The mother with sharp expectations whacked a sandok against the kitchen table, and her bunso rushed to their bedroom before a belt could be found. Based on what I overheard, the child had arranged the pots on the shelf in an order the nanay deemed incorrect. I continued observing from under the nighttime chill outside the house. The nanay, now alone, looked down at her spiraled reflection on kitchen-table plastic, rapidly whispering and cursing in hisses about the due arrival of another baby. The disillusion in her obtuse neck signaled to me that this person needed a healer rather than another child.

Once the mother lay to rest for the night, I slithered inside the unlit home. The main bedroom smelled like layers of bleach residue. Hovering at the base of her mattress, I could hear the unsettling vibrations of unrequited emotion gurgling inside this mother’s throat, like that of my own nanay. And look how I turned out. I try to imagine that these pregnant people feel a positive sensation before realizing I’ve sucked out a fetus from between their legs. The emotionally immature woman’s screeches probably woke the whole neighborhood as I, now nourished, climbed out the window to the bamboo grove beyond the home’s front gate.

Filipinos—even those stolen from the homeland for school or shipped across the ocean for work—know that the easiest way to kill a manananggal is to steal their legs in the middle of the night and have them flatline under sunlight. To lower the maternal and infant death rates. To allow barrio children and adults alike to rest their heads at night with no worries of their blood being sucked away. To stop a manananggal from literally eating up a man in bed.

Darkness weaves through mangrove tree shadows beside the river, cradling my torso with tense fears gripping this widely known fact. I’d planned for just another night slaughtering corrupt politicians in their homes and stopping traumatized women from becoming abusive mothers, but my legs are nowhere to be found since I returned outside.

“So you left them behind bamboo shoots? Your legs aren’t that skinny. It’s, it’s, it’s—it’s risky!”

The temperature drops exponentially with each gusting note of Darkness’s piercing anxieties.

“That’s precisely why I did it,” I explain with balmy whispers. “Risk is arousing for an aswang like me.” Shifting moonlight illuminates my rich brown flesh under retreating flight feathers.

A manananggal is one type of aswang, and aswang are the feared shape-shifting beings of the Philippines. The men at the market throw unoriginal gazes and phrases at us like the women and femmes during the day, but rearrange furniture and set up traps at their homes each night with reverent dismay and anticipation of us attacking. On the other hand, people are almost always afraid of Darkness. When English-speaking tiangge shoppers started using the phrase, “Look on the bright side,” we started exclusively buying our mackerel from vendors under shade and shadows.

I sense Darkness’s insecurities delicately simmer as Earth’s rotation seems to quicken. “Well, aren’t my mysteriousness and low visibility alluring enough for you?” they ask me through near-tears.

“Oh, please no fog tonight!” I urge. “Of course you’re enough. Attractive. Full of wonder. Difficult to see through. All open space, and then suddenly nearly no space at all. More than enough.” I sigh with forceful flaps of my wings accompanied by a snoring lolo and an Aplopeltura slurping a snail out of its shell.

“Maybe the risk was alluring,” Darkness tucks us under banana tree leaves barely hovering over sediment, “but this time, someone stole your legs.” It’s only mere hours until the roosters will begin to crow. “And, you will die without me.” The midnight air around us thickens.

My full—or, should I say partial?—body weight folds heavily into Darkness as we approach the gate sa bahay ni Amparo. I feel the type of weakness that’s so strong it’s effortlessly numbing.

“Nasaan ang bruha?” Darkness's voice clatters lonely against the concrete walls of Amparo’s isolated hilltop home.

The sounds of Amparo’s new modular synth crawl out the half-open front door with the triple meter of a sultry kundiman.

“Who’s here, interrupting my day?” Amparo calls out through a galaxy of incense and other smoke.

Darkness and I desperately slither to the entranceway. “We need,” I urgently breathe between zaps of morning astronomical twilight prodding us, “a place to stay!” A punctual rooster crows in the distance. “Now!”

“Y’all are a mess!” Amparo laughs to themself, smushing us to the back corner of their bedroom closet. They slide the door shut, sending a stray lavender SAVAGE X FENTY thong beside Darkness, my dangling belly flesh, and silence that’s swiftly interrupted by a bass line with too much reverb.

“We’re safe now,” Darkness reasons. “Maybe we can start searching for your legs again in, say, 12 hours?”

I shove the thong away from our bodies. “This is painful.”

“Well I guess a closet isn’t the most comfortable container for us, though—”

“It’s not the physical ‘container’ we’re in together. It’s the feeling I’m feeling.”

Flickers of dawn sweep inside, accompanied by Amparo’s acoustic guitar. “I’ve felt infinity feelings simultaneously since I was conceived,” Darkness stumbles through a newfound vulnerability, “so I don’t understand your pain.”

“And maybe you never will. I don’t think you’ve ever felt the wounds it takes for me to just exist in your presence. The self-segmentation.”

“Have you ever been a sunset on a summer’s day?”

“Have you ever tried to fit your full self into the clumsy biology that’s a human body? The daily ritual of the manananggal, the aswang is obligatory destinesia; you wake up each morning wondering why you’ve returned to a body so void of purpose before dusk. Or, the only motivation you have for daytime activities is attempting existence not predicated by pain.”

The intimacy shared between Darkness and my flesh morphs from welcome relief to slimy shivers. I’m wondering whether the droplets I hear flick the floorboards are my forehead sweat or organ blood. Whatever they are, the drips slowly continue, rarely falling to the looping beats of Amparo’s compositions reverberating throughout their home. A puddle forms, greeting my left palm and cooling me down from the heat, and I decide that I won’t try to fix it. I begin wondering if my body now ends at my fingertips or my oblong sweat-slash-blood formations on the floor. Perhaps my wholeness can be rooted in my own decisions, my autonomy, rather than a particular human DNA or flesh anatomy. My body doesn’t fit in a container; my body shifts constantly and often immaterially, thriving in relationships where I can be interdependent of my powers alongside traumas, insecurities, and shadows.

Silence reentered Amparo’s home and grew and grew and grew for hours, replenishing a body through the intentional labor of the bruha’s exalted inhales. Amparo would’ve written a song about the serenity of this moment if any of their instruments still remained.

Darkness jumped to the opposite corner of the closet as the door slid halfway open. “Why, why would you scare us like that?”

“I’ve made something that’s only yours, Azul,” Amparo professes. As I emerge from the closet, they shield me from golden hour with their own body before stepping back to leave space for part of mine.

My legs provide my torso with coagulation and structure that’s altogether human, robot, cyborg, and aswang. They reboot with a dance of blue lights backlighting patchwork of wood, sheet metal, capiz, motherboards, mango seeds, banana leaves, and woven audio cables, plus a chime that melds samples of a SOPHIE bass line and my favorite bird song. Feeling one’s fullness is wrought, but this process can be supported by technology and those who love us.

Darkness swims between my body’s many new crevices as I play with various knobs, buttons, and faders that toggle my legs between sensations like ache, tingling, heat, swelling, and an indescribable muted yet roaring feeling that, I believe, can best be described as euphoria.