Tahong -2024- -

Ligaya noticed none of this. Or rather, she noticed, but the noticing felt distant, like watching a bad storm through a window she couldn’t open. She spent her days on the water, her hands moving automatically, prying tahong from the ropes. She no longer ate anything else. She no longer wanted to.

“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.”

Ligaya ran.

The cot was empty. The blanket was still warm. Outside, the sea had risen — not in a wave, not in a storm surge, but simply lifted , as if the ocean had decided to stand up and stretch. Water lapped at the stilts of the house. In the distance, the western beds glowed faintly, a sickly green phosphorescence that lit the undersides of the clouds.

The buyers came back in January.

Ligaya ran to his bamboo cot, expecting a nightmare, a fever, a spider. But Kiko was sitting upright, his eyes wide open, his mouth moving in a shape that didn’t match any word she knew. His skin was cold — impossibly cold, like the deep water where the light never reaches.

For 2024, the harvest was a miracle.

But people started changing.