Clara and Mirabel
by Alyssa Sy de Jesus | From Issue One (Fall 2025)
It is not safe for any girl or woman to be alone in the woods. But thirteen-year old Clara had a job to do and that was to keep the manananggal’s lower half safe.
The existing lore is wrong about how the manananggal feasts on fetuses. It was invented by Spanish priests and generals who impregnated the local young women. An excuse they used to explain away the miscarriages of their unwanted children. These colonizers had started appropriating the local lore to fit their own agendas. But Mirabel was not lore.
“Do you feel anything, when you’re separated from your lower half?” Clara asked, “does it hurt?”
“I haven’t thought about it much these days”, Mirabel answered. “I’ve gotten used to it now,” she scratched her chin thoughtfully with a beautiful black shiny claw. “I suppose it feels like the initial pressure you feel when stretching, followed by the ecstatic release. Except, the release is an actual one,” Mirabel answered before giving Clara a mischievous wink with one of her long-lashed dark yellow eyes. .
Mirabel looked to be sixteen years old. But Clara had a feeling she was much older than that. Sometimes Mirabel made comments about having to escape the Japanese soldiers when they were here. Clara learned from school that the Japanese Imperial army invaded the Philippines from 1943 until their surrender in 1945. So Mirabel has been around and hunting since at least then.
On this cool twentieth-century evening, Mirabel had just separated from her lower half. Her wings were expanded and visible and she was about three feet off the ground. Clara sat next to the lower half.
“Do the thing!” Clara playfully said.
“No”, Mirabel groaned.
“Please, ate?”
“Fine. Ugh.”
The tiny toes on Mirabel’s lower half wiggled for Clara. Clara burst into giggles.
“Enough playing around!” Mirabel said. “I’m hungry. It’s time for you to watch her.”
It was the first time Mirabel was trusting Clara with this task. Clara began covering Mirabel’s lower half with the leaves and twigs around them. When Mirabel was satisfied, she took flight. The initial take-off of her wings set off a cool breeze that forced Clara to cover some parts of the lower half again.
Clara was the local midwife’s third daughter and the most disinterested in the family business. Catching Mirabel with one of the family’s chickens nine full moons ago was a god-send that saved her from the boredom of the daily grind. On one of her sleepless nights, with nothing but the moon to light her path, she decided to visit their animals. She heard a snap and when she turned to see where the sound had come from, she saw a guilty-looking manananggal. Her shiny hair, big brown eyes, claws, sharp teeth sheepishly biting the bottom of cupid-bow lips. Clara was too entranced to be frightened.
“I’m sorry!” Mirabel quickly whispered. She dropped the chicken and put her hands up in the air.
She still wonders why she wasn’t more frightened of Mirabel. All those stories about aswang.
“Why can’t you just go to the palengke and get raw meat there?” Clara had asked Mirabel before.
“I do, in disguise. But when the moon is full and I run out of money, I need to hunt. Hunted meat does something different for my kind. Don’t ask me to explain, I never paid attention to my lola.”
“Well thank you for sparing Marimar. She has always been our favourite chicken.”
“You don’t think your mom will turn Marimar into tinola one day? Ha? Or maybe…” Maribel shuddered, “adobong manok.” Two out of the basic ingredients of adobo could poison a manananggal: black pepper and garlic. In that the lore was correct. Clara once read one of those picture books about the folkloric figure of Juan Tamad and how he defeated a manananggal with the adobo his mother had left for him. The manananggal in the book was scary with gorgon-like eyes, fangs, and hair. Not at all like Mirabel.
Clara had been accompanying Mirabel out on her monthly hunts. Helping her find stray dogs or richer families with more chickens or ducks to spare. Usually they left her lower part in the three to five hiding spots Mirabel frequented. But two moons ago, the lower half was almost discovered by a wandering neighbour. Another time, they caught a tianak lurking about. It was getting too risky.
Armed with blessed water from the local albularyo (none of that tame holy water church stuff), Clara was ready to play defense in case some other aswang wandered by. She had also turned her clothes inside out so as to avoid any kapres. She also wore her jade anting-anting–passed down from her Chinese grandmother who swore jade kept evil spirits away. It never kept Mirabel away though–perhaps because she wasn’t really evil. Just a little sassy when she got hangry.
Clara was getting bored. She turned on her Walkman, a gift from a cousin in Manila. She took out some Sky Flakes. She wasn’t really hungry, but it was something to do. Tonight Mirabel said she’d go to the De Guzman’s property, which was about three miles from the hiding spot. Clara checked her watch and couldn’t believe only twenty minutes had gone by.
Suddenly she heard footsteps nearby.
“Tao po!” said a deep voice in the dark, verbally assuring that they were human. Clara’s Lolo said that only real humans could say “tao po.”
“Who is that?” Clara asked. “I have a knife and I’m not afraid to hurt you if I have to,” she lied.
While she may have had the albularyo’s water and the jade against other ill-intentioned aswang, she didn’t have any weapons that might defend or make her invisible to other humans. The person continued to approach.
“Don’t come any closer!” she said. The figure listened and stopped. They held up their hands, perhaps to show Clara they meant no harm. But sometimes that was a trap so one would have to let their defenses down. At thirteen, Clara knew as much. “Okay, I’ll stay here. But I’m curious. What are you doing in the woods? Are you all by yourself?”, they said.
“I should ask you the same, but I won’t.” Clara said. “I’ll mind my own business and you can mind yours.”
The figure put their arms down. They chuckled. This made Clara nervous. Then silence as they cocked their head to the side. The distance they were at somehow made them remain in silhouette and shadow. Such shadows represent the possibility of too many dangers to name.
Suddenly, a cool breeze blew around them. A screech. It was Mirabel. Even in the dark, Clara could see her face, her mouth and teeth bloody with feathers. Mirabel held up her claws threateningly. The human figure backed away, calmly. Almost too calmly. Eventually, they disappeared into the woods.
“Are you okay, Clara?” Mirabel asked, placing a hand on Clara’s shoulder. “I am now, ate,” Clara answered. She realized how fast her heart had been beating.
Mirabel took her into a full embrace, wings and all. Clara smelled the chicken blood on her friend.
Alyssa Sy de Jesus is a twice-removed diasporic settler in search of the ghosts, words and artefacts of her family’s five generation settlement in the Philippines and eventual migration to Vancouver, Canada. She is based on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh People. Previous publications: Chinatown Stories (Vancouver) and Living Hyphen (Toronto). She was co-editor of de-comp Journal’s “Translate Me Not: New Filipin/x Writing and Art” issue. She volunteers for the LiterAsian Festival, and is a founding consultant on the “Kuwentong Pamamahay” oral history project with UBC and Heritage Vancouver Society.
