl on a swing set at the park; laughing as she chases pigeons down the street; raising a hand for a second blow as her mother launches herself toward us, between us, teeth bared—

“How is it?” she says.

Foul. “Great,” I say. It settles my stomach, at least for a little while. But my baba was no Harvey, and I can already feel the hunger creeping back, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

“You ate something you shouldn’t have, didn’t you, Meimei.” My ma looks up at me for the first time since I walked in, and she looks almost as tired as I feel. “Why didn’t you learn from me? I taught you to stick to petty criminals. I taught you to stay invisible.”

She’d tried to teach me to disappear into myself, the way she’d disappeared into this apartment. “I know I messed up,” I tell her. “Nothing tastes good any more, and I’m always hungry. But I don’t know what to do.”

My ma sighs. “Once you’ve tasted a killer, there’s no turning back. You’ll crave that intensity until you die. And it can take a long time for someone like us to die, Meimei.”

It occurs to me that I don’t actually know how old my ma is. Her thoughts are old and covered in knots, stitched together from the remnants of other people’s experiences. How long has she been fighting this condition, these overwhelming, gnawing desires?

“Move back in,” she’s saying. “There’s so much tong activity here, the streets leak with food. You barely even have to go outside, just crack open a window and you can smell it brewing. The malice, the knives and bullets…”

The picture she paints makes me shudder, my mouth itching. “I can’t just leave everything, Ma,” I say. “I have my own life now.” And I can’t live in this apartment, with its lack of sunlight and fresh air, its thick stench of regret and malice.

“So what happens if you go back? You lose control, you take a bite out of Aiko?” She sees me stiffen. “That girl cares about you so much. The best thing you can do for her is keep away. Don’t let what happened to your father happen to Aiko.” She reaches for my hand, and I pull away. “Stay here, Meimei. We only have each other.”

“This isn’t what I want.” I’m backing up, and my shoulder bumps into the trash, threatening to bury us both in rotting stuffed animals. “This isn’t safe, Ma. You shouldn’t even stay here.”

My ma coughs, her eyes glinting in the dark. The cackling from her jar collection swells in a vicious tide, former lovers rocking back and forth on their shelves. “Someday you’ll learn that there’s more to life than being selfish, Meimei.”

That’s when I turn my back on her, pushing past the debris and bullshit her apartment’s stuffed with. I don’t want to die, but as far as I’m concerned, living like my ma, sequestered away from the rest of the world, her doors barricaded with heaps of useless trinkets and soured memories, is worse than being dead.

The jars leer and cackle as I go, and she doesn’t try to follow me.

The scent of Flushing clings to my skin, and I can’t wait to shake it off. I get on the train as soon as I can, and I’m back on Tindr as soon as the M passes above ground. Tears blur my eyes, rattling free with the movement of the train. I scrub them away angrily, and when my vision clears, I glance back at the screen. A woman with sleek, dark hair, slim tortoiseshell glasses, and a smile that seems a little shy, but strangely handsome, glows up at me. In the picture, she’s framed by the downtown cityscape. She has rounded cheeks, but there’s a strange flat quality to her face. And then, of course, there are the dreams shadowing her, so strong they leak from the screen in a thick, heady miasma. Every one of those myriad eyes is staring straight at me, and my skin prickles.

I scan the information on her profile page, my blood beating so hard I can feel my fingertips pulsing: relatively young-looking, but old enough to be my mother’s cousin. Likes: exploring good food, spending rainy days at the Cloisters, browsing used book stores. Location: Manhattan.

She looks a little like Aiko.

She’s quick to message me back. As we flirt, cold sweat and adrenaline send uncomfortable shivers through my body. Everything is sharper, and I can almost hear Harvey’s jar laughing. Finally, the words I’m waiting for pop up:

I’d love to meet you. Are you free tonight?

I make a quick stop-off back home, and my heart hammers as I get on the train bound for the Lower East Side, red lipstick immaculate and arms shaking beneath my crisp designer coat, a pair of Mom’s glass jars tucked in my purse.

Her name is Seo-yun, and as she watches me eat, her eyes flickering from my mouth to my throat, her smile is so sharp I could cut myself on it. “I love places like this,” she says. “Little authentic spots with only twelve seats. Have you been to Haru before?”

“I haven’t,” I murmur. My fingers are clumsy with my chopsticks, tremors clicking them together, making it hard to pick up my food. God, she smells delectable. I’ve never met someone whose mind is so twisted, so rich; a malignancy as well developed and finely crafted as the most elegant dessert.

I’m going to take her home and split her open like a—

I can already taste her on my tongue, the best meal I’ve never had.

“You’re in for a treat,” Seo-yun says as the waiter—the only other staff beside the chef behind the counter—brings us another pot of tea. “This restaurant started as a stall in a subway station back in Japan.”

“Oh wow,” I say. “That’s…amazing.”

“I think so, too. I’m glad they expanded into Manhattan.”

Behind her kind eyes, a gnarled mess of ancient, ugly thoughts writhes like the tails of a rat king. I’ve never seen so many in one place. They crawl from her mouth and ears, creeping through the air on deep-scaled legs, their voices like the drone of descending locusts.

I’m not her first. I can tell that already. But then, she isn’t mine, either.

I spend the evening sweating through my dress, nearly dropping my chopsticks. I can’t stop staring at the ugly thoughts, dropping from her lips like swollen beetles. They skitter over the tablecloth toward me, whispering obscenities at odds with Seo-yun’s gentle voice, hissing what they’d like to do to me. It takes everything in me not to pluck them from the table and crunch them deep between my teeth right then and there, to pour into her lap and rip her mind clean.

Seo-yun is too much for me, but I’m in too far, too hard; I need to have her.

She smiles at me. “Not hungry?”

I glance down at my plate. I’ve barely managed a couple of nigiri. “I’m on a diet,” I mutter.

“I understand,” she says earnestly. The ugly thoughts crawl over the tops of her hands, iridescent drops spilling into her soy sauce dish.

When the waiter finally disappears into the kitchen, I move in to kiss her across the table. She makes a startled noise, gentle pink spreading across her face, but she doesn’t pull away. My elbow sinks into the exoskeleton of one of the thought-beetles, crushing it into black, moist paste against my skin.

I open my mouth to take the first bite.

“So, I’m curious,” murmurs Seo-yun, her breath brushing my lips. “Who’s Aiko?”

My eyes snap open. Seo-yun smiles, her voice warm and tender, all her edges dark. “She seems sweet, that’s all. I’m surprised you haven’t had a taste of her yet.”

I back up so fast that I knock over my teacup, spilling scalding tea over everything. But Seo-yun doesn’t move, just keeps smiling that kind, gentle smile as her monstrous thoughts lap delicately at the tablecloth.

“She smells so ripe,” she whispers. “But you’re afraid you’ll ruin her, aren’t you? Eat her up, and for what? Just like your mum did your dad.”

No, no, no. I’ve miscalculated so badly. But I’m so hungry, and I’m too young, and she smells like ancient power. There’s no way I’ll be able to outrun her. “Get out of my head,” I manage to say.

“I’m not in your head, love. Your thoughts are spilling out everywhere around you, for everyone to see.” She leans in, propping her chin on her hand. The thoughts twisted around her head like a living crown let out a dry, rattling laugh. “I like you, Jenny. You’re ambitious. A little careless, but we can fix that.” Seo-yun taps on the table, and the waiter reappears, folding up the tablecloth deftly and sliding a single dish onto the now-bare table. An array of thin, translucent slices fan out across the plate, pale and glistening with malice. Bisected eyes glint, mouths caught mid-snarl, from every piece. “All it takes is a little practice and discipline, and no one will know what you’re really thinking.”

“On the house, of course, Ma’am,” the waiter murmurs. Before he disappears again, I catch a glimpse of dark, many-legged thoughts braided like a bracelet around his wrist.

Seo-yun takes the first bite, glancing up at me from behind her glasses. “Your mum was wrong,” she says. “She thought you were alone, just the two of you. So she taught you to only eat when you needed to, so you didn’t get caught, biding your time between meals like a snake.”

“You don’t know anything about me,” I say. The heady, rotten perfume from the dish in front of me makes my head spin with hunger.

“My mum was much the same. Eat for survival, not for pleasure.” She gestures at the plate with her chopsticks. “Please, have some.”

As the food disappears, I can only hold out for a few more slices before my chopsticks dart out, catching a piece for myself. It’s so acidic it makes my tongue burn and eyes itch, the aftertaste strangely sweet.

“Do you like it?”

I respond by wolfing down another two slices, and Seo-yun chuckles. Harvey is bland compared to this, this strangely distilled pairing of emotions—

I gasp as my body starts to warp, hands withering, burn scars twisting their way around my arms. Gasoline, malice, childish joy rush through me, a heady mix of memory and sensory overstimulation. And then Seo-yun’s lips are on mine, teeth tugging gently, swallowing, drawing it out of me. The burns fade, but the tingle of cruel euphoria lingers.

She wipes her mouth delicately. “Ate a little too fast, I think, dear,” she says. “My point, Jenny, is that I believe in eating for pleasure, not just survival. And communally, of course. There are a number of us who get together for dinner or drinks at my place, every so often, and I would love it if you would join us tonight. An eating club, of sorts.”

My gaze flickers up at her thoughts, but they’re sitting still as stones, just watching me with unblinking eyes. My mouth stings with the imprint of hers.

“Let me introduce you soon. You don’t have to be alone anymore.” As the waiter clears the plate and nods at her—no check, no receipt, nothing—Seo-yun adds, “And tonight doesn’t have to be over until we want it to be.” She offers me her hand. After a moment’s hesitation, I take it. It’s smaller than mine, and warm.

“Yes, please,” I say, watching her thoughts instead of her face.

As we leave the restaurant, she presses her lips to my forehead. Her lips sear into my skin, nerves singing white-hot with ecstasy. “They’re going to love you,” she says.

We’ll have so much fun, say the thoughts curling through her dark hair.

She hails a cab from the fleet circling the street like wolves, and we get inside.

I run into Aiko two months later in front of my apartment, as I’m carrying the last box of my stuff out. She’s got a startled look on her face, and she’s carrying a bag stuffed with ramps, kaffir lime, heart of palm—all ingredients I wouldn’t have known two months ago, before meeting Seo-yun. “You’re moving?”

I shrug, staring over her head, avoiding her eyes. “Yeah, uh. I’m seeing someone now, and she’s got a really nice place.”

“Oh.” She swallows, shifts the bag of groceries higher on her hip. “That’s great. I didn’t know you were dating anybody.” I can hear her shaky smile. “She must be feeding you well. You look healthier.”

“Thanks,” I say, though I wonder. It’s true, I’m sleeker, more confident now. I’m barely home any more, spending most of my time in Seo-yun’s Chelsea apartment, learning to cook with the array of salts and spices infused with ugly dreams, drinking wine distilled from deathbed confessions. My time stalking the streets for small-time criminals is done. But why has my confidence evaporated the moment I see Aiko? And if that ravenous hunger from Harvey is gone, why am I holding my breath to keep from breathing in her scent?

“So what’s she like?”

“Older, kind of—” kind of looks like you “—short. Likes to cook, right.” I start to edge past her. “Listen, this box is heavy and the van’s waiting for me downstairs. I should go.”

“Wait,” Aiko says, grabbing my arm. “Your mom keeps calling me. She still has my number from…before. She’s worried about you. Plus I haven’t seen you in ages, and you’re just gonna take off?”

Aiko, small and humble. Her hands smell like home, like rice flour and bad memories. How could I ever have found that appealing?

“We don’t need to say goodbye. I’m sure I’ll see you later,” I lie, shrugging her off.

“Let’s get dinner sometime,” says Aiko, but I’m already walking away.

Caterers flit like blackbirds through the apartment, dark uniforms neatly pressed, their own ugly thoughts braided and pinned out of the way. It’s a two-story affair, and well-dressed people flock together everywhere there’s space, Seo-yun’s library upstairs to the living room on ground floor. She’s even asked the caterers to prepare some of my recipes, which makes my heart glow. “You’re the best,” I say, kneeling on the bed beside her and pecking her on the cheek.

Seo-yun smiles, fixing my hair. She wears a sleek, deep blue dress, and today, her murderous thoughts are draped over her shoulders like a stole, a living, writhing cape. Their teeth glitter like tiny diamonds. I’ve never seen her so beautiful. “They’re good recipes. My friends will be so excited to taste them.”

I’ve already met many of them, all much older than I am. They make me nervous. “I’ll go check on the food,” I say.

She brushes her thumb over my cheek. “Whatever you’d like, love.”

I escape into the kitchen, murmuring brief greetings to the guests I encounter on the way. Their hideous dreams adorn them like jewels, glimmering and snatching at me as I slip past. As I walk past some of the cooks, I notice a man who looks vaguely familiar. “Hey,” I say.

“Yes, ma’am?” The caterer turns around, and I realize where I’ve seen him; there’s a picture of him and Aiko on her cellphone, the pair of them posing in front of a display at a big event they’d cooked for. My heartbeat slows.

“Aren’t you Aiko’s coworker?”

He grins and nods. “Yes, I’m Jimmy. Aiko’s my business partner. Are you looking for her?”

“Wait, she’s here?”

He frowns. “She should be. She never misses one of Ms. Sun’s parties.” He smiles. “Ms. Sun lets us take home whatever’s left when the party winds down. She’s so generous.”

I turn abruptly and head for the staircase to the bedroom, shouldering my way through the crowd. Thoughts pelt me as I go: Has Aiko known about me, my ma, what we can do? How long has she known? And worse—Seo-yun’s known all along about Aiko, and played me for a fool.

I bang the bedroom door open to find Aiko sprawled out across the carpet, her jacket torn open. Seo-yun crouches on the floor above her in her glorious dress, her mouth dark and glittering. She doesn’t look at all surprised to see me.

“Jenny, love. I hope you don’t mind we started without you.” Seo-yun smiles. Her lipstick is smeared over her chin, over Aiko’s blank face. I can’t tell if Aiko’s still breathing.

“Get away from her,” I say in a low voice.

“As you wish.” She rises gracefully, crossing the room in fluid strides. “I was done with that particular morsel, anyway.” The sounds of the party leak into the room behind me, and I know I can’t run and grab Aiko at the same time.

So I shut the door, locking it, and mellow my voice to a sweet purr. “Why didn’t you tell me about Aiko? We could have shared her together.”

But Seo-yun just laughs at me. “You can’t fool me, Jenny. I can smell your rage from across the room.” She reaches out, catches my face, and I recoil into the door. “It makes you so beautiful. The last seasoning in a dish almost ready.”

“You’re insane, and I’m going to kill you,” I say. She kisses my neck, her teeth scraping my throat, and the scent of her is so heady my knees almost bend.

“I saw you in her head, delicious as anything,” she whispers. Her ugly thoughts hiss up my arms, twining around my waist. There’s a sharp sting at my wrist, and I look down to discover that one of them is already gnawing at my skin. “And I knew I just had to have you.”

There’s a crash, and Seo-yun screams as a porcelain lamp shatters against the back of her head. Aiko’s on her feet, swaying unsteadily, face grim. “Back the fuck away from her,” she growls, her voice barely above a whisper.

“You little bitch—” snarls Seo-yun.

But I seize my chance and pounce, fastening my teeth into the hollow of Seo-yun’s throat, right where her mantle of thoughts gathers and folds inward. I chew and swallow, chew and swallow, gorging myself on this woman. Her thoughts are mine now, thrashing as I seize them from her, and I catch glimpses of myself, of Aiko, and of many others just like us, in various states of disarray, of preparation.

Ma once told me that this was how Baba went; she’d accidentally drained him until he’d faded completely out of existence. For the first time in my life, I understand her completely.

Seo-yun’s bracelets clatter to the floor, her empty gown fluttering soundlessly after. Aiko collapses too, folding like paper.

It hurts to take in that much. My stomach hurts so bad, my entire body swollen with hideous thoughts. At the same time, I’ve never felt so alive, abuzz with possibility and untamable rage.

I lurch over to Aiko on the floor, malice leaking from her mouth, staining the carpet. “Aiko, wake up!” But she feels hollow, lighter, empty. She doesn’t even smell like herself any more.

A knock at the door jolts me. “Ma’am,” says a voice I recognize as the head caterer. “The first of the main courses is ready. Mr. Goldberg wants to know if you’ll come down and give a toast.”

Fuck. “I—” I start to say, but the voice isn’t mine. I glance over at the mirror; sure enough, it’s Seo-yun staring back at me, her dark, terrible dreams tangled around her body in a knotted mess. “I’ll be right there,” I say, and lay Aiko gently on the bed. Then I dress and leave, my heart pounding in my mouth.

I walk Seo-yun’s shape down the stairs to the dining room, where guests are milling about, plates in hand, and smile Seo-yun’s smile. And if I look a little too much like myself, well—according to what I’d seen while swallowing Seo-yun’s thoughts, I wouldn’t be the first would-be inductee to disappear at a party like this. Someone hands me a glass of wine, and when I take it, my hand doesn’t tremble, even though I’m screaming inside.

Fifty pairs of eyes on me, the caterers’ glittering cold in the shadows. Do any of them know? Can any of them tell?

“To your continued health, and to a fabulous dinner,” I say, raising my glass. As one, they drink.

Seo-yun’s apartment is dark, cleared of guests and wait staff alike. Every door is locked, every curtain yanked closed.

I’ve pulled every jar, every container, every pot and pan out of the kitchen, and now they cover the floor of the bedroom, trailing into the hallway, down the stairs. Many are full, their malignant contents hissing and whispering hideous promises at me as I stuff my hand in my mouth, retching into the pot in my lap.

Aiko lies on the bed, pale and still. There’s flour and bile on the front of her jacket. “Hang in there,” I whisper, but she doesn’t respond. I swirl the pot, searching its contents for any hint of Aiko, but Seo-yun’s face grins out at me from the patterns of light glimmering across the liquid’s surface. I shove it away from me, spilling some on the carpet.

I grab another one of the myriad crawling thoughts tangled about me, sinking my teeth into its body, tearing it into pieces as it screams and howls terrible promises, promises it won’t be able to keep. I eat it raw, its scales scraping the roof of my mouth, chewing it thoroughly. The more broken down it is, the easier it will be to sort through the pieces that are left when it comes back up.

How long did you know? Did you always know?

I’ll find her, I think as viscous black liquid pours from my mouth, over my hands, burning my throat. The field of containers pools around me like a storm of malicious stars, all whispering my name. She’s in here somewhere, I can see her reflection darting across their surfaces. If I have to rip through every piece of Seo-yun I have, from her dreams to the soft, freckled skin wrapped around my body, I will. I’ll wring every vile drop of Seo-yun out of me until I find Aiko, and then I’ll fill her back up, pour her mouth full of herself.

How could I ever forget her? How could I forget her taste, her scent, something as awful and beautiful as home?

The Fisher Queen

“The Fisher Queen” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/Jun 2014.

My mother was a fish. That’s why I can swim so well, according to my father, who is a plain fisherman with a fisherman’s plain logic, but uncanny flair for the dramatic. And while it’s true I can cut through the water like a minnow, or a hand dipped over the edge of a speedboat, I personally think it’s because no one can grow up along the Mekong without learning two things: how to swim, and how to avoid the mermaids.

Mermaids, like my father’s favorite storytale version of my mother, are fish. They aren’t people. They are stupid like fish, they eat your garbage like fish, they sell on the open market like fish. Keep your kids out of the water, keep your trash locked up, and if they come close to land, scream a lot and bang pots together until they startle away. They’re pretty basic.

My sisters tried to talk to a mermaid once. It was caught up in one of Dad’s trammel nets, and when they went to check the net out back behind the house, they found this mermaid tangled in it. It was a freshwater one, a bottom-feeder, with long, sparse hair whose color my sisters still argue about to this day. Iris, the oldest, felt bad for it and made May splash some water on its fluttery gills with her red plastic pail. She asked the mermaid if it was okay, what its name was. But it just stared at her with its stupid sideways fish eyes, mouth gaping open and closed with mud trickling out over its whiskers. Then Dad came home and yelled at Iris and May for bringing in the nets too early and touching the mermaid, which probably had sea lice and all kinds of other diseases.

I was just a kid then, but my sisters tell that story all the time. Iris is a marine biologist wannabe, almost done with high school but too dumb to go to university, who lectures us on fishes like we haven’t been around them our whole lives. She sleeps with the biology textbook I stole from the senior honor kids’ classroom under her pillow. May doesn’t give a shit about school and will probably get married to one of the boys living along the dock so she doesn’t have to repeat tenth grade again. The mermaid is one of those shared childhood memories they have, a little spark of magic from a time when they still believed that our mom really was a fish and maybe that mermaid was a cousin or something.

But I’m fifteen now, a full-fledged deckhand on a trawler and too old to be duped by some story Dad made up so he wouldn’t have to explain why our very human mom took off and dumped the three of us with him. I don’t care about stories of kids touching a glorified catfish either. It actually makes me sad, to think that my sisters really believed that our mom could be a dumb animal like that mermaid.

I’m lacing up my boots and getting ready to leave for the boat when May flops down from the top bunk, her black hair tumbling over my face. “Here.” She fumbles for her necklace and presses her carved-shell Buddha into my palm. “Come back safe, okay?”

I slip the waxed string over my head. It’s still dark out; the sun won’t be up for another few hours. “Yeah, of course. Go to sleep.”

She gathers the sheets up around her, their folds cresting like the ocean’s breakers. “I mean it, Lily,” she mutters. “Don’t come back a ghost.”

I tuck the dangling tail of her blanket under her belly. Iris, snoring on the bottom bunk, doesn’t even stir. “Ghosts are silly,” I tell May, grabbing my knapsack from where it hangs on the edge of the bed. Our little house is only two rooms, a blue tin roof over bedroom and kitchen, balancing on stilts above the river. Dad’s bedroll is gone, so I figure he’s aboard Pakpao already. “I’ll see you in a few days.”

I always check the nets out back for any fish that might have wandered in overnight, drawn by the ripe scent of trash. They’re empty tonight, no silver tilapia or pacu with their human teeth. No spindly-armed mermaids, either. I let the nets slip back into the water and trot down the walkway that connects the neighborhood of ramshackle houses above the river, wooden boards yawning underfoot. The green, thick smell of the river creeps up over the piers, rising into the night sky.

Our rickety trawler, Pakpao, waits at the edge of the docks, the crew drifting through the moonlight like specters. Pakpao looks like a child’s toy boat built out of scrap metal and blown up to the twentieth scale. Colored flags flicker in the damp wind, and rust creeps up the ship’s sides. My father’s stout, compact figure crouches over the nets, winding them up.

“Hey, Lily,” says Ahbe as I jog up the pier. At nineteen, he’s the deckhand closest to my age. “Ready for another four days at sea?”

“You must be feeling lucky if you think we’ll fill the hold and make it back home in four days,” grumbles Sunan, hauling a crate of plastic floats past us. His shirt has wandered off somewhere. “Cook’s looking for you, Ahbe. He wants to know what happened to the other batch of rice.”

“Gan was supposed to bring it in,” complains Ahbe, but he disappears downstairs anyway. Taking my cue, I follow Sunan to the nets.

Dad doesn’t look up from his work, patting the deck beside him for Sunan to drop off the crate. I sink down next to it, crossing my legs and pulling the nets into my lap. When the light’s better, it’ll be my job to fix the floaters and the heavy bobbins to the net’s mouth, widening it to span the surface of the river and weighing the bottom layer down to skim the mud below.

“I tried to wake you but you were fast asleep,” Dad says. He sounds apologetic. “Captain Tanawat wanted me here early to double-check the motor and our course to the ocean. Monsoon weather makes the fish finicky.”

I glance at him. My dad’s shoulders pump as he draws in the last of the nets. He’s the strongest, slyest fisherman I know. Someday, I want to be just like him. “Even the deep-water species?”

“Even those.” Dad sighs and lets the nets pool at his feet, kneeling beside me. His weathered hands coax the nylon strands out of their knots. “We might not find any mermaids for a week.”

“I don’t mind missing school,” I say. “I’d rather be here with you.” This is better than school, I figure; the algebra of the nets, the geometry of Pakpao out at sea, are more valuable lessons to me.

Dad smiles and ruffles my hair. “You’re a good girl, Lily.” Standing, he unclips his pocket flashlight from his belt and hands it to me. “I need to make sure we have enough ice in the hold, but you might as well start on the nets now.”

As he walks toward the cabin, I twist the flashlight on and grip the metal handle between my teeth, working in the small circle of electric light. I tie on the plastic floats and metal bobbins until the sky lightens and Ahbe hurtles from the kitchen. “We’re leaving! Are the nets ready?”

“Just about,” I reply. “They’ll be ready by the time we need ‘em.”

He grins, raking back his hair. “Awesome. I’ll let Captain Tanawat know that we’re all set!” He dashes off again, thin brown limbs flashing. I wonder if May will marry Ahbe out of all the fishing boys. I think he would be a good choice.

The motors roar, churning the green water below. Other ships are pulling into the docks, unloading their catches of basa, perch, and stingray for the fish market starting to construct itself on the shore. I don’t see any mermaids on sale, not even the pesky local catfish ones. Maybe they’re saving them for international markets.

Pakpao barely clears the heavy-limbed trees clustered by the riverside, their branches drenched with musky river-scent. I duck, keeping my attention on the nets. By the time I finish fixing on the last bobbin and remember to look up, our stork-legged village has disappeared from sight.

The monsoon rains catch us an hour into the journey downriver, so we don’t end up letting out the nets until the next day, when we’re almost at the delta that opens up into the sea. Dad, Sunan, Ahbe, and I work together, feeding out the bottom nets with their bobbins first, then the large central net, and finally the top nets. The nylon stings my fingers as it’s yanked through the water, but I won’t complain, not in front of Dad and the others. I’d rather nurse my wounds in private.

It isn’t long before the nets grow heavy. Pacu, carp, lots and lots of catfish. We pack them into coolers full of ice, where they’ll stay until we return home, and send Ahbe and Sunan to cart them down to the hold. No mermaids yet; maybe they’ve been scared into deeper water by the storms.

“Fuckin’ hell,” mutters Sunan as we drop the nets back into the water. “Not even a fuckin’ mud-eater. At this rate, everything in the hold’s gonna spoil before we catch anything good.”

“Be patient,” hums my father. The river mouth is widening, and salt cuts through the thick, live smell of the water below. “There will be plenty in the open sea.”

“The better kinds,” adds Ahbe, as Sunan casts him a sour look. “Tigerfish, lionfish, yellowfin—”

“I know what brings in the money,” Sunan snaps. I keep my head down and focus on the nets. “I don’t need you to name all the fish in the sea, kid.”

The two of them bicker as the river empties into the ocean, trees and thick foliage giving way to an expanse of open sky. It always scares me, how exposed everything is at sea. At the same time, it thrills me. I find myself drawn to Pakpao’s rail, the sea winds tossing my hair free from its braids. The breakers roll against the trawler, and as we buck over the waves, the breath is torn from my lungs and replaced with sheer exhilaration.

When we pull the nets in the next morning, they are so heavy that we have to recruit the cook to help us haul them onto the ship. There are a few tuna, bass, and even a small shark, but the bulk of it is squirming, howling mermaids. As we yank the nets onto the deck, bobbins clattering over the planks, I realize that we’ve caught something strange.

Most of the mermaids tangled in the nets are pale, with silvery tails and lithe bodies. This one is dark brown, its lower body thick, blobby, and inelegant, tapering to a blunt point instead of a single fin. Its entire body is glazed with a slimy coating, covered in spines and frondlike appendages. Rounded, skeletal pods hang from its waist, each about the size of an infant.

Worse, this fish has an uncannily human face, with a real chin and defined neck. While all of the mermaids I’d seen before had wide-set eyes on either side of their heads, this one’s eyes—huge and white, like sand dollars—are positioned on the front of its head. And unlike the other mermaids, gasping and thrashing and shrieking on the deck—there are few things worse than a mermaid’s scream—this one lies still, gills slowly pulsing.

“We got a deep-sea one,” breathes Sunan.

Ahbe crouches over the net, mouth agape. When he reaches his hand out, my father barks, “Don’t touch it!” and yanks Ahbe’s arm away. His body is tense, and when the mermaid smiles—it smiles, like a person—its jaws unhinge to reveal several rows of long, needlelike teeth.

I can’t stop staring. The mermaid has a stunted torso with short, thin arms and slight curvature where a human woman would have breasts, but no nipples. This shocks me more than it should; why would a fish have nipples? Heat rises in my face. I feel exposed, somehow, fully clothed though I am.

“Wow,” Ahbe says. His eyes are shining like he’s never seen a deep-sea mermaid before. Maybe he hasn’t. I haven’t either. “We’re gonna make a lot of money off of this one, huh?”

“If you don’t lose a hand to it,” my father replies. The other mermaids are wailing still, the last of the seawater trickling from their gills in short, sharp gasps. “Let’s bring them below. Do your best not to damage them; we need as much of the meat intact for the buyers as we can get.”

We descend on the net with ropes and hooks. The brown mermaid’s eyes are blind windows, like an anglerfish’s, but her face follows me as we move around the deck, securing the mermaids, pinning their delicate arms to their torsos so they won’t shatter their wrists in their panicked flailing. Once they’re bound, Dad and Sunan lift them and carry them down to the hold. With Ahbe packing the other fish into coolers, I draw close to the deep-sea mermaid, rope in hand.

That mouth opens, and I swear—I swear to god, or gods, or whatever is out there—a word hisses out: “Luk.”

I drop the rope and stumble away. Ahbe’s at my side in an instant. “Shit! Lily, did it hurt you?” He grabs my hands, turning my arms over. “Did you get bitten?”

The pods at her waist clatter and air whistles between her teeth. She is laughing at me as they bind her and drag her down to the hold. “Luk. Luk. Luk.”

Daughter.

My belly burns. I can’t stop shaking.

On Pakpao, we keep most of the catch frozen, but mermaids are a peculiar, temperamental meat. You have to keep them alive or the flesh goes bad. In fact, it goes bad so quickly that some places have created delicacies based on rotten mermaid because of how impossible it is to get fresh cuts in non-coastal towns. The Japanese traders who visit our village have great saltwater tanks installed in their ships which they load up with live mermaids, carted straight from the holds of wet trawlers like ours. From there, they’re shipped to restaurants, which take great pains to sustain them. Still, they rarely last more than two weeks in captivity, which means there’s always a market for fishermen like us.

Mermaid is a cash crop. Iris, May, and I wouldn’t have been able to go to school if not for the ridiculous amounts of money people are willing to pay to eat certain cuts of mermaid species—not the catfish mermaids from the river, but the ones harvestable on the open sea. These are the people who say that the soft, fatty tissue of a deep-sea mermaid is the most succulent luxury meat you will ever taste: like otoro but creamier, better. There are others who claim it’s the thrill of the forbidden that makes mermaid taste so good. I had a classmate once who told me that eating mermaid, especially the torso, is the closest to eating human meat you’ll ever get.

The truth is, I fucking hate mermaids. I can’t stand them. I would never tell Iris or May this, but mermaids scare me. Their empty eyes, their parasite-ridden bodies, their almost-hands, almost-human faces…they are the most disgusting, terrifying fish I’ve ever seen. There is nothing about them that I like.

I can’t even eat them. Once, for May’s birthday, Dad brought home a thin slab of silver-scaled kapong mer-tail for us to share. It was the most expensive food we’d ever had, and it tasted like plaster in my mouth. May and Iris wouldn’t shut up about how delicious the white flesh was. I wadded mine in rice and choked it down, knowing that Dad had spent a large chunk of his last catch’s salary on this special birthday feast. He liked to spoil us whenever he got the chance.

The mermaids in the hold won’t stop whimpering. I can hear the high-pitched, teakettle sounds through the walls of the ship as I lie in my hammock with my hands over my ears, trying to sleep. It’s a noise they make under stress, according to Iris. Something about air whistling through their gills and the vibrations deep in their bodies.

I don’t fucking care why they’re making the noise. I just want it to stop.

It’s even harder to sleep because I keep thinking about that brown, spiny mermaid. Those blind, luminous, predatory eyes. The unhinged jaw, the tapered waist, the brief curves on her chest. The scent of her skin, salty and alien.

Luk.

I swallow.

Sunan and Ahbe are gone, taking the night shift on deck. Across the room, Cook and Dad are asleep. The electric lantern swaying overhead isn’t doing anyone good, so I snag it and hop from my hammock, slipping quietly out of the cabin.

As I pad down the stairway to the hold, the whimpering gets louder until it’s a fevered whine in my head. I imagine the brown mermaid laughing, floating in the water. Too soon, I’m on the landing at the bottom of the stairs, my sweaty palm on the metal door’s cold handle. I pull it open.

The hold is full of seawater, coolers of frozen fish bobbing up and down with the outside waves. The mermaids swim in confused circles, making distressed cooing noises. They are tethered to metal rings on the wall, thick twine wrapped around their delicate baby wrists and hooked into the sides of their mouths. A mermaid whose body is mostly muscle, long and heavy like an arapaima, surfaces with a treble hook stabbed through its cheek and disappears back into the water without a ripple.

Sunan is kneeling by the wall, the rocking motion of Pakpao slopping fake waves up to his chest. At first I think he’s hurt because there’s blood in the water nearby; the mermaids keep circling closer, keening when the hooks and tethers prevent them from reaching him. Then I realize the pale crescent disappearing in and out of the water is his ass. His pants hang on a ring nearby, their ankles drenched in seawater, and he’s holding something down as he rocks back and forth, back and forth. It’s not the ship rocking, it’s him. A thin, clawed hand slashes over his shoulder; he swears, the sound echoing, and slaps whatever’s underneath him. A heavy silver tail thrashes the water.

A hand grabs my shoulder from behind and I almost scream. I’m pulled backward, the door to the hold clicking shut in front of me.

“Don’t watch, Lily,” Dad says in that low voice he puts on whenever he wants to protect me. My blood boils, fear and anger and adrenaline roaring through my system. “Go back upstairs and pretend you never saw any of this.”

“They’re fish!” I snarl. “What the hell is Sunan doing? This is all kinds of wrong. They’re not even people, they’re just goddamn fish!”

“It happens on ships sometimes,” Dad says, and I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “It doesn’t hurt the meat.” He looks straight at me, those serene dark eyes unfamiliar for the first time in my life. “I didn’t want you to know until you were older, but I suppose you were bound to find out sooner or later.”

“You knew?” I whisper. “Does everyone on this ship know?”

My father sighs. “Go upstairs and don’t think about it.”

I have this horrible epiphany. Dad used to have his own boat too, long ago. Mermaids are common enough; even the big ones could fit in a bathtub. He could have kept them alive, feeding them, fucking them—is his story about Mom just that, a story? Or is it true that he kept a fish for himself, hurting it—raping it—until it gave him three daughters? Or was there more than one fish? I think of the dumb, mud-mouthed catfish mermaids that drift into our nets behind the house sometimes, and my stomach turns.

“Have you been fucking them, too?” The words spill out before I can stop them.

“Lily, go upstairs.” His voice has gone cold and dangerous.

“This is really sick, Dad,” I manage.

“I’m not going to tell you again,” he says, and when he looks at me, I wish he hadn’t.

I go.

My mother was not a fish. My mother was a warm, human woman. I am certain of this, even if I cannot remember her at all.

There was a story I heard once about a man who got his dick bitten off by a catfish. He was peeing in the water and the catfish followed the stream of urine straight to his dick, crunched it right off.

This was our second-favorite story growing up, after the story about our mom, and now that Iris is an almost-biologist, she likes to tell us smugly that it’s the ammonia in pee that attracts fish, something about tracking prey through the ammonia leaking from their gills. I don’t know if this is true. But I’ve felt the crushing power of a catfish’s jaws, the bony plates on my arm while I wrestled them down to the hold. The catfish in the Mekong are huge, bigger than me. I am learning, as I get older, that many things are bigger than me.

In her second year of high school, Iris shut down. She stopped going to school, staying curled up in bed all day, and at night she would cry in her sleep. She wouldn’t talk about what had happened, but I found out from May, who knew some of Iris’s friends, that one of the boys at her school had followed Iris into a broom closet when they were cleaning up the classroom together. He was a close friend, a big, heavyset guy with short hair and glasses, but Iris would flinch whenever someone mentioned his name.

As I lie in my hammock, I think about catfish. I think about crushing mouths, crushing holds. All the while, the brown mermaid’s scent and voice sing in my blood, pulling it, tugging and setting it aflame.

I swing my legs over the side of my hammock and slip out of the sleeping quarters, taking the lantern with me.

Ahbe is making his way up the stairs as I descend, and he stops me with a laugh and a hand out against the wall. “What are you doing up so late, Lily?”

I look at him, that fire a cold burn in my chest. His shirt is hastily buttoned, his knees damp with seawater. “I’m going to check on the fish,” I say. The words feel flat in the wet, stifling air.

“I just did that,” Ahbe says. “They’re fine. Nothing’s spoiled; we should be able to get them to the market by tomorrow.”

“No. I want to see the mermaids,” I tell him, deliberately, and his face changes.

“I didn’t know you knew about that,” he says. “You’re too young to go down to the hold by yourself.”

“I’m fifteen,” I say. I think about the way my dad talks, the rich, strong core of his voice, and I channel that as I add, “I’m old enough to decide what I want. And I want a mermaid.”

Ahbe stares at me in the lantern light, and I can see his resolve wavering. “I guess it’s all right,” he mutters. “I was fifteen too the first time I had a mermaid. Just be careful—they bite.” He sucks in his cheek. “I didn’t take you for a tom, though.”

I knock his arm out of my way and he laughs. “Go to bed, Ahbe,” I snap. “You’re stupid. I’ll lock up the hold when I’m done.”

He tosses me the keys before he vanishes up the stairs, and I’m left alone in front of the heavy metal door to the hold.

It’s impossible to be a fish’s daughter. It’s almost as impossible as believing that your father is a monster.

I open the door and walk inside. Another set of stairs descends from the doorway, disappearing underwater after the third step. The mermaids appear to have calmed down a little, the surface of the water no longer choppy with tails. Only the slowly moving tethers stretching from the wall mark their presence beneath the waves.

I raise the lantern slowly across the room, searching for the brown mermaid. There: I catch a glimpse of her white eyes peeking just above the water. She is bound tight against the wall, tighter than any of the other fish. To get to her, I will need to wade across the hold.

I take a deep breath and shuck off my clothes before descending into the water. It’s freezing cold; the shock, the new weightlessness of my body, shoot thrills of adrenaline and terror through me. The mermaids dart away from my legs, smooth contact of scales against skin as they brush by. I walk faster, purposefully. I remember the fins and teeth on some of the tigerfish mermaids we caught earlier today. Maybe if I’m confident, they’ll think I’m a predator and stay away.

By the time I reach the brown mermaid, I’m shivering and my body is pebbled with goosebumps. The lantern wobbles in my hand, casting an orange glimmer over the rippling waves.

The mermaid surfaces, her chin just brushing the water. I can see her spines, the pods and fronds, and the rest of her soft, blobby body floating with the motion of the ship.

A sound hisses through her teeth, and it’s a moment before I can understand what she’s saying. “The girl-child.”

“I’m not a child,” I find myself saying through chattering teeth.

She smiles, blind eyes glowing silver in the darkness. “No, no child. What is your name, luk?”

In all of those European myths we had to read in school, they made it clear that you should never give your name to a faerie. But this is just a fish.

“Lily,” I say. I wish I had pockets to put my hands in. “Why do you keep calling me luk?” Why can you talk? I want to ask, but the breath is sucked back into my lungs. I am afraid of the answer.

Her arms are stick-thin, tipped with delicate toddler-hands and bound above her head. “Let me go and I’ll tell you.”

“Fat chance,” I say. “I didn’t come down here to get eaten by a fish.”

She clicks her jaws. “It is the other way around, no? You eat the fish.”

“Yeah,” I say. “That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

The mermaid laughs at me. “And are you content with the way things are supposed to be, luk?” Perhaps she smells my hesitation, hears my grip tighten on the lantern, because she softens her voice to a deep hum. “I will not hurt you. Let me go and I will tell you everything you want to know.”

Maybe it’s because I want to believe her so badly, maybe it’s the fire singing deep in my body, maybe it’s the image of Sunan in the water on top of a mermaid; before I really know what I’m doing, my fingers are picking out the knots attaching her tethers to the ring above her head.

As soon as the last knot slips undone, her hand snaps out, lightning quick, snagging my chin. The twine tethers still attached to her wrists lash against my bare chest. The lantern bumps against her head as she draws close and licks my face, her tongue cold, alien, and rubbery. Her teeth are inches from my eyes.

“Are you really my mother?” I whisper.

The mermaid’s tongue sweeps across my forehead, down my nose, and across my mouth before retracting. “Ah,” she sighs. “Not my broodling. No, I would remember one like you.” That childlike hand is nightmarishly strong. “But you are ours nonetheless. You taste like the ocean, not like the stinking land above.” She lets go of my chin, but I don’t back away. “I would grant you a boon, luk, in place of your mother. But I must have a bite of your flesh to make it true.”

Dad used to tell us an old tale about a magic fish that granted wishes if you caught it and released it back into the sea. I don’t remember this part of the story.

Her baby-fingers trickle across my shoulder. “Right here. It will not hurt much.”

A hysterical laugh bubbles up inside me. I am standing naked in the hold surrounded by mermaids, talking to a magic fish. What am I afraid of? I have had worse injuries; I can handle a single bite. I am an adult now.

I open my mouth to ask her for enough money to get off this stinking boat, enough gold to drown a sailor in, to drown all of the sailors in. I open it to ask about my mother, if she knows her or can find her or bring her back. If my mother is alive or dead. Whether she was human or fish, truly.

But then I think of my sisters: Iris, shaking beneath her blankets and clutching the biology textbook like a magic charm, and May, who had given me hers to protect me at sea. I remember that there are more important things. I think about the people who hurt my sisters, who could hurt them, about the boy in the broom closet and Sunan in the hold. About my father on landing, his eyes bitter cold.

I tell the mermaid my real wish.

She grants it.

There are many versions of this story, each with a different ending.

In one, I swim away with the brown mermaid. The sun wavers in a jagged disk overhead, glinting in strange scintillations. The water is cold, the pressure enormous. It pushes in on my billowy body, still tender, pressing it into a tighter, sleeker shape. Our tiny, delicate hands are locked tight as we dive deeper into the ocean.

In another, a large storm scuttles Pakpao, along with all the other fishing boats in the area, on the reefs by Teluk Siam. The hold cracks, allowing the mermaids to escape. Everyone survives and is discovered days later. The rest of the story is fairly uneventful, equally implausible, and made up by people who care more for happy endings than truth.

But here is what really happens. The brown mermaid disappears and Pakpao makes it safely home with a hold full of live mermaids. If the crew looks a bit dazed and disoriented, if they are not quite themselves and walk as if they are not used to having two legs, it is just the result of sunstroke. If the mermaids in the hold swim in frantic circles, their eyes rolling wildly in their heads and their wails ricocheting through the hold, it is just what fish do. After all, mermaids are fish, not people. The Japanese traders find the catch acceptable and the mermaids are transported by tank to restaurants across Hokkaido. We make a huge profit.

With the exception of yours truly, every member of Pakpao’s crew drowns within a week of returning home. Though I live, our family does not escape this tragedy unscathed; my father’s body is found floating in the nets behind the house. A joint funeral is held. Sunan’s widow speaks tearfully about how her late husband stopped talking after his last fishing trip and had spent the days before his death trying to walk into the river, a story that resonates with the families of the recently deceased.

My sisters weep, their futures secure. I weep, too, licking the salt from my tears. There is a bandage on my shoulder and a bite beneath that will not heal.

Santos de Sampaguitas

Santos de Sampaguitas was first published in October 2014 in Strange Horizons.

The dead god descends on me as I sleep, the way it did my mother the night before my conception, and my grandmother before that. Even with my dream-eyes shut, I know it’s there; the weight of folded limbs on my body threatens to crush my ribs, and I can smell the wreaths of sweet sampaguita hanging from its neck.

“Go away po,” I tell it, adding the honorific since Nanay always taught me not to be rude to gods. “I’m having a good dream for once.” I usually have nightmares during bangungot, trapped halfway between sleep and waking, unable to push my way fully to either side. The pressure on my chest, the terrible prescience that something very bad is about to happen, and the sound of distant screaming, like a boiling saucepan of human voices, are too familiar to me. But tonight there is only a pleasant floating sensation, fresh from a dream of flying over the oceans cresting Manila.

Cool, smooth fingers push my eyelids open. Just as my mother told me, the dead god dresses like a saint, all in chipped white paint and dried offerings, braided together on cheap twine. It is man-shaped, though it is neither a man nor a woman. Even though it has no skin or flesh, the stench of rotting lechon assaults my nostrils.

Magandang gabi, my child, it whispers. Blessed evening, Maria, my heir.

“You have the wrong Reyes sister,” I tell the dead god. “If you’re talking blessings and inheritance, find Silvia po. She’s two years older.”

It lowers its bone-pale head, and kisses my hand. The waking dream ripples around me, and my beautiful, healthy dream-arm evaporates, shriveling and twisting into a withered claw. My real arm. I do not make mistakes, says the dead god. You wear my mark, like your nanay and your lola and many others before you. It cradles my mangled hand gently, lacing its fingers through mine. I chose you, just as I chose them. Therefore you are mine, Christina Maria Reyes, are you not?

I fight the sleep paralysis enough to snatch my hand out of the dead god’s grasp, but when I try to cradle it to my chest, my limb flops against me like a useless wing.

“Why are you here?” I shout. The shrill boiling sound has started up again, a high wail in the distance. “Nanay promised you wouldn’t show yourself to me until I was grown. I’ve still got years! Besides, Nanay is your disciple right now, not me.”

No, says the god. It has no eyes in its empty, hollow face, but somehow it manages to look away. Not any more. Your mother is dead.

The waking dream shatters. I bolt upright in my bed, drenched in cold sweat. The dead god is gone. My sister sleeps quietly, tucked next to me in our small, wooden bed; none of the other maids in the room are awake, either.

It takes me almost a minute to realize that the teakettles I’ve been hearing are my own high-pitched, muffled whine, and that my lap is damp with tears.

My sister is draped in piña, in the middle of the Calderones’ living room, trying to avoid the dressmaker’s pins and the American ma’ams’ glares. The thin piña cloth shimmers over her dark hair like a halo, and she reminds me of the fresco of The Holy Mother, on the wall of Saint Peter of Makati’s chapel, only rounder and shorter. But she has the Holy Mother’s same expression of inner contentment and peace. All of the bladed comments and piña in the world would not be enough to hide Silvia’s inner glow.

“I don’t know why we’re paying for this wedding,” says Ma’am Chitti. She is sprawled out on the couch, neck beading with sweat, vying for a spot in front of the electric fan. Her voice rings loud over the dressmaker’s muttered measurements, uncaring of who hears. We maids, standing in the corners of the room, are all but invisible. “I don’t know why there’s going to be a wedding at all.”

“It’s because he got her pregnant, the idiot.” Ma’am Margarita flaps a newspaper in front of her face to create a fake breeze, and snaps her fingers at me. “Water,” she orders without looking. “With ice.” To her sister, she says, “If he was going to be fucking the maids, especially the under-aged ones, he should have at least used protection.”

“It’s harder to get, here,” says Ma’am Chitti. “Kasi Catholic.”

I dip out of the room with a soft, “Yes, Ma’am Margarita,” and pad to the kitchen. My withered right arm is tucked beneath my apron, so as not to offend any onlookers’ sight.

“Mom should just send her back to the province where she came from. Get rid of her, and let her have the baby there.” Ma’am Margarita’s voice chases me down the hall, and I bite my bottom lip so hard that my teeth threaten to break the skin.

I have not told Silvia about our mother. I will keep it buried deep inside myself, a dark, jagged hole. Maybe I will tell her after the wedding. Maybe I won’t at all. After all, with no cell phone service back home, and a postal service that takes ages and loses more letters than it delivers to the provinces, how could I know such a thing?

Stepping into the kitchen at midday is like wading through a cloud of steam. Even the ceiling fan on its highest setting can’t cut through the oppressive heat trapped in the room. Two of the other maids, Jene and Vicky, glance up from the stove, where they’re making sinigang. “How’s it going in there, Tintin?” Jene asks me.

“It’s fine,” I mumble. I keep my body angled away from them, as I slip my right arm out of my apron, and use my wrist to open the cupboard where we keep the glassware. My hand works just fine, even if I can’t use my fingers to grip things. I know my arm scares other people, though, and even the other maids still stare, when they think I’m not looking. I’m always looking. “Silvia’s getting fitted for her wedding dress, and the ma’ams are making a big deal out of it.”

“It is a big deal!” chirps Vicky. Before I know it, she’s dropped the ice bucket on the counter next to me, the top already propped open. “You only get married once. And especially a maid, getting married to Sir Carlos—”

“It’s no wonder they’re pissed,” says Jene. “Your sister’s a nice girl, Tintin, but she’s a probinsyana like us. They want a high-class bride for their brother.”

“You don’t have to remind me.” I slam down a glass a little too hard, and the others flinch. Sometimes I wonder if they are scared of me, even though I am five years younger than Vicky, and two younger than Silvia. My mother, small and dark-skinned, has the same effect on people.

My mother. My stomach turns.

“Tin,” calls Ma’am Loretta, her voice muffled through her bedroom door, adjunct to the kitchen. “Tin, I need you here right now!”

“I’ll be right there po,” I shout from the kitchen. Hurriedly balancing the glass of water and its coaster on a tray, I ferry it to Ma’am Margarita in the living room, stepping carefully over the train of my sister’s dress. Ma’am Margarita takes it without a word, and I dash back to Ma’am Loretta’s room. Tucking the tray under my arm, I knock on her door. “Ma’am?”

“Come in, Tin.”

Ma’am Loretta, matriarch of the Calderones, lies on her bed in near-darkness. All of the curtains are drawn; only a single clip reading lamp lights her face. The shelves lining her room are covered in wooden carvings of saints, each adorned with wreaths of dried, dead sampaguitas. The air is perfumed with their stench.

I do not know how old Ma’am Loretta is, but if my own grandmother was still alive—if she’d had a normal life, without the interference and patronage of the dead god—I think she would be almost as old as Ma’am Loretta.

Ma’am Loretta beckons me over. “I have a special task for you, Tin. I need you to go to the jeweler’s for me.” Her voice is low, as she hands me a small wooden box. I cradle it in the crook of my right arm, flipping the latch open with my left hand. My breath catches in my throat when I see what’s inside.

The Calderone arrhae lies on a pillow of blue velvet, a ring of thirteen gold-dipped coins, strung together like a crown. I’ve never seen this ancient family treasure, but I’ve heard of it: four-peso coins engraved in Spanish lettering, kept away from outsiders’ eyes, passed down and used in every Calderone wedding since the first, in the 1800s.

“The color’s gotten tarnished, see?” She lifts the arrhae and shows me a series of dark spots on the underside of the coins. “Go to Manila Jeweler’s, above the tiangge, and get it re-dipped. It needs to look good for my son’s wedding.” She lets the arrhae fall back onto the pillow. “Salma’s my suki there; tell her to give you a good price in my name.”

I can’t believe she wants me, of all people, to hold onto the Calderone arrhae. Me, with only one strong, healthy hand to hold. But I do not mention this. “Yes, Ma’am Loretta.”

She presses an envelope into my hand; inside is a thin, crisp stack of hundred-peso bills. I swallow hard and look into her eyes. Age clouds their edges milky blue, but at their core, they are mahogany-hard.

“I trust you, Tin,” Ma’am Loretta tells me. “More than I trust anyone else in this house. Don’t break that trust.”

“I won’t po,” I say.

I can’t escape from the room fast enough.

A ten-minute jeepney ride becomes thirty with traffic, but I make it to Greenhills without incident. Pushing my way through the tiangge, with the arrhae box tucked in a pouch beneath my blouse, is harder. The market writhes with people, flooding in and out of makeshift booths, pushing past the vendors shouting, “Ma’am! Bags! Wallets!”

My sister hates this place, but I adore it. There is a lovely anonymity among the crush of humanity in the tiangge; people are pressed too close to care about small things like a withered arm or a damaged face, anything but: “T-shirts, 300, Ma’am! Hairclips, 25 pesos, Ma’am!”

Climbing the steps to the jewelers’ alley, I let the security guard check my purse. He doesn’t think to check the pouch around my neck. They never do. The jewelers’ alley sprawls before me in a sea of glass cases and glittering stones, almost all of which are real. You could drown in opulence here.

“Manila Jeweler’s?” I ask the security guard. He points me toward a stall in the corner, with a big, plastic banner reading: sale. It seems largely abandoned, but a single figure is tucked at a desk, behind the large display counter. At first, I think that person is a girl, but then I realize he’s a boy my own age, with very long black hair. Most of that hair is tied in back in a ponytail, falling well beyond his waist.

I clear my throat. “Salma?”

He glances up at me through stray strands of dark hair, and I catch sight of a pair of eyes, the color of new bamboo. Oh.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” he says. “Salma is my mother. How can I help you?”

“I was told to give something to Salma,” I tell him. There’s a strange, high pressure in the back of my head, very similar to the shrill sound I hear during bangungot. I feel stupid, and I have an irrational urge to hide my arm from him, even though he’s already seen it. “My ma’am is her suki. My ma’am says she’ll give her a good price, and I don’t want to be cheated.”

He smiles. “What’s your ma’am’s name po?”

“Ma’am Loretta Calderone.”

The boy whistles. For the first time, I notice he’s holding a pencil, and the papers in front of him are covered in sketched jewelry designs. “Oh, yes, I know her. Everyone up here knows Ma’am Calderone. What work does she need done?”

With hands that have suddenly grown clumsy, I fumble for the pouch and pull it from my shirt. I am stupidly conscious of the droplets of sweat that splatter from the bag onto the countertop. When the boy sees me having trouble with the drawstring, he reaches for the pouch. “Here, let me—”

“I’ve got it,” I say, pinning the edge of the pouch down with my right elbow, and using my left hand to pull the drawstring free. I pop open the box so he can see the arrhae, keeping it close to my body in case he tries to grab it from me. “Ma’am Calderone needs this dipped in gold for her son’s wedding.”

“May I see?”

Reluctantly, I let him take the arrhae. He examines it in the light, peering closely at the tarnished metal. “We’d usually charge 1,000 pesos for this, minimum. But for Ma’am Calderone, 850.”

“800,” I reply shortly.

“You would beggar us, Ma’am!” he protests, but there’s a hint of a laugh in his voice. It’s a nice laugh. “850 pesos for Ma’am Calderone.” He pauses. “But 800 pesos for you, if you tell me your name.”

“Done.” I slap the money down on the counter, before he can change his mind. A name given is surely worth 50 pesos. “I’m Tin.”

He grins again. “Rodante,” he introduces himself.

Instead of shaking his hand, I make him write a receipt to prove that Manila Jeweler’s is now in possession of the Calderone arrhae, and has agreed to dip it in gold—“14k? 24k? Yellow, or white?”—for 800 pesos. Rodante folds the arrhae and places it carefully back into its box. “I’ll take very good care of this for you,” he says, when he does shake my hand at the end of the transaction. His green eyes are serious. “I promise, Tin.”

“If you don’t, I’ll find you,” I threaten. “Worse, Ma’am Calderone will find you.”

He laughs again, as he lifts himself out of his seat and walks toward the back of the shop. That’s when I see that he’s limping. Rodante’s right leg is a tangled, rippled mass of scars. Just like my arm.

The hum in the back of my head builds to a dull roar.

I am dreaming, and dreaming proper, of my mother’s house in Bicol, a small, bamboo-and-hemp structure that the ma’am in Manila call a ‘shanty’—a word I never knew before coming to the city. Shadows from the malunggay trees dapple our house’s nipa roof, and the scent of the white sampaguita blossoms, by the door, is so strong that I almost don’t smell the dead god arrive.

Perhaps I came on too strongly, earlier, says the dead god. Today it wears a skin bristling with black feathers, thin panels on the side swinging open with each movement, to reveal white bones beneath. I keep forgetting how young you are.

“I’m not that young.” When I lived here, Nanay’s house and the land around it were full of running, tumbling children. But in the dream, the house is silent. The curtain over the doorway swings open in the thick, salty breeze, revealing darkness inside. “Did you go back for her funeral?” I ask the dead god. As soon as the words leave my mouth, I feel stupid; who knows if or how gods travel?

The dead god sighs. I stayed by her side, until your family cremated her, and scattered her ashes in the sea. Then I came to find you.

A face flashes in the window, and for a moment, I see my mother running her palms over the latticed screen, checking for dirt. The dead god’s mark glimmers like white fire in the sunlight, a web of discoloration and scarring across her face. She vanishes before I can call out to her.

I loved her, the dead god says quietly. Very much.

“She loved you, too,” I say. The sea wind whips around us, ruffling the dead god’s feathers and my own short black hair. “She used to tell us stories about you all the time.” I don’t say that these stories, like those of all of the old gods, are banned in the Calderone household, in favor of Catholic masses and Ma’am Loretta’s saints.

The dead god laughs, a dry sound like marbles rattling. Don’t I know. I’ve been looking after your family since its inception, long before the milk-skinned Spanish washed up on your shores, with weapons in their mouths and greed in their hearts. It turns its head to me, empty eye sockets staring through me, to a different time and place. Your mother was special to me, though. She was my favorite, so fierce, so strong. She made me promise to take her youngest daughter as her heir when she passed on, in honor of her years in my service, and to grant you a special boon when you make your pact with me.

I do not want to think of my mother dead and lying in ashes at the bottom of the sea, so I wipe my eyes and ask the god, “What kind of boon are you offering me po?”

The dead god grins, revealing a beak full of thick, blunt teeth. I would give you the gift of transformation. Pledge yourself to me and I will teach you to wing about the night, unhampered by human concerns. I will show you the secret banana groves where your mother hid her legs, deep in dreamland and Bicol’s jungles.

My right hand tingles. I shield it from the dead god’s sight with my good hand, banishing the images the god’s words conjure up. A perfect, straight limb. No more stares. No more hiding. “That’s not what I meant.”

Well, then. The dead god shrugs. I offer you knowledge of charms and spells, enchantments that will guarantee your household safety, recipes to keep the curses of other aswang away. I can teach you to make a man love you, and stay by your side for the rest of your days. How rare is that?

“No, you promised me something special,” I say. I pretend not to notice my knees shaking, so that the dead god will not notice either. I pretend not to think of Rodante, with his sharp green eyes and sweet smile. “In memory of my nanay. She was your charge for most of her life, and you would teach me all these things if I pledged myself to you, anyway. Do not try to cheat me po.”

The dead god clicks its beak. It sounds pleased. All right, clever child. You really are like your mother. I can offer you a special gift: one death, or one life, before you take on my powers. No one will ever know it was you, and you may cast the blame or credit on anyone you choose.

I shiver. What a great and terrible gift. Before I think it through, the words fall from my mouth: “Can you bring my mother back?”

The dead god is silent for too long. You would not recognize her if I did, it says finally. I would have to gather her ashes from the sea, and the ocean has already claimed most of her essence. Even so, I may only keep one living disciple. She already designated you, at her passing.

“So you can’t,” I say. “Or you won’t.”

To bring her back, you would have to die. And I refuse to trade our living daughter, to bring back only half of the disciple I loved most.

The love and sorrow in the dead god’s hollow voice makes me flinch. “You’re no father to me,” I snarl. “I don’t need your gifts. You’d best leave. Don’t bother coming back.”

The dead god sighs. I’ll see you tomorrow night, it says, and vanishes, leaving me alone with the whispering trees and my abandoned childhood home. This time, it doesn’t take the sampaguita scent with it.

In the next weeks, my mornings are filled with wedding preparations: running to and from the barong-makers’ with measurements from the groom’s party; rushing glasses of ice water to the ma’ams from America, who whine and argue over flower arrangements; and pushing through the tiangge to check on the arrhae’s progress and on the green-eyed jeweler’s son.

I spend the late afternoons with Rodante, sneaking out on the pretext of errands, and meeting him on the walk-up roof above jeweler’s alley, to share cigarettes and snacks. We talk about our families and homes, far, far from Manila. He is from Capiz, a province south of mine. Once, I ask him about family gods.

“We have one, I think,” he says. “Though I’ve never really believed in gods.”

Unusual, I think, in this country full of Catholics and witches. “Not even in spirits?” I ask, tapping our shared cigarette against my finger, and watching the ash flit down onto the concrete, away from the cigarette’s glowing, orange tip.

“No, though my dad said he saw a kapre once. This was back when he was looking for a place to build our home.” Rodante runs his fingers through my hair, and I lean into his touch. “The kapre was up in a tree, watching him wander through a banana grove. He warned my dad that the grove was sacred, and that if he chopped down any of the trees there, the kapre would curse him.”

“So, did he? The kapre, I mean.”

Rodante laughs and shrugs. “Who knows? If my dad really saw him, maybe he did. He ended up building our house in the banana grove anyway.” He takes the cigarette from me and draws in a deep breath, exhaling a thin trail of smoke. “Maybe that’s why my leg’s the way it is.”

“Does it hurt?” I ask, turning to look at his leg.

On the way, he catches my chin and kisses me. His mouth is bitter with tobacco, and sweet from the lychees we’d been eating earlier. Long strands of his hair brush against my bare shoulders, cool and fluid over my sticky skin.

I want to kiss him until we both melt in the summer heat, dissolving into each other in a tangle of limbs and beating hearts. But I’ve learned from my sister, and from the ma’ams’ cold hostility. In our meetings, I never let him touch me for too long, always breaking away from his kisses, before the embers under my skin grow to a full-fanned flame. Unlike Silvia, I have no rich sir to marry; I cannot afford to have a baby and risk being sent away.

But his breath is like sweet spice, and I have never kissed a boy before, especially not one who is so like me. I have yet to ask him if he also hears the strange hum in his skull when we meet, if the dark circles beneath his bright green eyes are products of the same night terrors I’ve had all my life. His mouth moves against me, and I can feel his hands around my waist, sliding up the hem of my shirt.

“I should go,” I mumble, pushing him away. My face burns, and I’ve dropped the cigarette. I stamp it out, avoiding eye contact.

“Okay.” Rodante doesn’t sound disappointed; rather, his tone is shy. “I’m sorry if—I’m sorry about pushing you too hard, if you aren’t ready yet.”

I blush, for shame. I know I am not ready as he means it, but I do enjoy his kisses. “Will you walk me home?”

“I’m sorry. My mother doesn’t like me going out after sunset. It’s hard for me to get around, and she’s afraid I’ll be taken advantage of, with this leg.” He must see my face fall, because he reaches into his pocket and produces a small, black pouch. “But I have something for you, Tin. Here, open it.”

Our fingers touch as he hands it to me, and I open it to find a small, glass-faced locket, on a golden chain. I gasp. It’s worth more money than I’ve ever had, far too expensive for someone like me. “No, Rod, I can’t—”

He kisses my cheek gently, almost chastely. “Please, Tin? Let me help you put it on.”

Rodante limps behind me, and draws the chain over my head. The links are so fine that they slide over my skin, like a thread of woven silk. After he closes the clasp, he brushes my hair away from the necklace. “I hope you like it.”

“I do.” The setting sun catches in the glass, illuminating the small white flower trapped inside. “It’s beautiful,” I murmur. “But are you sure it’s okay to give this to me?”

“I designed it.” He smiles, the corners of his mouth crooked. “It’s almost like you’re keeping a piece of me, wherever you go. Hopefully it’ll keep you safer than I can.”

I kiss him once more before I leave, pressing our lips together and then darting away, for fear that if I stay any longer, I will never be able to leave.

Back home in the maids’ quarters, the other girls gather round to admire the necklace and tease me about my new suitor. “Be careful,” says Vicky, mussing my hair. “You’ll be the next to be married, at this rate!”

My sister, now swollen with the child growing inside her, doesn’t seem jealous of all the attention I’m getting. Instead, she watches beatifically, the entire room gently lit with her presence. Lacing my fingers with hers, I cannot remember a time in the recent past when I have been happier. The hole torn in my heart by Nanay’s death seems smaller, with each passing moment and each beat of my sister’s pulse against mine.

I wake to the Calderone house on fire. Even in the maids’ quarters, the air crackles with flames, searing my skin and catching at my blanket like groping fingers. I shout and try to beat the flames on my bed out, but it’s a lost cause. No one else is in sight.

Snatching the only intact blanket from Jene’s bed, I wrap it tightly around me and barrel toward the exit, hoping and praying to God, to the dead god, to whoever is listening. The flames snarl, as I crash through the doorway, hitting the dirt so hard I forget how to breathe. The roof caves in behind me.

The maids and ma’ams are clustered together on the sidewalk, the closest I’ve ever seen them, in my year and a half of service to the Calderones. Ma’am Loretta hunches over the asphalt, a blanket over her shoulders, rocking silently back and forth, as her childhood home burns.

Over it all is the sound of my sister screaming. But she is nowhere to be seen. Neither is Sir Carlos, her fiancé.

“Where’s Silvia?” I shout, recovering enough to draw in a raspy breath. No one seems to hear me at first, but then I see Vicky point at the house. She’s still inside, I realize with horror. My pregnant sister, trapped inside a burning, collapsing house.

The dissonant hum in my head is so strong, I almost can’t find the strength to walk. But I fight through it, just as I fight through the splintering doorway and follow Silvia’s screams, through the once-great halls.

I find her on the floor of Sir Carlos’s bathroom, crumpled on the floor like a dark-winged bird, lying in a growing pool of blood. Sir Carlos is wrestling with her, and for a moment, I believe he is trying to kill her. Then I hear him shouting, “Stop! Silvia, stop! Please!” and see the panicked tears streaming down his face. My sister is trying to tear her hair out, gripping great fists of it and banging her head against the tile. Sir Carlos catches sight of me and cries, “Help me get her out! Please!”

I rush to her side, and she almost swings her skull into me. I grab her head, whispering assurances into her ear through her moans and screams, and help Sir Carlos hoist her to her feet. That’s when I realize that her nightgown is soaked in blood from the waist down, and she’s sobbing, over and over, “My baby, my baby, my baby.”

Outside the house, my sister collapses in the grass by the gate, Sir Carlos weeping at her side.

You little fool, snarls the dead god. It crouches on my chest, its spidery limbs stabbing down on either side of my face, as I lie in a state of bangungot, paralyzed and helpless. Black flames blaze in its empty eye sockets. That fire was no accident, and that was not a normal miscarriage. A rogue aswang is preying on you.

“An aswang?” I ask, bewildered. “Like Nanay and me?”

Worse. The dead god presses a hand to my forehead, and an image of a hideous, bat-winged creature silhouettes itself against my mind. I picture it dragging its legless torso toward the house, pulling itself up to the window of the maids’ quarters, unfurling its proboscis-like tongue…I wrench my head away, as the dead god says, A manananggal, judging from the wounds on your sister. They only grow like that deep in the jungles of Capiz.

“Someone targeted her?” I would cover my face if I could, the dead god’s visage is so terrible, but I am frozen, the breath crushed out of me by the god’s unforgiving weight. “But why? She’s just—”

She is a Reyes girl, from my line. I am not the only god in the region. And Manila is an amalgamation of many peoples, from many regions. For the first time, the dead god sounds contemptuous. Perhaps you fancy yourself special, Christina Maria Reyes. But there are plenty of other witch-families that would love to stamp you—and me, with you—out completely, and they are much more powerful than an uninitiated girl-child and a stray god without a disciple. It breathes its fetid odor into my face. Maybe I have been too lax on you, and have not emphasized the danger your family is in. The danger that you brought into this house!

“What are you talking about?”

It snaps the necklace from my neck. Even more than the pain of the breaking chain is the stab of pain through my heart, the fear and betrayal. That necklace is mine and mine alone, the only thing that really belongs to me.

The god holds the locket before my face, the broken chain tangled in its fingers. Haven’t you figured it out yet, little girl?

The dead god hurls the locket against the wall, where it shatters. Suddenly I am looking into a familiar pair of tired green eyes, and Rodante’s voice floods my head:

“The kapre was up in a tree, watching him wander through a banana grove. He warned my dad that the grove was sacred, and that if he chopped down any of the trees there, the kapre would curse him.”

An echo of the dead god’s voice from many nights ago: I will show you the secret banana groves where your mother hid her legs, deep in dreamland and Bicol’s jungles.

“I’m sorry,” says Rodante’s shadow, up on the rooftop. My mouth burns, with the remembered taste of tobacco and overripe fruit. “My mother doesn’t like me going out after sunset.”

I will teach you to wing about the night, unhampered by human concerns, whispers the dead god. How rare is that?

An image of Rodante limping away, that first day in the jewelry shop, the scars on his skin now aflame with power: “Maybe that’s why my leg’s the way it is.”

By the time the dead god releases its grip, there are tears streaming down my face. I collapse, gasping for air, the remnants of the bangungot’s paralysis leaking from me.

Think about it, the dead god says coldly. It vanishes, leaving me to face the rest of the night terrors on my own.

“The wedding is still on?” demands Ma’am Chitti. “Are you serious, Mama?”

Ma’am Loretta doesn’t even look at her. Her gaze is trained on her son, Sir Carlos, who sits next to my sister on the couch. Their hands are entwined, and he’s stroking her arm. My sister is pale, dazed; they’ve put her on Ma’am Margarita’s Valium, to dull the shock of losing the baby.

The entire family has taken refuge at Ma’am Loretta’s brother’s house, a few streets down from the old Calderone home. It’s also much smaller than Ma’am Loretta’s house, and the close quarters mean that tensions are higher than ever.

I stand along the wall with the rest of the maids, watching the ma’ams battle and bicker. The shelves of saints, as many here as in Ma’am Loretta’s former room, stare down at us with dead, wooden eyes.

“Carlos.” The man startles at his mother’s voice. “Do you still want to marry Silvia?”

He nods silently, clutching my sister close to him. The two of them are still shaking, trembling together like a pair of rabbits.

“But there’s no baby!” protests Ma’am Margarita. “What’s the use of a marriage—”

Ma’am Loretta slaps her across the face. The sound echoes across the room, followed by shocked silence.

Tears begin to leak from my sister’s dull eyes. Silvia wanted this baby more than anything, I realize. She wanted it because it was his, because she loves him. And because he loves her. And Ma’am Loretta knows that.

Ma’am Loretta snaps her fingers and looks straight at me. “Tin, come here.” I detach myself from the wall, ignoring the American ma’ams. “Make sure you retrieve the arrhae tomorrow, as planned. We must have it for a proper Calderone wedding.”

“Yes, Ma’am Loretta,” I murmur, bobbing my head and excusing myself from the room.

As the matriarch’s daughters begin to scream at each other, I slip into Ma’am Margarita’s room for just a moment. Glancing over my shoulder, I steal one of her Valiums from the bottle atop her nightstand, hiding it in my blouse pocket. A dark, ugly rage burns in my heart. If things are to go as I’ve planned, I’ll need all the sleep I can get tonight.

“I’m sorry,” I tell the dead god, as soon as it appears in my dreams that night. “I want to make this right.” I glance down. “Between us, and for my sister.”

The dead god sighs, the whistle of wind through bone. I’m sorry, too. It was unfair of me to blame you completely. The manananggal tricked you. There was no way you could have known.

“It was still my fault,” I mumble. “It’s my fault her baby’s dead.”

Smooth, paint-tipped fingers touch my face. Do not say that, the dead god tells me sternly. You did not call the manananggal on purpose. The fault lies not with you, but with it. Besides, there’s a reason your ancestors made a pact with me. Neither of us alone can protect your family, but together we have a fighting chance.

I grip the dead god’s wrist. “I know. That’s why I want to make a pact with you and receive your boon.” I breathe in the dead god’s scent, sampaguitas and rot and ash. It is not so different from the scent that once lingered on Ma’am Loretta’s altar of saints. “I want a new child. For my sister.”

The dead god stills. If I do that, the child will be mine, it says finally. She will bear my mark and be your heir. And once the mark is passed, I cannot choose another heir, until the death of the next designated.

“I know.”

The dead god’s voice sounds almost gentle. If you pledge Silvia’s daughter to me, your own children will never fly free through the night air. They will never feel the dread and thrill of the transformation, nor see the sacred groves of your mother’s line.

I think of my sister, screaming and bleeding on the bathroom floor, tearing her hair out and battering her hands on the burning tile. Sir Carlos’s determination to marry her even without the child, the fierce, protective way he cradled her on the couch, days after the accident, the gentleness of his fingers as he stroked her hair. Her radiant face, only weeks before, as the dressmaker measured her for her wedding gown. They would surely be able to love such a child as one marked by the dead god. Who could provide better for a daughter like that? Like me?

“My sister wishes for a child,” I say quietly. “I will pledge myself to you, if you give her a daughter to replace the one she lost. You may mark her, but she must be healthy. And you must bless their household, too.”

This I can do. The dead god presses a cold, stinging kiss to my forehead, and begins to shrink, paint flecks and sampaguita wreaths dropping to the ground around our feet. Soon it is a tiny black chick, small enough to fit in my hand. As I scoop it up in my palms and bring it to my face, it whispers to me, We will look after them together. I promise.

I blink tears away. “Thank you po,” I whisper back.

The black chick pecks at my lips, and I open my mouth to swallow the dead god whole.

With the weight of a god in my stomach and a pouch of a cremated saint’s ashes in my purse, the latter scavenged from the ruins of the Calderone house, I chase the hum in my head through dreamland.

It won’t be long now, says the dead god. My right arm burns with power. We fly together toward Capiz, a single, many-winged shadow passing over the water. I can smell my brother’s curse already.

“The kapre is your brother?” I ask it. “Is he also a god?”

It laughs in reply, the black ruff of feathers around our neck rippling in sea breeze. Aren’t we all.

The dead god is with me always now, as I am with it. The night is our passage, and dreams a current to human reality. Soon, we reach the end of the sea and the verdant shores of the central isles south of Manila. The hum in my head is so intense that my teeth hurt. We’re close.

Together, the dead god and I land our body in a forest of banana trees, the leaves muttering overhead in the wind. A figure unfolds from a nearby trunk, limbed like a man, but over eight feet tall, and the color of pitch. When he sees us, however, he merely watches us, pointing a long finger toward a clump of trees to the left.

We bow to the kapre, and trek in the direction he indicated, our bones rattling with each step. The dead god whispers, Makikiraan po, as we pass through, and I see the kapre incline his head before vanishing back into the trees.

Too soon, we find what we’ve been looking for.

“Let me do this myself,” I tell the dead god.

It obliges, pulling back and leaving me with full control over our shared body.

I sift through my purse for the bag of ash, and step up to the manananggal’s severed waist and legs, which stand on their own, concealed in the shadows of the banana grove, like a small tree growing in the shade of its elders. But I know these legs, the right one twisted and roped in scars.

Popping the corner of the plastic bag open, I drizzle the ash carefully over the manananggal’s lower half, coating the raw meat and exposed bone in white, powdered saints. Once the bag is empty, I step back, and we hide in the trees, waiting.

The sun is a sliver of orange, just cresting the horizon, when the rest of the manananggal returns. Its leathery wings flog the air, as it maneuvers itself down toward its standing lower half, its long black hair flapping around it.

But the moment its torso touches the ash, the manananggal screams and tumbles to the ground, its legs crumbling to dust around it. As the manananggal gapes and drags its hands through the remains of its ruined legs, the dead god and I step forward as one.

I wave my right hand, and the dead god’s feathers and beak recede, to reveal my face.

“Tin?” gasps Rodante. “What are you doing—”

“How dare you.” I flick my right hand, and black feathers slice down through his arms. Power hums in me, intoxicating, dreadful. He screams again. “How dare you use me to hurt my family. How dare you touch my sister. How dare you use me at all!”

“Tin, stop!” he begs, crawling toward me. “I didn’t know she was your sister. Please, Tin, I love you!”

I slash through his wings, until the dead god pulls our body away, saying, Enough.

The dead god may be old, but it is wrong this time. It will never be enough.

Together, the dead god and I watch silently, as Rodante claws his way around the grove, desperately chasing the waning shade, until the sun rises fully, dousing the land in light. As the sunlight floods the banana trees, what remains of Rodante dissolves into fine, white dust.

We need to go, the dead god reminds me gently. Your living body will need to wake up soon, and we must be back.

But it is so hard to move, staring down at what used to be the boy I thought I loved. So full of fire and power just moments ago, and now I can barely feel at all.

Something golden glitters in the dirt among Rodante’s ashes. I dig it out, revealing a wreath of thirteen coins, linked together like a crown.

Suddenly exhausted, I loop the Calderone arrhae around our neck, one more string nestled against the sampaguitas. The screaming in my head has died down to a gentle roar, a sad, ancient ache in my bones. With the weight of Spanish and Filipino gold pressing against our shared heart, the dead god flies us back over the brilliant, fiery sea.