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Hearts And Half-Measures

by Cassiopeia Gatmaitan

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You eat the hearts of men because your father says that if you consume enough, you’ll turn back into one.

You think it’s all bull. Anyone in their right mind would. But he watches you like a hawk, so you always make sure to bring a fresh one with you when you stagger home past dawn.

He smiles over his cup of coffee, makes you one the way you like it, and helps you into your seat. Most times, he doesn’t even call you hijo when he asks about your evening.

This time, he does, and you clench your teeth as you tell him about the fire on Recoletos Street, and how you almost wanted to make one of the firemen your mark. And then you realized that it would have been too hard to tear his heart out through his uniform, that he would taste like smoke, and that the body would stand out like a stoplight, clad in red-stained neon green. You recall giggling at the image, but you know that your father would think you crass for that, so you keep it to yourself.

He takes the heart from your hand, and you continue your story as he heats up oil in a frying pan, slicing the meat into bite-sized chunks.

“I had to stash my legs by a creek,” you say, running your bloody finger along the seam separating your waist and hip. The provincial girls usually like leaving their lower bodies in banana groves, where they can be mistaken for trees chopped down. Less chance for some wannabe monster hunter to find them and sprinkle salt or ash or garlic on the open wound.

“You need to be more careful,” your father says, dark, sleepless shadows beneath his eyes. He was always tired these days. “The village boys are always out so late. What will you do if they see you like that?” You know he’s referring to your upper half severed from your lower half, but you don’t miss the disdain with which he looks at your miniskirt and tube top.

You roll your eyes, raise a gory middle finger at his back. “Like I have a choice,” you mutter. The houses here are too packed together for you to leave your lower half anywhere you can easily get to it. There’s an abandoned lottery down the block, but the last time you tried hiding there, some of those rich kid urban explorer motherfuckers decided it was a good night to bring a ouija board over and get high on tainted weed. You were lucky they didn’t spew their guts out on your legs.

You hear a sizzle, and the smell of cooking meat makes your stomach gurgle, reminding you that you haven’t eaten in three days. Most people think that girls like you can eat men whole, cocks and what little brains and all, but the truth is that you can only eat eyes, hearts, and livers. Nowadays, good livers are hard to find. You could pry a man open expecting a good meal only to take a bite and realize that his liver’s been rotted through, made bitter by cheap vodka (foreigners) or Red Horse (locals). Eyes are somewhat more manageable, though you hate the feeling of prying them loose and hate the slurp of the optic nerve as it goes past your lips. It reminds you of spaghetti, and you could never quite eat that right without getting sauce all over your face.

“You arrived home a bit later than usual,” your father says, and you hate the accusation in his words, as though you didn’t spend the entire night hunting for a heart to bring back to him.

You’re tempted to roll your eyes and flip him off again, but then he turns and places a plate before you and you have to fight the urge to puke at the sight of it.

The other girls say that hearts are delicacies, worthy of being marinated for hours and served like fancy dinners, but to you, they’ve always been too raw, too tender, no matter how long your father cooks them.

You were thirteen when your father found you with your first victim, one of his white drinking buddies who’d tried to put his hands on you. The man was unrecognizable save for his off-brand cap, his body as mangled and bloodied as a charnel house pig. You’d been up to your elbows in his entrails, the end of an intestine wrapped around your fingers. Your father didn’t really care about any of that. He’d cared more about the fact that you killed the man while wearing one of your mother’s old dresses.

You didn’t really know how it happened, but between one moment and the next, he’d started shoving the man’s heart between your teeth, telling you that maybe if you consumed it entirely, you’d go back to being a boy, as if you’d ever been one to begin with. Fueled by denial, your father had made up a monster myth: if you ate enough men’s hearts, you would become his son again.

But it had been too late by then, because your wings had come in and you could feel them break through the meat of your back, shoving your shoulder blades aside to unfurl into black-tipped monstrosities, leathery as a corpse’s skin. You’d heard enough stories to know what you were—a manananggal, a monster who could detach from her lower limbs at night to feed off of human flesh.

Your father tried to grab them, but you came undone at the seams, free of yourself for the first time in your fucking life. Back then, girls like you had been a myth, so you didn’t know that the transformation hurt, that the wings unfurling would run you through, and that leaving your lower body behind meant that you could feel each stitch of skin shred until you finally broke free.

While you tried to catch your breath, you remembered The Little Mermaid. The Disney movie had been your favorite as a kid, so when your mom found a 35-peso bargain at the local Booksale, she bought it for you as a gift, read you the story of a girl turning to seafoam and describing walking on land like walking on knives. That was what flying felt like, baring an open wound to the sky. But it was freedom.

Your father couldn’t do anything to stop you after that.

Eventually, you met the other girls, roamed the night with them, fed on packs of tourists with them. In the sky, you all had the same parts: the same teeth, the same wings, the same entrails that dangled in the dark. Your daylight lives didn’t matter: up in the air, there was only the wind on your face and the sisterhood that came with devouring men together. The only things that could kill you were ash or salt, garlic or stingray tails, the first three if smeared onto the open wound where your body severed, the last if pierced through your heart.

Now, holding the memory of the hunt, you choke down the heart your father gives you, eat whole hunks of meat down to the dregs. Your father smiles, beaming with pride, slapping you on the back, calling you son. Still unused to the weight of your legs after so long in the sky, you escape to your room, sleep until nighttime.

You let him hold onto his fantasy. It’s the only way you can fly.

Come sunset, as he’s watching a basketball game, you leave, cross the threshold onto the street.

You’re careful. The other girls have been saying that some among your number are disappearing. The gossip is that they’re just going back to their home provinces for the summer, but there are darker tales—girls found with their hearts pierced through, bleeding out onto the cobblestones.

You follow the direction of the wind, its humid summer heat leading you further and further as you come onto the Intramuros streets, avoiding the wolf whistles of the myriad white tourists who come here thinking that the only purpose of girls like you is to give them a good time. You consider baring your teeth more than once, but tear a man to shreds in the middle of a tourist spot and more will come gawking. You don’t want to deal with that tonight.

Quiet as you can, you make your way down the side streets, crossing all the ancient stone edifices, looming over you like sentinels. You’re not afraid of them. Your kind has lived on this land before foreign hands ever set these foundations. Though now you cross the work of centuries, thousands and thousands years’ worth of girls like you have graced the skies above it all.

During your nightly outings, the other girls tell you stories, unspooling millennia’s worth of history. You hold onto that now, knowing the power in your body, grasping it close to you. It is the most sacred thing on this earth.

Before any foreign ship encroached on your shores, your kind served as the wives to kings, if not kings themselves. You were the boundary between the living and the dead, the veil between mortals and spirits, for you were both, and you were whole. And then the conquistadores came and called you witches for it, desecrating your bodies, setting them ablaze, leaving them between the maws of crocodiles. Only then did your bodies take their vengeance, severing in two, gaining the strength of your beloved dead. No prayer could keep you away, not when the thirst for blood came, and it came swift.

You look around, wonder whether waves of foreign blood ever painted these old stone walls, shed at the hands of those who’d come before you. You revel in the thought, imagining it as your foremothers’ blessing, wishing you luck on tonight’s hunt.

Eventually, you find a narrow alley to tuck away your legs. It lies between a print shop and a paper mill, both now closed for the night. The half of your body you’ll leave behind will be well-concealed.

You take a deep breath. You can go anywhere tonight. Your wings could carry you all the way across this island, if you wanted. You could skim the sea, dance across the tops of trees, shroud the moon with your shadow. But no. You’ll remain here tonight. You want to find one of those disgusting men who cross the ocean just to make a brothel of the shores they touch. The kind that jeer at you, who touch you, who think your body, every brown body, is their right.

They’re your favorite targets. They taste like rotting garbage, insides black and clotted, but there’s such power in plucking out their eyes, unspooling their intestines to get at their livers, pushing aside their lungs to get to their hearts. You love the feeling of their blood running down your chin. It feels right, the vengeance of centuries, a brown girl on the warpath.

Once night falls onto the cobblestones, your change begins. You feel it down in your stomach first, the unraveling, your innards unknotting themselves. The sensation travels down your waist, the seams of your skin coming loose stitch by painful stitch. You close your eyes. This pain is a blessing. The other girls told you that this is a lineage’s gift, passed down from mother to daughter ever since the very first of your kind emerged from her execution, alive.

You think about the Little Mermaid again, dancing on knives, and then you think about your mother. You never got to tell her you were a girl, but you suspect she always knew. She never batted an eye when her dresses went missing, and she always called you sirena, lovingly, mermaid. When she read you the story each night, she’d tell you that in the very first tellings, sirens had had wings. You wonder if she’d ever flown, ever hunted. Maybe all the nights she’d spent at work were instead spent in the sky. You hoped so. It was a better life, a kinder one. But you would never know for sure. If she’d had wings of her own, she’d taken them to the grave.

After she’d died, your father had forbidden all mention of her, and you thought that perhaps he’d damned her memory from grief, but you never seemed to see him cry over her.

When the severance is complete, all it takes is a single thrust of your wings to shoot you high into the sky. It’s ecstasy, being released from your body, feeling the wind in the open wound above your hips. High above the world is the freest you’ll ever be, so you make the most of it, breathing the night into your lungs, catching the light of the stars in your dark hair and your brown skin. You savor it for only a moment before you swoop back down, just high enough for cloud cover and just low enough to watch the streets.

The night fills the winding Intramuros roads with bar-crawling tourists, trailing like ants all along the alleyways. You stalk the stragglers, the slow-walkers, and the drunks, but they all eventually leave in tricycles or overpriced Grab taxis.

The sky is gray with the coming dawn when you spot a white man sitting alone outside a bar closing down, nursing a cigarette and what must be his dozenth bottle of San Miguel. With no one around, you approach him, your entrails dragging behind you, a smile on your lips.

You give him no time to react. You bare your fangs, aiming for the jugular, biting down until you feel bone.

And then—the smell of burning.

“Fuck,” you snarl, realizing that he’d thrown his ashtray at you, the contents spilling into the open wound of your body, filling your innards with ash.

Gasping for air, you flee, shooting back up into the sky and digging out as much of the ash as possible on the way back to find your legs.

You’re able to reattach yourself to your lower half, but it isn’t exact—there’s a gash going through the circumference of your waist, its depth uneven.

You try to pull your crop top down over it, but all you manage to do is soak it in blood. You’ll have to explain it, and the lack of a heart, to your father.

Honestly, you thought that the ash, garlic, and salt thing was all a load of bullshit, but now you’ve experienced your own vulnerability firsthand.

You walk for a while, intending on clearing your head before you go back home. You pass by alleyways and back roads, lost in thought. As a car passes by, you duck into the dark space between two buildings.

“Damn it,” you mutter as you nearly slip, something sticky beneath your heels. You pull your phone out of your bra and open the flashlight to see red all over the stones.

Veins turning to ice, you trail the blood back to the source.

There, slumped on the alley wall, is a girl like you, her wings pulled close to her body as if in self-defense. Her lower body is missing, and when you pull her wings away from her torso, you see that she’s been stabbed through the heart by something small, leaving a strange wound.

She’s cold, long dead of course, but when you look at her face, you’re horrified to see that you recognize her. She’s one of the girls you’d joined hands with as you flew, laughing together as you hunted down white men fleeing like roaches. Her name is—was—Dani.

You press your hand to your mouth but there’s no helping her now.

As the sun crests over the walls, her body turns to ash, the fate of all the girls who don’t find their way back to their lower halves before dawn. She slips through your fingers like sand.

You arrive earlier than you usually do, so your father isn’t waiting for you at the table like he usually is.

You go upstairs, intending to sleep until twilight, deal with him later, but at the sound of your footsteps, his door creaks open and he finds you in the hall.

“You’re home early,” he says. He looks tired, as though he hasn’t slept a wink. You wonder why that is.

You put your hands up to show him that they’re empty.

“No heart today,” you say, pulling up your crop top to show him the wound. “Some guy got me good with cigarette ash.”

You expect him to rage at you, but his expression remains neutral. He walks down the hall, passing you by. Once he’s halfway down the stairs, he calls over your shoulder: “Come down for breakfast once you’ve changed your clothes. Wear something appropriate,” he says, disgusted.

You look down at your crop top, shorts, and fishnets. You roll your eyes.

You walk down the hall, intending to go to your room, but your father’s door is ajar and this gives you pause. You haven’t been in there since your mother passed, found dead the same way you found that girl—stabbed through the heart in an alleyway. No one ever found her killer.

You open the door to your parents’ room, and slip inside, wincing as a creak resounds throughout the house. You step back hastily, but before you leave, something strange catches your eye. Its shape isn’t something you understand, ivory and serrated like a human spine.

“Breakfast’s ready!” your father calls, and you nearly jump out of your skin.

Hastily, you leave the room, changing out of your outside clothes and into a basketball jersey and shorts. Something that would mollify your father.

You make your way downstairs, the image of that strange object burned into your mind.

You weren’t raised with provincial superstitions. It wasn’t your fault that you had no way of knowing what on earth a stingray tail looked like.

The next night, you meet up with the other girls, Dani’s absence an open wound among your ranks. You tell them what you saw, and they respond with their own stories of dead girls, hearts pierced through in the night while they were transformed, their bodies left to turn to ash come dawn.

With everyone promising to regroup once the hunt is over, Sophia and Megan each take one of your hands, and you fly up into the sky together, fangs parting to howl into the night. This is your tribute. This is your grief.

That night, your hunt is as bountiful as it is vicious. Blood and bile run down your chin as you feast on more livers than you’ve ever consumed in a single evening, leaving carnage in your wake. The night comes to life with yours and your sisters’ monstrous song.

As you take back to the sky, the iron tang of blood on your tongue, you feel pure euphoria racing through your veins. This is bliss: the sky, the kill.

Only, as you close in on your designated meeting place, that bliss turns to ice.

There are two bodies. Still. Unmoving.

One is colder than the other. Sophia, with her mouth wide open, fangs bared and stained with her assailant’s blood, as though she’d fought to the last, is still warm, as though you’d just missed hers and Megan’s killer.

No man alive could take two of you at once, so you reckoned that Megan had died first, and her cries had summoned Sophia, who’d found herself face to face with the killer.

Breathing hard, you find that the murder weapon is still embedded in her chest, and with growing dread, you realize that you’ve seen it before. Ivory and serrated. Like a human spine. The object lying on your father’s bed.

You begin to scream, summoning your remaining sisters, each one drawn to your cries like a moth to the fire’s light.

The night is once again filled with your keening, though this time, instead of vengeance and freedom, it signals grief.

One of the girls pulls the weapon from Sophia’s chest—a stingray’s tail, she tells you.

You test the weight of it in your hand, so light despite carrying the weight of the lives it has taken.

You could be wrong. There would be no going back once you acknowledged the truth, the reason for all his tired sighs and sleepless nights standing right in front of you.

Your father was a hunter himself. A good one, it seemed, able to stalk and ambush your sisters without the rest of you catching sight of him.

You dry your tears. At least now your rage has found its focus.

Up in the dark sky, the stars still hang bright. The night is young. You still have time.

Gritting your teeth, you follow the bloody footsteps around the bodies. You know all too well where they lead.

Your body is whole again when you enter through the door. You deposit three hearts on the dining table like an obedient child.

Your father is already there, bandaging several deep gashes all along his arm. Teeth marks. Sophia’s death throes. When dawn comes and her body turns to ash, those marks will be all that’s left of her.

“Where were you tonight?” you say, keeping any trace of accusation from your voice.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he says. “I went on a walk, but I fell and wounded my arm.”

It’s a stupid lie, and frankly, you’re insulted that he’d think you’d believe it.

“Go and change your clothes,” he says. “I’ll cook breakfast.”

Obediently, you go upstairs, muffling the sound of your footsteps. Instead of entering your room, you go into his. There has to be more proof, there has to be a clue as to the reason why.

Hanging behind the door is a wreath of garlic bulbs, and though you’re safe from them as long as you have your lower half, you still recoil.

On a console table in front of the bed is a decorative mount for a weapon, but it lies empty. The stingray’s tail knife, left behind at the scene.

As the house fills with the aroma of cooking hearts, you continue to dig through your father’s things, finding jars of ash and salt among the clutter of his desk.

In a drawer, you find something that gives you pause.

Your old copy of The Little Mermaid.

Except, the first page has been ripped out, the one that read:

To my little sirena,

Love, Mama

Your vision goes crimson. You see only blood.

After the murder of your sisters, you can’t take another slight. To defile the memory of your mother, the very last thing you have of her, wakes a vengeance in your soul so all-consuming that you know it doesn’t wholly belong to you. This is the vengeance of your foremothers, the very same ones that rose from the ashes, passed down to you.

You turn around when you hear the door creak open. You hadn’t closed it behind you.

When you’re face to face with your father, you ask him only one word: “Why?”

“I did what I had to do to save you. Their kind made you what you are. They took you from me,” he says, advancing towards you. “All I wanted was my son back.”

“You never had a son. I’ve always been a girl, I’ve always been a monster,” you say, raising the book up as he continues to approach, as if the memory of your mother could defend you.

“It was your mother’s fault. She was like you. I forbade her from ever turning into a monster after we were married so she wouldn’t pass the taint down onto you, but that bitch did.”

You remember how your mother died. Found stabbed through the heart in an alleyway. You realize now, heart pounding, that it had been no coincidence.

“So you killed her?” you whisper. “Is that why you never let me say her name again?”

“She was the first one to ever take you away from me,” he sobs. “All I ever wanted was a son. She took you away from me.”

“And the other girls? Why kill them? Why not just cut away the parts of me that you didn’t want so you could have your fucking son back? Why didn’t you just kill me? That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“I killed them so you’d have no competition. I would have started killing men myself just to give their hearts to you. More hearts to eat. More chances for you to return to me.” And, god damn it, you realize that he really believes his own raving. It was a small madness, bordering on superstition, that you indulged for the sake of mollifying him. You never thought that the belief ran so deep, but of course desperate men clung onto delusion. It was the only thing they had left.

He was insane. So lost in his own hatred that he could never fathom that he’d never lost anything save what he himself had thrown away.

But it is strange, the way he lays the blame on your mother, your sisters, for taking you away from him. If his motive for killing the other girls was to give you more hearts to eat, then maybe deep down he knew your detachment from him was nobody’s fault but his own.

You let out a growl, rushing towards him, baring your teeth and aiming for his neck.

Even with his injury, he bats you away easily, your mortal body no match for his strength.

But you glance towards the window.

Dawn is still a while away.

You let the transformation overcome you, feel yourself shed the weight of half your body. The pain clears your mind, makes you angrier. This gives you strength.

“I loved you,” he says. “Believe me, I loved you. I still do, that’s why I did everything to get you back. If only one of us leaves alive, I’ll mourn you for the rest of my life. But if it’s you, promise me you’ll eat my heart. Promise me that even though I’m gone, you’ll be my son again.”

He takes the wreath of garlic and throws it at you, but you bat it away with a snarl, your hand burning.

You do not give him the dignity of an answer. You rush at him again, claws tearing into his injured arm, savoring his screams. This is the least of what he deserves.

He tears himself away from you, leaving long lacerations down his forearm, and before you can get to him again, he darts away, lunging for the jars on his desk.

You’re faster. You reach him in a single stride, closing your teeth around his jugular. You shriek as he empties the jar of ash onto you, but you hold fast and keep biting until you feel your teeth connect.

You let go, letting him fall onto the floor. The ash burns. You smell smoke as you tear into your father, savoring the warmth of his blood as it stains you, the crack of his ribs as you dig through his entrails to find a heart like the ones he’d so prized. But if the ash hadn’t been enough to kill you at first contact, it won’t be enough to kill you now.

You don’t eat his heart. You toss it aside and tear through his body until you’re satisfied. Your mother’s killer, your sisters’ killer, dead at last by your hand.

By the time dawn comes, you’ve rejoined yourself with your lower half, if a bit imperfectly.

You stand over your father’s corpse and marvel at the carnage set aglow by the morning light.

And then you leave. You step out the door and into the empty street, letting him rot along with the hearts he thought would make you come back to him.

You’ll find your sisters. Your wounds will heal. You’ll build a new life. By day, you’ll sleep. By night, you’ll fly. You’ll hunt. You’ll find the sort of scum like your father who threatens girls like you and dig their livers out to feast on them. You’ll find more people to love you, and you’ll live as you want to live: unburdened and wholly yourself.

And most importantly, you’ll never have to eat another heart again.

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Host Commentary

It’s hard to let go. Especially in horror. Being dead doesn’t mean being gone.  You got pet cemeteries, vampire curses, and zombie viruses. You have people unwilling to let go of their loved ones even when “dead is better”. People who still see their loved ones even when they are obviously monsters.

That’s what we have in this story. The father is unwilling to see that his daughter has changed into a monster. Not the obvious monster with the claws and wings who kills and eats men. No, it’s that they are no longer a man. This is his idea of a true monster. It’s turned out, capitalism isn’t the real evil this time, it’s patriarchy. The father can’t let go of the idea of his son, that so-called fatherly love turning him into a monster or maybe just revealing the monster he already was.

Now the daughter is also having a hard time letting go. She’s still a teenager and he is still her dad. Sure, he’s making her eat cooked hearts to try to detransition her but she has a place to sleep and rents are ridiculous these days. Home is sort of a refuse. But she is as lost in delusion as her father. She sees her dead sisters killed by someone who knows their ways. She sees how her father tries to hide secrets of her family. She sees what her father truly is, a monster. So she lets go. She lets go of her rage and literally cuts him out of her life. I fortunately have never had block someone over this and I know people who have and it is painful, but you have to let go of you are truly going to fly.

See you soon, folks, take care, stay safe and protect the dolls