Category: Issue #19

The second time that Marnie Stanvelt shows up at the (highly nondescript) Bureau of Malignant Phenomena, it’s ten pm on a Thursday, and pissing down buckets. She doesn’t bother removing her boots, leaving a snail-trail of muddy water across the yellowing linoleum. Thea, the omnipresent receptionist, lets her hammer the call bell for a good minute before bothering to look up. Her greying hair falls over her tortoiseshell glasses in neat curls.

‘We’re closed.’ She wraps her hands around a steaming coffee mug. It’s freshly brewed.

‘I hope you choke on that,’ Marnie informs Thea, scowling, though it’s not very effective with rain dripping into her eyes and squelching into her socks.

.

‘Is there anything I can help you with, tonight?’ The light of the computer reflects off Thea’s spectacles, faintly green as it limns the crags of her face. ‘Our typical business hours are listed as five-to-seven-pm.’

Marnie rummages in her pockets, producing a compact-camera and an envelope of photos. ‘There is something, actually,’ she says, ‘and I’m not leaving until you can look me in the eyes and tell me this isn’t the weirdest shit you’ve ever seen.’

‘Weirder than that cat run over by a car?’

‘I’m telling you, that’s not what—yes. Weirder than that.’

The photos, when removed from the envelope, are from a few days ago. They’re grainy and sepia-tinted, but Marnie doesn’t care when the subjects are clear enough. Thea waits for her to slap them down before she leans forward, sliding her desk lamp over for a better look.

Earlier this week, Marnie made the effort of climbing down to the sewers and braving their depths in a two am chill. The results lie on the peeling Formica-topped desk before them. She waits for Thea to sift through the detritus, hovering over the one of the mangled cat from below 27^th and Rue Street. It goes unmentioned by both of them that she’s the reason it’s down there in the first place.

It went like this: a few days before The Sewer Trip, Marnie found a cat with its stomach ripped open down the street from her flat. The thing’s paws had been chewed off in hunks, with the legs splayed about its gutted belly. She’s ashamed of it now, but she shoved the cat in a plastic bag and threw it down the gutter. And sure, sue her. It was a beastly thing to do, but the sight of it had sent such a chill through the lining of her teeth, the kind that tugs at open nerve endings and splits them wide. The mangled cat felt like a threat. More so when she nearly walked right over its rotting cadaver in the tunnels. And so she turned it in to Thea, who’s been the receptionist of the Bureau since probably the 1800s.

Thea taps a plum-lacquered nail on one of the later photos. It resembles nothing so much as a monstrous warren of a sewer tunnel, the brick walls prised apart by roots the size of Marnie’s forearm. (She knows; she measured.) Even shot with an old Kodak and a torch-light, the image picks up glimmers of bloated corpses, their tails knotted together. Wheels of dead rodents floating in the shallow bilge-water. ‘These look like rat kings,’ she says.

‘Sorry?’

‘Rat kings. It’s when a bunch of them get stuck together by their tails, usually with sap or something else sticky.’ Thea taps at her keyboard, then twists the computer monitor around. It’s archived material, Marnie guesses—a full-colour image of a specimen box and a tangle of rats inside.

‘Huh. Creepy.’ It takes a moment for Marnie to get her bearings again, the way she’s been doing more and more lately. Part of her feels like it’s still there in the sewers. Maybe coming here wasn’t the best idea. There’s a lingering, ever-present smell in the office building, something like potpourri and vinegar, and it’s pulsing a headache through her temples.

Thea makes a face that could almost be a smile. ‘Photos are plenty malleable, I want to make that clear. But when a woman sloshes into your office with something this interesting, you begin to entertain, just the tiniest bit, the notion that her statement’s worth looking into after all.’ She clicks around with her mouse, then jabs a finger at the ‘Enter’ key.

Something below her desk makes a death rattle as she plucks a sheaf of papers from the unseen printer. The half hour that follows instils vicious loathing for bureaucracy that Marnie will carry for the rest of her life, probably, as Thea drags her through a formal statement of paranormal esoterica.

Yes, she did first encounter signs while working on the subterranean storm drain expansion. Yes, she’s the main worker tasked with the deeper sewers that nobody else will even touch. Eventually, they work their way towards the Associated Phenomena section, during which Thea’s jaw works tighter and tighter as Marnie bleats about scores of red-tinged eyes while she worked in the tunnels.

The really nasty bit comes when she mentions the kid who asked her for a cigarette yesterday. She couldn’t be older than fifteen, but her eyes stared Marnie down as she shuffled towards the maintenance entrance and clocked in.

‘Got a smoke?’ the girl asks.

‘Definitely not,’ past-Marnie gawks. She notices, with her hindsight-sharp eyes, that the kid’s dark cheeks are hollowed from the inside out. Now-Marnie watches absently as Thea’s lips press into a thin line, writing it all down.

The girl laughs. It sounds like teeth hitting the ground and cracking apart. ‘They’re wrong about the walls having ears, you know.’ She looks around emphatically at the empty dawn streets, then takes a pack of Marlboro’s from her jeans and puts one in her mouth. ‘It’s the gutters you should be really worried about.’

It’s here that Marnie dips out of yesterday and back into the rickety seat she’s pulled up in front of the desk. Thea waits impatiently with a colour printout, full of faces. MISSING PERSONS, the heading shouts in 35-pt font. Marnie has a bad feeling about it.

(That feeling is correct: the girl grins up at her from the second row. She’s been missing for three days. Her name is there, but Marnie only vaguely registers it.)

Marnie doesn’t mention to Thea the other things. Those moments when she can’t sleep for the sounds of skittering right beneath her floor—persisting even after she’d ripped up the floorboards one night, hands shaking.

She doesn’t mention that this isn’t the first time she’s gone down there off-duty, either. Not even close. Or that she isn’t scared of it, not the way she used to be. That’s—that’s not even the reason she’s here, she thinks, as Thea carefully feeds the images into a banged-up fax machine. She’d been… excited, when the photos had developed. She wanted someone to admit that she was right.

And maybe that’s the nature of secrets. Some secrets can’t help but be dug up. Some rot in the ground for years, pitted with worms and crawlers. Others still burrow into heartflesh, grow fat on blood beneath the breastbones of the guilty who fed them.

There’s an odd sort of poetry in how the worst secrets of all come from underneath—carried in sewer pipes and loamy tunnels. Those ones don’t stay buried. They come looking for food.

But Marnie Stanvelt isn’t pondering the nature of secrets as she pushes out into the night, leaving Thea to sip at her long-cooled coffee. She’s counting down the minutes until the metro gets to the nearest station, until she can tuck herself into bed with a hot water bottle and enough blankets to build the bloody Taj Mahal of pillow forts.

She probably should’ve been thinking more about secrets.

First, it’s the kh-shnnk of a manhole cover sliding over the sound of a thousand scurrying feet—tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk-tk. A creeping awareness of how her steps squelch against the pooling water on the pavement, her shoulders hunching further and further inwards. Steady dripping of rain into her cheap earbuds. Water-logged music filtering into her head.

‘Man, you’re bad at taking a hint.’  

It’s as if the girl has always been walking next to Marnie, her thin arm looped into hers. She’s wearing cheap sunglasses that don’t quite cover the ghoulish cast to her skin, stringy hair knotted up in clumps and braided with filth.  ‘I mean,’ she continues, ‘it’s not like we’ve been that subtle. You’re practically a guest.’ The girl looks up at her with a barbed-wire smile, teeth stained brown. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a smoke this time, would you?’

Marnie’s earbuds sputter out with a weak crackle, rain trickling past the deadened plastic and into her ears proper. The girl has deteriorated a lot since the photo in the Missing Persons file, as if her skeleton’s begun eating itself down to the marrow. ‘God, tell me you’re not Ingrid Ashram,’ she says weakly. That had been her name on the file, hadn’t it? Her eyes were a bit panic-blurry at the time, but it sounds right. Definitely Ingrid-something. The letters had been squeezed together in an impersonal little lump under her picture, gripping the lower border between hers and the next missing persons’.

The girl starts to snicker. ‘I won’t, if that makes you more comfortable.’ Her fingers bite into Marnie’s elbow with a disquieting kind of over-familiarity. ‘Normally folks seem to like pretending that the people are still here. Adds a bit of humanity to the whole affair.’

Half of this, admittedly, is going over Marnie’s head. It’s the way she talks, all menacing and dancing around the actual point. What does stick the landing, though, is a thought. She looks down at Ingrid, something sickly flooding her stomach.

‘What do you mean, pretending people are still here?’    

Ingrid’s face beams as if she’s letting Marnie in on a private joke. It’s a profoundly unsettling thing, her features working in tandem to split open the mouth like a rotting grapefruit. ‘Well, that’s an interesting question,’ she says, reaching a thumb up to wipe some blood from her gums. ‘What is pretending, you know?’

It’s only when the clustered buildings fall into too-familiar shapes that Marnie realises they’re in her own neighbourhood, drifting unerringly closer to her flat on Rue Street. The girl’s—Ingrid’s—footsteps are nimble, skirting around the puddles of light shed by streetlamps as if leading them through a dance.

‘Oh, hold on,’ Ingrid chirps as they approach the side of the road, pulling Marnie to a stop by an open gutter. Marnie winces at the damning streaks of dried blood smeared across the drain lip. ‘A bit rude to dump one’s party favour, but that’s something we can put to rights.’ Her brittle fingers flex as she bends a knee, stirring through the air in a come-hither motion. Her sunglasses betraying nothing but her smiling mouth, Ingrid seems to make direct eye contact as the dead cat is spat from the drain. Even though Marnie can’t see her expression proper; it feels far too old, too self-satisfied to belong on the face of a fifteen-year-old. Behind Ingrid, the gutter flashes with knotted-up tails—rats, hundreds of them, a roiling sea of fur and night-red eyes.

With a one-handed flick, the dead cat soars into Marnie’s arms. A scream gutters and dies in her throat.

Ingrid sits down, right in the middle of the road. ‘But it’s getting late, isn’t it?’

The swarm of rats spills onto the street, a black rippling sheet sewn together with thick, glistening pink veins. They eat up the tarmac, the pavement. Cover every square inch of free space.

‘You’re welcome down there any time you like, of course.’ Ingrid flaps a wasted hand towards the hidden sewers. ‘Same as Ingrid was, the little asshole.’ She lets out a fond chuckle. ‘Oh, she was a fun one to have. I’m glad she stuck around—the others went much more quickly than her.’

The thing wearing Ingrid’s skin removes her sunglasses. The sockets are empty, the eyes rotted away. Worm larvae trail from gaping holes. That rotting-grapefruit mouth peels back again in a friendly grin.

‘Don’t be a stranger, Marnie,’ she says, then pauses thoughtfully. ‘But maybe don’t go tattling again to Thea and her ilk. They’re not ready to deal with the likes of me.’

The street echoes with the sounds of rodents. Hundreds and hundreds of them, as the creature throws back her head and laughs. And Marnie starts to run.

Charlie Adams is a horror folklore enthusiast with a love of video games and things that go bump in the night. Currently a BA Creative Writing undergraduate, Charlie is drawn to fantasy and paranormal fiction with dreams of writing the next cult indie game. Her past works are lost to time (and several government cover-ups).

Once upon a time, there was a young boy called Joseph who lived in a village on the edge of the jungle. He wanted to prove to everyone that he wasn’t like the other kids. He wanted to prove that he was the man. Against his parent’s pleas and the fears of his friends, he marched deep into the jungle at midnight. He invaded her territory. Like a siren, a screech — the type that could shatter glass — echoed through the column of trees. The hairs on his little legs stood. But he kept exploring. He told himself again that he was the man. Then he stepped on something slimy. He opened it. Illuminated by the moon, a tiny face with empty sockets stared back. Joseph shivered as the screech returned. He looked at the full moon. The silhouette froze Joseph. She had two giant bat-like wings, scraggly hair, and a long tongue that slithered like a snake. She had no legs and like a million tiny tentacles, her guts dangled from her ripped torso. Wrapped around the tree, the street urchins — the children who didn’t listen — piled high. He should’ve listened.

Most Filipino children were told a story like that. They call her the manananggal. The manananggal was the woman across the street, the one so sweet and cute. The woman who, at the stroke of midnight, separates herself from her legs, grows wings and flies, hunting down pregnant women and other delicious things. Everyone has a story of a manananggal. Uncles boasted of being chased by them after skinny dipping in the lake, pregnant mothers were warned to shut their windows, and boys would throw salt at girls in the playground.

Well, that’s what they say anyway.

*

Once upon a time, there was a barangay — or small village — deep in the mountains of Cagayan named Conda. There were no high rises, no harbours, no concrete roads. Instead, shanties and shacks of scrap metal and planks lined the village. In the wet seasons, typhoons would flatten the barangay and the only structure left after the typhoon had passed was the white brick cottage on the hill, the envy of the village. It belonged to the town doctor, Maria del Rosario, the richest person in Conda who lived alone with her medicine and chemicals the witch doctors scoffed at. Everyone knew each other since birth. They woke up, worked on the farms then spent the evenings in the town square belting ballads beside the karaoke machine and the TV, the village’s only window to the outside world. In the dry season of ‘92, after the decades-long storm of dictatorship and rigged ballots, the people got their first taste of democracy. The villagers were hypnotised by the smiles of presidential hopefuls and found themselves, at the flick of a candidate’s finger, on the streets to fight in their name. It was the only way they knew how to debate. The barangay Kapitan, who governed over 100 men and women, almost lost both eyes breaking up brawls. One of these days, someone in Conda was going to get killed. One of these days, the barangay was going to melt under the heat of the election.

Jay Contrales and his wife, Elma, lived in one of those shanties when, one midnight, Jay woke up to an empty bed. He heard something faint from the bathroom, the sharp sucking of air through teeth. He lit a candle. ‘Oh god,’ murmured the woman behind the door. Jay’s hairs stood as the wind breezed through the cracks and he tasted metal in the air as he approached the door. He opened it. The candlelight fell upon Elma. Hunched over, her white dress was stained at the edges as she did her best to hold herself off the ground as a pool of blood congealed beneath her. In the centre of that pool sat a slimy sac. A face was trapped inside. The villagers rushed to the sound of Jay’s cry. The Kapitan vomited at the smell. Maria rushed to Elma’s aid. It was too late.

‘Our child,’ Jay sobbed, ‘why us?’ As Maria examined Elma, she asked questions about her diet and activity, searching for an answer as to why the miscarriage occurred. Elma stared blankly at the doctor.

‘I… can’t remember,’ said Elma, ‘but weirdly, I feel an angel answered my prayers.’

‘Prayers…’ Maria muttered, ‘I think I understand.’ She shrugged and then continued her examination.

Jay noticed the bathroom window ajar before he and the villagers heard a screech in the forest. Jay remembered the story he heard when he was a child. The story of Joseph. His stomach churned. He glanced at the shrivelled face in the sac and grabbed Maria’s elbow. ‘This was the work of an aswang. I think a manananggal attacked my wife.’ That’s when Maria saw, on the side of the fetus’ head, blood oozing from a thin puncture. The Kapitan and Jay inspected the wound when Elma shot up in her bloody dress and shouted, ‘I remember now! A manananggal… it killed my baby!’

While the aswang attack subdued the village for a week, the election soon returned to the villagers’ minds and the Kapitan struggled to maintain order. But soon, the villagers heard a shriek from the Kapitan’s house. When they arrived, the marital bed was soaked in the blood of the unborn. The Kapitan trembled as his wife sat motionless on the bed, a gaping wound in her side. The window was wide open. Families clutched each other tightly. A pregnant woman made the sign of the cross. Maria examined the wound. She’s seen something like this before; too many times actually. She was about to speak when the Kapitan wept, ‘Why God? Why me?’ Maria chose not to say anything. She offered her condolences and returned home with the rest of the villagers while Jay and a few men stayed with the Kapitan. Amidst his sobs, the Kapitan thrust a finger into the sky, eyes wide and shouted, ‘A–aswang!’ The villagers looked out the window. Nothing was there. The Kapitan said they just missed it. He then traced a line from the moon to the white brick house.

The spectre of the aswang paralysed Conda. No one talked about the election anymore. Seeing this, the Kapitan ordered a nightly curfew and educated the villagers on what the manananggal looked like, how it behaved and how to defend against it. Men sharpened sticks into stakes and the women prepared pouches of salt and spices. The Kapitan appointed himself, Jay, and three other men to a task force to investigate aswang sightings. Jay was particularly hellbent on capturing the manananggal. The Kapitan noticed this and told Jay a secret.

‘There’s one thing I couldn’t mention to the village,’ he told Jay, ‘the manananggal is just an ordinary-looking woman in the day.’ And so, the Kapitan and Jay surveilled every woman for anything remotely suspicious. They said they were doing this for their wives. They said they were doing this for the children.

Manananggal sightings were reported almost nightly. The task force would hear a cry across the barangay. ‘I saw something with batwings fly there!’ or, ‘I heard scratches against my door!’ Their testimonies were full of hysterics and hyperventilating. Frustrated, the Kapitan translated their chaotic cries. ‘So you said it flew from here. Is that correct?’ he’d ask. The witnesses perked up and pointed confidently to the place suggested by him. All the witnesses pointed to the same place. Jay remembered that on the night the Kapitan’s wife was killed, the Kapitan pointed to the same place too. Jay smirked. He told the task force his theory. The Kapitan, with a glint in his eyes, grinned.

Five men knocked on the door of the white brick house. Maria answered. They entered before she said anything. The Kapitan asked what she did the other day; she said she was working. Jay asked if she saw anything with batwings; she said bats usually visit her place for her fruit trees. Another asked if she saw anything resembling an aswang; Maria chuckled.

‘Aswang aren’t real!’ No one laughed back. The Kapitan asked her to put out her hands. ‘A test,’ he said. She obliged. The Kapitan poured the vial of salt and spices into her hands. Maria sprung up, swore and flailed her hands back and forth to get it off. Everyone flinched.

‘Sorry,’ said Maria as she showed them a laceration across her right palm, ‘I was clumsy with some glass yesterday and the salt stung.’ She forced a smile. The Kapitan frowned. He bashed his stick against her skull and Maria collapsed. Jay stuffed her inside a bag and the others bound her arms and legs with rope. They dragged her to a tree in the centre of the village and hung her upside down. At dusk, the Kapitan rang the bell for a town meeting. Darkness swallowed the village.

Maria woke up to the torchlit faces of a hundred villagers. The crowd murmured as she wriggled in place. The Kapitan boomed: ‘Don’t be fooled. During the day, a manananggal looks just like us. Here she is. For the charges of the murder of Jay and Elma’s child and the murder of my wife and our child, the people find you guilty.’ Maria squirmed and screamed. She protested it wasn’t her. She protested that aswang aren’t real. She protested that she could explain the wounds on the Kapitan’s wife and the hole in the fetus’ head. The Kapitan gagged her. Then, tears in his eyes, he turned to the crowd.

‘It’s not her fault,’ the Kapitan said, ‘she knows not what she’s done. In every manananggal lies a black chick trapped inside. That chick is the true monster, the one that possesses our women into monstrosities. The one that preys upon our children.’

Jay remembered all the times Maria brought fruit to him and his wife and Maria’s perfect renditions of ‘My Way’ on the karaoke. He couldn’t believe that the same sweet Doc was the host of a devilish parasite. The Kapitan wiped his tears and continued.

‘But I know that she is the same Doc we all know and love. And by God’s grace, she can still be cured! All we need to do,’ the Kapitan picked up a bat, ‘is force it out.’

Nobody spoke as Maria’s gag struggled to contain her cries. The Kapitan offered Jay the bat. ‘For your child,’ he said. Jay grasped the bat and stared into Maria’s beet-red face as tears streamed down her forehead and dripped onto the floor. Jay scanned the crowd. He couldn’t find his wife but he saw children cower behind their parents. Jay smashed the bat against Maria’s stomach. The face in the sac of flesh flashed in his mind. He set aside her muffled screams. He swung harder. Then harder. Then harder. Jay collapsed onto the floor out of breath as Maria swayed under the tree. The Kapitan took the bat. A grunt. A thump. A crack. A muted wail. He passed the bat to another. Then another. In this ungodly game of pinata, every strike leaked blood through Maria’s gag. ‘Take a good look,’ said a woman as she gave her daughter the bat, ‘aswang can take many forms, even those you least expect.’ The girl looked into the eyes of the woman who helped bring her into the world. She raised the bat. Another crack. The cries stopped. The Kapitan removed the gag. A stream of food and acid and blood flowed onto the floor. ‘Where’s the chick?’ a man shouted and ripped the bat from the girl’s hands. With every blow, he got more desperate.

After an hour, the only sounds were the panting of the villagers and the creaking of the rope. Jay stared at Maria: the corners of her mouth were crusted red and her forehead dried in tears. A villager tapped Jay’s shoulder. ‘That’s the chick right?’ He pointed at a black particle in the pool of vomit, blood and tears. A pit formed in Jay’s stomach but before he could answer, the Kapitan nodded. ‘We’re safe now.’ The villagers snuffed their torches and returned home. Jay and the Kapitan dumped Maria in the woods.

Soon after, the election passed over and the village returned to its habitual state of torpor and karaoke. The new government built roads and phone lines to connect isolated barangays like Conda with the wider world. They worked alongside barangay kapitans, who were now promoted to mayors. Because Maria had no family, the Mayor of Conda moved into her house and over the years, he would never leave office. No one fought on the streets again.

In contrast, shortly after the election, Jay spotted a coat hanger, glinting outside his house beside the bathroom window. Elma flinched when Jay showed it to her. When Elma reminded Jay of the mayor, the couple never spoke of it again. Deep into old age, the couple moved to an apartment, smaller than their shanty, in the bustling streets of Manila. Despite the ever-present beeping of car horns, Elma seemed to sleep just fine. But Jay, no matter how far from the mountains they now were, could never seem to escape the strained, creaking cry of the rope.

***

Some say that once upon a time, there stalked a black chick in the woods. She heard the weeping of a soul, imprisoned in the husk of a battered body. With pity, she forced herself into the body’s mouth. Then, at the stroke of midnight, the body’s torso tore itself from its legs, its arms transformed into wings and the wail of a thousand tears pierced the forest, alerting the birds to flock away. Luckily for her, a street urchin arrived just in time to witness her metamorphosis.

Well, that’s what they say anyway.

Bradley Cagauan is an academic coach and writer studying creative writing and law at Macquarie University. He has a keen interest in the law, justice and politics which underpins his feature articles and stories. ‘The Folk Tale of the Manananggal’ is his first published short story, a cosy tale drawing upon Filipino mythology and mob justice.

This story deals with themes of suicide

The air is rushing past my face, pushing my entire body forward like the entire world wants me to do it. Ants scatter the pavement below, walking to their workplace or grabbing coffee with some friends. And my creature mocks me from the lick of my ankles, a distorted recording of that video I replayed a thousand times in my head now coming from its drooping mouth.

‘Can you tell me how a perfect love goes wrong!’

My friends scream at the top of their lungs as they ‘sing’ for karaoke, their happy faces seemingly etched right into the core of my brain. The monster attaches itself to my back, cackling as it continues to play the memory of the video again.

‘Alone again! On your own, like always!’ It screeches something I don’t want to hear, cementing itself as my truth. Last night my friends had gone without me to a party I wasn’t invited to, my ex in the video along with them. “They chose him because they hate you. They hate you! They hate you! They hate you!”

‘Shut the fuck up!’ I scream at the top of my lungs and almost choke on those words as my right foot slides along the roof’s edge, half of it now above a twelve-story drop to the ground. Vertigo takes over, and my body feels like it’s rocking back and forth, the buildings around me tilting side to side. It feels like a nightmare and I can’t wake up – I’m not in control of my body even though I know what’s going on.

A scream echoes from the streets, and all the little critters there stop to look up where the lady is pointing at. ‘She’s gonna jump!’

Is that what I’m going to do? The stranger’s conclusion sends my head spinning even more and my left foot staggers until it matches my right. With one wrong move, I’ll fall. Everyone will see me, and I can see them take their phones out. The whole world will see me now and maybe my friends will see me for once too.

‘Be careful, haha!’ That same scratching imitation of a friend’s voice sparks the memory, of a video of them messing around in their backyard. I should have been there, they were my friends first. All of them chose my ex over me, to have that man fool around and have fun while I sat at home and cried the whole night. Would they still have done that if they knew what he had done to me?

‘What difference does that make?’ My creature hisses into my ear, its black sludge winding around my body. The simple question makes my heart beat in my ear and I find myself forcing air in and out of my lungs. He touched me without my permission, is that not a big thing? Wouldn’t my friends get rid of him if they knew? Wouldn’t they choose me instead? The lump in my throat forms and tears prick the edge of my eyes, blurring the entire city in front of me. I’m not a choice, I’m a friend and I know that, so why – Why didn’t they choose me?

‘They hate me. That’s why.’ Clarity sets in, and my heart slows down as I feel a wave of calmness sweeping my body.

‘She jumped!’ The woman screamed and all I thought as the pavement came closer was:

‘Shut up, shut up, shut up.’ My nightmare laughs into my ear.

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY

Katherine sits on the top bunk bed with headphones plugged in and the volume up way too loud. Mae does not scold her for it, the older sister is frozen on the first step of the stairs. The blur of lights is flashing in front of their eyes but Mae’s brain isn’t processing anything. Instead, there’s a sinking feeling.

            A door slams outside, Mae flinches. The shared bedroom door is cracked open just a little and Mae hears her mother begin to yell.

            I need to close the door. She shuffles past the mess of toys on the carpet floor.

            ‘Why?! Why would you do this?’ It feels like she needs to throw up everything in her stomach but her stomach is empty all at once. Her mother’s anguished voice is enough to completely freeze Mae over that she’s not even shaking. ‘Did I do something wrong, huh?! Is that why you’re going out all the time?!’ She won’t stop yelling and it’s always followed by silence, not a peep from the other person her mother is addressing.

            The silence stretched on as if a reply was pending silently in the air, waiting for Mae to press play again when she was ready. It’s enough for Mae to pull the door open wider, her head sticking out in what children could not understand as a feeling of morbid curiosity.

            The kitchen and dining area are within view down the hall and in between those two spaces is her mother staring accusingly at someone behind the corner. Her tear-stricken face is contorted in so much rage and so much sadness at the same time, that Mae wanted to cry too. Who was she talking to? It could have only been her father but that didn’t make any sense, nothing bad happened today, he’d only been out this late because of work.

            ‘You spend all our money and you can’t even look at me!’ She swings the door until it’s back to just a crack in the wall, one eye looking through but it is now just a blur of her mother. Her figure leans over and it is followed by the crash of the plastic stool, the familiar sound of it being knocked down and Mae realises she’s thrown it at him. ‘You should have stayed out! Don’t come back next time.’

            That was the end of it, her mother storming towards the hall where Mae was hiding in the bedroom. She must have seen the door was a little open because the door slams shut, the doorknob hitting Mae near the eye and it took all of her to not cry out, whimpering in the pain.

            ‘I miss dad.’ Katherine says from the bed, her headphones now off. ‘When will he be home?’

ASHORE

The ship creaks, as she rocks gently from side to side. The scent of sea air is familiar but never fails to feel refreshing on the lungs as it whisks away the smell of dead fish. Kreol is hunched over the steering wheel, surveying the still waters. It’s too quiet, with not a single bird flying over or fish near the surface despite it being close to known heavily populated waters during migrating season. The sun is high above, obscuring a part of his view.

            A school of orange faintly appears on the left, a large body of god knows what swim under the ship at blinding speed and it knocks the ship with its weight. ‘Piranials!’ He shouts and the crew bursts from under, flooding the deck in their rags and spears, gunners rolling the canons into positions.

            ‘Captain, we can’t-’ A scream tears through the Quartermaster’s words, both of them spinning towards the sound as a piranial jumps out from the ocean, their mouths full of four rows of sharp teeth sinking into the side of their head. The ungodly three-eyed fish shrieks but doesn’t let go of the man who is trying to tear it from his flesh. Kreol covers his ears and the sound signals a whole hoard to jump from the ocean’s surface, the vicious display of teeth grabbing onto the rest of the man’s body, tearing at him until one side was a mess of blood and mangled organs.

            ‘It’s over.’ Kreol whispers, drawing his sword as a piranial from the dead body spots him, its blood-red eyes glow in daylight. The fish shrieks and he watches as the ship is surrounded on both sides. The predators biting into the ship and his men, their screams drowning out the sound of his own heart dying.

Sharon Cabasag is a young adult that mostly stays at home unless she is invited to go hang out with friends. She has only had enough time to read comics instead of novels because of university, although, she has taken to gaming late at night for some much needed isolation.

She is stitched to her destiny with golden thread, needles stabbed through her fingertips to tug her along. In a cottage choked by ivy and honeysuckle, she is clothed in pale pink and dark brown, sickening fairy floss and sturdy trees. She dreams in false memories: a mother and a father, a queen and a king, a cradle soft and safe, a spell ghostly and green.

She holds a candle close to her finger so she can see the shadow of the bone. She worries her skin will melt like spun sugar sucked into nothingness. She worries she will fall into the strange dreams and be stuck as a baby, shrouded in embroidered silk and the sharp curse of a disregarded witch.

 She learns how to stifle her waking scream. She treks into the woods to scream. She climbs trees. She falls out of trees. She learns to tie her shoes. She grows out of her shoes. She bakes cakes. She burns cakes. She learns to sew clothes. She grows out of her clothes. She rips her clothes. She learns how to mend clothes.

She is strictly supervised by her godmothers when she has a needle in her hand, fingers tightly wound with tape, jammed with thimbles. They perch next to her or hover in front of her, wringing their hands as if they’re struggling to stop themselves from reaching out and snatching the fabric and needle and thread away. She is not allowed to hold the knives when she helps them cook, instead measuring out shards of sugar and messy clouds of flour with smooth wooden spoons, tipping careful quantities into glass bowls and thick-bottomed pans, stirring and sifting and staring out the window at the forest.

She decides that her skin must be made of paper, although she has been out in the rain many times and she has not yet dissolved. If she were to be nicked or stabbed or sliced, the wound would not heal, and her own heart would pump her determinedly into death.

She walks through the woods, grass wet beneath her feet, leaves whirring overhead like shimmering beetle wings. Sunlight slides through the gaps in the branches like drops of honey. She is searching for something freshly mythical, like always. She’s so used to seeing the magical in the mundane that it’s lost its charm. She wants wonder again, and so she worms her way out of chores and worry, sprints through the trees, picks bright handfuls of wildflowers to display in a vase or press dry or twist into a crown.

Their saturated stems snarl around her fingers as she stumbles steadily deeper. The trees grow closer together here, tangled around each other, making her feel like an ant trotting through a maze of grass. The green grows deeper, dimmer, darker. Her body absorbs the shadowy shade, eyes adjusting, shivers stopping.

There is a crack of golden light in the distance. Her eyes spill open. The trees block her path, tripping her on their roots and bumping her to the ground with their trembling trunks. She makes a game of it, laughing as she dives and delves through the army of green and brown. The rough texture scrapes threateningly at her skin and she stops her laughter, pulling out of the claw-like clutches and struggling into a mad dash towards the flourish of phosphorescence. She squeezes through the splintering branches and finds herself in a clearing. The space is awash with the movement of spiralling colour, grass gleaming with remnants of dew, flickering butterflies, glinting beetles, swaying flowers.

A boy stands in sharp relief against the softness. He is perfectly still, staring at her. He looks too human for such a pretty place, except for the staggering sunlight making his skin glow gold and his hair gleam white-hot, like a melting candle.

‘Hello,’ she says. ‘Are you the magic?’

‘I am the monster,’ he says proudly.

‘You don’t look much like a monster,’ she says, chin high, as if she’s seen many monsters to compare him to.

He bares his teeth and she recoils, but then steps towards him, dropping her flowers to grab his chin to stare at them.

‘Wow,’ she says, because his teeth are monstrous. There are too many of them. They stick out at strange angles, sharp grey triangles, jagged slices of shattered slate shoved into his gums. She pokes the flat edge of one. He snaps at her finger, shrieking with laughter at her gasp of fear. She hits him once, misses twice, falls over her own laughter and ends up lying on the grass.

He flops down beside her.

‘If you bit me, I would die,’ she tells him, sitting up to face him.

‘No, you wouldn’t. I would save you. I would bandage you up.’

‘It wouldn’t work. If I bleed, I die.’ She says it with affected casualness.

‘Why?’

‘My skin is made of paper.’

He pokes her.

‘No it’s not. Your skin is made of skin. Same as mine.’ He places a finger under her wrist to guide her hand into the air, pressing his palm against hers once she holds the position. His hand is warm, browned by the sun and radiating the absorbed heat. He curves the tops of his fingers over hers.

‘How did you become a monster?’ she asks. He drops his hand away from hers, busies himself with gathering up her scattered flowers, sorting them into piles of colour: daisies like folded paper, poppies like frozen fire, hyacinths like small blue stars, pale pink wild roses like blood that’s too set in to be properly washed out.

‘I was cursed.’

‘Why?’

‘I stole an apple.’

‘Why?’

‘I was hungry.’

‘And then what?’

‘And then I got caught and cursed and cast out. And now I live all alone, on the outskirts of the woods.’

‘Me too. I’m alone. I have my godmothers, but they’re more like birds than people, sometimes. They make noises for the sake of making noise. They’re colourful for the sake of being colourful.’

He laughs. ‘Maybe your paper skin is a curse as well. Maybe we match.’

His fingers nimbly knot the flowers into a crown. He sets it on her head. He smiles with all his teeth. Her hand still hangs in the air, wilting like a plucked flower. There is a storm gathering overhead, rustling thick grey skirts. She should go home. Her heart expands at the thought, pounding with fresh pain like new petals.

He presses the remaining flowers into her suspended hand and her fingers automatically curl around them. His skin brushes against hers. It burns, like touching a section snipped off the sun.

They sit in steady silence as she blows on her scorched fingers and begins making another looping crown. Hers is neater than his, but the precise pattern makes it less pretty. Two poppies droop down over her forehead, partially obscuring her vision with bright splashes of red. She closes the circle. He is lying on his back, eyes swallowing the colour from the sky. She nudges him to sit up. She sets the crown on his head.

‘We match,’ she tells him. He smiles with all his teeth. She bares her own in return, resenting their bright whiteness, their sleek neatness.

The sky tips over. The rain is warm at first, a soft summer shower, the sunlight peeking through the clouds to make it shimmer silver-gold.

‘Maybe this will be the time I dissolve,’ she says, swiping her damp hair out of her face.

He laughs, the sound made brighter by the downpour muffling the creaking forest. He tilts his head back to drink the droplets.

She reaches out again to hold his mouth open, examining the ragged roughness, the serrated edges leading up to precise points.

She presses her thumb against the point of his tooth. A slice of red pain blooms. Her hand shakes as she raises it up to examine it. The rain floods over the wound.

She falls, racing her spilling blood to hit the glossy ground.

.

It’s still raining when she wakes up. She is lying on her back. He is holding her hand, tongue poking out as he ties a bow in the bandage he’s wrapped around her finger.

‘Told you I’d save you,’ he says. The rain rushes down his face, dripping onto her hand. The flower crown is tangled with her hair, plastered across her face. Her pink dress is drenched to dark purple. ‘You were right, as well. You died a little death,’ he grins. ‘You’re alright now. I kissed it better. My mother always used to, when I would trip and fall.’

‘Where’s your mother now?’

‘She cast me out. I was always too difficult. It doesn’t matter. I am a monster. I don’t need anyone.’

‘I don’t think you’re a monster,’ she says. He finishes the bow with a flourish and she hastily tangles their fingers together, worried she’ll melt away into the mud if she doesn’t have something to cling to.

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he says.

The sinking sun spins the rain into sparks of orange and purple, the writhing forest into grey browns and greens like a freshly watered garden bed.

‘I am,’ she says, regret taking root in her chest, tugging in two opposing ways — she needs to go home before her godmothers flurry up into worry; she doesn’t want to leave him, she wants to stay in this secluded sanctuary till the sun stops setting entirely, and the earth crumbles to moonlight beneath her.

‘Where are you going?’ he asks.

‘Home,’ she says, and an idea worms its way out of her head, cleverly burrowing down to her chest to twist her appeal towards it. ‘Would you like to come with me?’

The freshly spun stars sprinkle down, competing with and complementing the rain. The light shatters in silver sparks against his teeth as he smiles.

Her own lips curve in return, golden thread hooked through the corners of her mouth and tugged up towards the sky.

Jo Crocker lives by the sea with her pet rats, fish and a border collie. When she’s not scribbling ideas in notebooks or weaving those ideas into stories, she enjoys reading fantasy and horror and playing violin. Her short story ‘Epiphany’ has been long-listed for the Future Leaders Writers Prize.