Tahong -2024- -

He was cross-legged, perfectly dry despite the rising sea. In his lap, he held a single, enormous tahong — bigger than any she had ever seen, its shell a deep, iridescent black. He was stroking it like a pet.

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.

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

And somewhere beneath the waves, in the dark and the cold and the endless green light, Ligaya opened her eyes. She had no hands to reach with, no voice to speak with. But she had patience. She had memory. And she had a hunger that the sea itself could not satisfy.