Tahong -2024- -

“Mama, your eyes,” he said one evening. “They’re not brown anymore.”

He looked up. His eyes were the color of a stormy sea. When he smiled, his teeth were small and sharp and arranged in a pattern that was not quite human.

Ligaya didn’t care about chefs. She cared that she could finally fix the roof before the typhoons came. She cared that Kiko’s uniform no longer had holes. She cared that, for the first time in years, she slept without dreaming of empty nets.

She looked in the cracked mirror hanging by the door. Her eyes were the same as they had always been. Weren’t they? Tahong -2024-

But people started changing.

She ran to the water.

“The shells are talking,” he whispered. “Mama, your eyes,” he said one evening

“But Mama,” he said, and his voice was not his voice — it was a chorus, a hundred wet throats speaking in unison. “The tahong are hungry. And you promised them a feast.”

They found no village. No people. No boats. Just a stretch of shore covered in a thick carpet of green-lipped mussels, glistening in the morning sun. The largest shells were arranged in a rough circle, facing inward, as if listening to something the sea had forgotten to say.

They were warm.

Kiko tried to warn her.

“Mama, look!” Her son, Kiko, held up a cluster the size of his head. Water dripped from the glossy black shells, their inner edges flashing a deep, poisonous green. “This one’s a king!”