One evening in late October, Ligaya noticed something strange. The tahong on the western beds had grown twice as fast as those in the east. Their shells were darker, almost purple, and when she pried one open, the meat inside was a deep, angry orange — not the pale cream she knew.
Celso, toothless and nearly blind, squinted at the mussel in her palm. He was eighty if he was a day, and his skin had the texture of dried seaweed. He turned the shell over in his gnarled fingers. For a long moment, he said nothing. Tahong -2024-
She looked in the cracked mirror hanging by the door. Her eyes were the same as they had always been. Weren’t they? One evening in late October, Ligaya noticed something
Celso didn’t answer. He just looked at the horizon, where the sun was bleeding into the sea, and muttered something under his breath. Ligaya caught only one word: Tiyanak . She didn’t know why he would say that. A tiyanak was a myth — a dead infant returned as a monster. It had nothing to do with mussels. Celso, toothless and nearly blind, squinted at the
“That’s not tahong ,” he said quietly. “That’s something wearing its shell.”
Ligaya stood at the water’s edge, her bare feet sinking into the cold, silty sand. The bamboo raft she’d inherited from her father bobbed twenty meters out, its ropes already straining under the weight of the day’s first haul. She was thirty-two, with sun-hardened skin and hands that smelled permanently of brine. Her husband had left for Manila three years ago, chasing construction work. He sent money sometimes. But the tahong — the tahong had never left her.
“They’re green, Mama. Like the shells.”