Perla, my granddaughter, was born near the city, miles away from where my ancestors came from. I knew it would come one day, when she would hear stories connected to my hometown and ask me about the half-bodied flying monsters. I said they were make-believe and as soon as she and her curious friends thought they were out of earshot, I’d hear them say, your apu must have escaped those creatures that caused the shell plague decades ago or worse, she was one of them.
Her mother long dead, I was Perla’s sole protector. As young as she was I fed her loads of garlic and kept her away from the sea (in my belief that her impending attraction to oysters would be prevented
without the abounding scenery). How a mere child would take the precautions, I did not know. But it worked for me. As soon as I left my hometown, along with that came my denouncement of what ran in my
clan. But I don’t know how effective it was, denouncing something, and if by simply doing that meant that my granddaughter had also been freed.
But you could only do so much. At age 12, Perla brought home shells.
She had never seen me do it, so I was alarmed the first time she did it, in the same way I used to. She opened a shell till it was hanging by the hinge. She looked delighted when she detached the oyster, put
it inside another and shut the shell.
What did you do that for? I asked her.
Oh, just shutting two dead oysters in a single shell, was her answer.
Seeing her like this, I had to tell her the story of the maiden. I told her, whenever we take the shells to turn them into ornaments or some other, a maiden loses her home. Those oysters are transformed
into maidens.
And back where I came from we had to kill and eat all the oysters before they could become maidens, the only enemies who had the power to destroy the likes of us, I wanted to tell her.
When Perla was all ripe and maidenly herself, I was a little surprised when she had grown to like oyster designs for her apartment, not at all confounded by any nightmares of torturing those oysters of her
childhood. White, orange, golden shells. Necklaces, chandeliers, lampshades. She had these all over the house.
These were easy to find but the biggest challenge as yet, was the shutter oyster.
She called me to her apartment one evening to ask if I could help her find windows with oyster shell designs, I, her apu whom she had high regard for, admiring more than questioning, why it seemed I looked
almost the same as she’d known me, when she was a little girl.
Do you mean shaped like an oyster shell, with a similar hinge? I asked.
She said I wasn’t understanding the idea and drew on a pad exactly what she wanted.
I looked at the drawing and nodded, muttering, shutter. I thought finding this shutter wouldn’t be easy.
As the years passed, I saw less and less of her. She wasn’t around much and in her travels, she kept looking for shutter oysters, in car boot sales, in craft fairs. Finally, she found one in an antique shop
in the next town.
She called me that day to have a look.
Why is this one very expensive? I asked the small foreign man on the cashier’s desk.
Before he could answer, Perla cupped her fingers to my ear and whispered to me, because the maidens still live within the shells, you see.
Perla bought the most expensive shutter oyster and when it was delivered, she told me, now the next step is to hang the garlic by the shutter.
Outside, a dog howled.
She wouldn’t end up like the women in our clan before me. She wouldn’t find her upper torso separating from her lower half during full moon nights, looking out for pregnant seashells, and being frightened by
garlic. My maiden and shell stories had seen to that. But Perla’s mind had the power of us creatures, so powerful that all her life all she had thought of shell stories. Our kind being totally alien to her,
she was becoming one of our clan’s enemies.
I’ll see you tomorrow, I said to her, pretending I did not see her eyes glinting in the dark.
She slowly closed the shutters until I could only see her tiny fingers in between the opening. Then they were gone and she slammed the shutter oyster to my face.
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©2011 Catherine Batac Walder
Catherine Batac Walder’s writing has recently appeared in M-Brane SF and Philippines Free Press. Born and raised in the Philippines, she moved across Norway, Finland and Portugal from 2005 - 2007 for a
European MPhil. scholarship. She then worked as a research group administrator at the Department of Earth Sciences, Royal Holloway University of London until October 2010 when her first child was born.
She is now a full-time wife, mother and boat sweeper. Visit her blog at http://deckshoes.wordpress.com.
