The buyers came back in January.

It was not unpleasant. The pressure held her like a mother’s arms. The darkness was soft, and somewhere in the distance, lights flickered — green and pulsing, like the inner lips of a shell. She tried to swim toward them, but her legs wouldn’t move. She looked down.

The water was wrong. That was the first thing she noticed. It had a sheen to it, a rainbow slick like oil but thicker, heavier, almost gelatinous. The tahong hung from the ropes in curtains, swaying in a current she couldn’t feel. She reached for the nearest cluster and paused.

Mussels should be cold. They should taste of the deep, of the dark, of the indifferent salt. But these were warm, almost hot, and when she pried one open, the orange meat inside was pulsing. Beating. Like a tiny, silent heart.

From the waist down, her body was gone. In its place, a cluster of black-green mussels clung to her spine, their shells opening and closing in a steady, patient rhythm.

But the sea has a memory.

One buyer, a young man from Manila, bent down to pick one up. It was warm. When he pried it open, the meat inside was the pale, perfect cream of a normal tahong . He shrugged, tossed it in his basket, and drove away.

“Old Man Celso,” she called to the fisherman on the neighboring raft. “Have you seen this?”

“The shells are talking,” he whispered.

Ligaya didn’t care about chefs. She cared that she could finally fix the roof before the typhoons came. She cared that Kiko’s uniform no longer had holes. She cared that, for the first time in years, she slept without dreaming of empty nets.

It was small at first. A fisherman who never forgot a face suddenly couldn’t recognize his own wife. A girl who loved to sing opened her mouth one morning and produced only a low, wet clicking. Old Celso was found standing in the shallows at midnight, staring down at his own reflection, whispering to it in a language no one understood.

And there, on the bamboo raft, sat Kiko.