philippine myth creatures gothic
- they talk of creatures lurking in the night, always reminding you of their ways whenever you do something bad. using your fear as a way for you to obey them.
- they talk of the tiyanak, and how they attract travelers by imitating a baby cry and then attack the victim. you walk home late one night from school, you hear the baby crying, not so distant. you stop for a second, the hairs on your arms rising, a shiver running down your spine. you resume walking. you don’t turn back.
- you remember the tikbalang one time you got lost with your friends. you drive and drive but you keep returning to that tree with the branches that look like arms and it feels eerie. you had your stereo on full volume and you turn it down. you tell your friends to keep quiet and to turn their shirts inside out. you keep driving and this time you get out. but it’s been five hours when it felt like five minutes.
- you think of the manananggal when your mom gets pregnant. you think of it flying to your house and using its long proboscis-like tongue to suck out the heart and blood of your would-be sibling. you think of its severed torso, the upper doing the job while the lower just stands there. you sit up every night waiting for it. you don’t get much sleep, too scared to sleep in case it comes.
- you wait for your friend one time. you hear, ek ek ek. it seemed very far so you don’t pay much attention to it. you tell your friend this and they say it was probably an ekek, similar to the manananggal. your friend also says that they fool people into thinking they were far when they were actually very close.
- your mom tells you that your maid’s mother is an aswang, a vampire-like witch ghoul. your maid is probably one too. you remember what happened to your neighbor, how he didn’t seem like himself and then he became sick and died. you hear people saying it was your maid and that it was the way of the aswangs to replace their victims with doppelgangers only to become sick and die. you’ve been very nice to you maid ever since. you don’t know who’s real, you don’t know who’s a doppelganger.
- these are some of the creatures you’ve been afraid of your whole life. they tell you to let go of it. they tell you it’s not real. but you can’t, you can’t, you can’t.