Agnes hiked into the woods in her bathing suit and never came back. We found her marine shoes in a plastic bag of crushed seashells next to a small pool filled with tadpoles. Peter thinks it must’ve been one of the snakes along the trail.
“The villagers said you gotta bring a stick when you go through the forest,” he said during dinner, playing with the wooden turtle figure on the table. “Those things’ll latch right onto you if you don’t put ‘em in their place.”
“Where’s the body then?” Lina asks, sipping on a frozen mango drink.
Nobuko-san, the old lady who runs Cottage Yonabe, brings over our boar meat noodles. The broth is clear, with accents of scallion and a bed of thick buckwheat noodles topped with smoked boar entrails. The old lady’s husband hunts the creatures in the mountains, bringing the meat back already butchered and packed. She says he built the cabin we’re living in too, finds the fresh mangos she purees into our drinks, the sour shikuwasa squeezed into our nightly cocktails. He’s a one-man provider while the old lady runs the Airbnb listing, messaging the guests and managing the money. None of us have talked to the husband, but we see him from the window of their cabin sometimes, waving to us in the dim light.
“They say a python can eat a boar whole,” Jin says, blowing on the steaming nest of noodles curled in his soup spoon.
“Agnes isn’t a boar.” Lina frowns. A box turtle crawls under her wooden chair and settles into the grass there.
Nobuko-san smiles politely and leaves with the empty tray.
“They’re really not so different in size in terms of how wide the snake would have to open its jaws,” Peter says before he sees the look I’m giving him. “Anyways, Nobuko-san said she already asked her husband to go look for her.”
“The husband who can do everything, including build Airbnb cabins, snipe wild boars in his beach sandals, and possibly harness the power of the almighty sun god?” I say, simultaneously envious and creeped out, glancing over at the curtained window in the neighboring cabin.
Peter and I have a good thing going: he comes to all my awkward family gatherings so my parents stop asking if I’ve ‘figured things out yet’ and I send messages to his lonely mom so she doesn’t demand weekly visits from him. Agnes used to say that if she cut open his head it’d be completely hollow except for a few dirty magazines and John Wick memes, but I like him. He doesn’t overthink things.
“Maybe she doesn’t want us finding her,” Jin huffs, taking a sip of his beer to cool his mouth. “You remember how she was the last time we saw her.”
“What do you mean ‘the last time’?” Lina winces, the most superstitious one out of us, which is endearing to Jin, her boyfriend (going 5-months strong!), and irritating as hell to the rest of us.
“Isn’t she always going off without telling anyone anyway?” Jin shrugs. “Do we even know where she was going? What she was trying to do? The woods are pretty thick …who knows why she really wanted to come here …”
“She wanted to see the sea turtles,” I say, pretending to check my phone messages so they don’t think I’m starting a fight. “She read about them online somewhere. Maybe on the Airbnb listing; I don’t know. Nobuko-san said they come out around dusk to graze on the sea grass near the shore. You can get so close you can even touch them.”
“Isn’t that against some environmental protection rules?” Lina says.
“The police aren’t waiting under the sea for you.” Peter slurps up noodles.
“You don’t know. They might have cameras down there,” Jin chimes in.
I smile weakly, knowing none of them are being serious at this point. I don’t tell them how Agnes has always had a knack for avoiding cameras. It’s about finding the blind spots, she used to tell me. Everything and everyone has them.
There’s only one ferry per week to the Island of Turtles. I mistakenly booked the room, thinking it was located on the main island, but Agnes is the one who looked through the fancy Instagram-worthy photos of the wooden cabin, white sand beach, and sea turtle videos with lo-fi BGMs, and convinced everyone that we should keep the reservation.
Look, there’s even an all-you-can-drink plan, she coaxed them like a stranger waving candy from a van.
The island has a grand total of fifteen residents. On the ride over, the tour guide pointed at a white shoebox-shaped building on the west corner of the island with its lone metal slide and told us how the only school on the island closed a few years back after the final class graduated. The building was soon converted into a water treatment facility, the former playground cleared into a kelp drying field. The only children left on the island now were boars, snakes, and the soft-shelled sea turtles hatching in the summer.
I’m thinking of the sea turtles as Peter feels up my chest, already half-asleep.
Agnes used to climb into my cot in summer camp, pretending to touch herself under the blanket, just to get a reaction from me. Now I’m the one touching myself, unsatisfied and wide awake. I close my eyes, my right hand moving lower, but I don’t know what or who to picture. I imagine the sound of the pier outside as my fingers reach deeper: the long wooden boardwalk bathed in moonlight, the row boats flipped over on the grassy beach several yards from sea. My breathing quickens as my thoughts wander to the long necks of the snake turtles we saw at Churaumi Aquarium back on the main island, the way the creatures kept beating their claws against the corner glass, heads bobbing over the water’s surface like someone drowning.
A faint moan cuts through the window like a low whale cry, jolting me awake. My ears strain toward the sound, but all I can hear is Peter’s snoring. I get out of bed and peer through the curtains. From the window, the neighboring cabin blends into the dark, Nobuko-san and her husband asleep. The old air conditioner whirs loudly overhead, competing with Peter’s snores. My skin pimples under the cold as I open my mouth, imagining the old man and woman tangled under sweat-damp turtle print sheets.
How many hours had it been since Agnes had headed into the woods alone? Was she scared? Had the old man really gone to look for her? Nobuko-san said her husband often camped out there during the summer months. Agnes wouldn’t be the first guest to try and get back to nature for a bit.
Once during summer camp we’d snuck out to the beach after lights out. We’d cut our ankles on the thick underbrush as we stumbled through the forest in the dark to reach the sand, but Agnes couldn’t stop giggling the entire time. Like we were fugitives who had escaped.
When the stars are your only audience, you can finally hear your own thoughts, she’d said, her eyes on the ocean.
The next day, Nobuko-san brings us to the “culture center,” a repurposed building that once housed a spa hotel and art gallery. Dirty bath buckets line the side alley, filled with dark rainwater. The hotel was shuttered long ago, but its rusted sign is still bolted to the house’s façade. Inside, ink paintings of turtles hang from the ceiling, swaying against moldy-smelling air conditioning.
The culture center runs a rotating set of classes from ceramic-making to zen meditation. Nobuko-san recommends we try a home-cooking class. She doesn’t say it’s to take our minds off the anxiety from Agnes’s disappearance, but what else could it mean?
Our instructor is an elderly woman who looks almost identical to Nobuko-san except with grayer hair and longer arms. She teaches us how to make okonomiyaki with shredded boar meat in a musty old kitchen that doubles as a storage space. The room is claustrophobic. Heavy wooden crates are stacked in each corner next to rain-rusted folding chairs and broken metal pipes. Within the first fifteen minutes, Lina burns her hand on the hot plate and Jin spills half his batter on the floor in his panic when the hot oil starts sputtering.
“Don’t you think we should be looking for Agnes?” I whisper to Peter, but he doesn’t answer. His knife clicks against the wooden cutting board as he chops his cabbage with the concentration of someone trying to disarm a bomb, sweat dripping down his chin.
The instructor’s voice fades into the sizzle of hot plates and my brain starts to wander. I can’t focus; I can’t hold the knife straight. My right hand feels strange since last night, like there’s something hard under the skin that I just can’t shake loose. I stare at the wooden crates in the corner of the room. They’re packed with little statues in the shape of faceless men with turtle shells on their backs. There were similar ones everywhere on the island: on the dining table in our Airbnb, lined up along the wooden railing of Nobuko-san’s front porch, nestled in the small stone shrine behind the dingy ferry station.
They’re a symbol of the island. The guardian gods who protect us, Nobuko-san had explained with a soulless smile like all the shopkeepers in Kamakura or Nara trying to sell little keychains and towels of cranes and deer. You can get your own for a few hundred yen at the culture center.
The statues in the crate are lopsided and unfinished, cracked heads and missing arms, defective products. If Agnes were here, she’d make a joke about how they’d come to life at night and murder us all. Death by knife-wielding dolls. She’d say it in a way that made it funny, that’d make us all laugh while still being a little scared. That’s what she’s always been good at.
Something moves in the window. Nobuko-san waves to me from the other side of the glass. I don’t know how long she’s been watching us. She smiles and points at me, making a chopping motion with her hands. Chop-chop-chop.
When we were kids, Agnes liked to play a game she learned from her older brother: she’d go into a bathroom stall at school and call Hanako-san three times.
“If you do it right, Hanako-san’ll knock from the neighboring stall,” she’d tell me with a straight face as we stood outside the bathroom stalls, waiting for one to free up. “Then she’ll ask you to bring her something.”
“What happens if you don’t?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Agnes said. “Will you stay with me if I try to find out?”
A toilet flushed, water gurgling down, and one of the doors opened. Agnes went first and then pulled me in by the wrist. The stall was cramped with the two of us in there, but we listened quietly to the other girl wash her hands. I could smell Agnes’s strawberry lip gloss mix with the stink of lemon bleach. Then I felt her breath in my ear:
Hanako-san. Hanako-san. Ha—
Nobuko-san knocks on our cabin door a little after 1AM, dressed in a turtle print sleeping gown and slippers. The sound of ocean waves pours into the room as Peter opens the door. The moon looks like a too-bright bathroom light behind the old woman.
“My husband found her,” she whispers as if not to disturb the forest. “She was looking for shells on the beach.”
“What the fuck?” Jin yawns, sitting up on the bed, his bare chest almost gray in the moonlight from the window. “Weren’t you the one looking on the beach?” he asks, motioning at me with his chin. Lina stirs next to him, the deepest sleeper in our group.
“I didn’t see her,” I say, my face hot. I can feel everyone’s eyes on me in the dark room.
“She’s in our house right now,” Nobuko-san says. “She’s talking to my husband. Something about sea turtles.”
Agnes is in good spirits when we see her in the morning, which is strange for someone who hasn't eaten or drank anything in nearly three days. Her left wrist is wrapped in gauze bandages, but her skin is tight, almost luminescent, like the young models on the posters in the department stores, their glossed lips pursed, eyes on an imaginary spotlight.
“What happened to you?” I ask, expecting her to shrink away, to dodge my questions like the characters in all the cheap mystery movies, her ability to speak mysteriously forgotten. But she politely apologizes for disappearing. For worrying us and the old couple. “Are you okay?” I ask as the others watch her cautiously.
“It was beautiful,” she says, scratching her hand. “There was a full moon the other day that lit up the whole beach so I could see the eggs.”
“Eggs?” Peter asks.
“The turtle eggs. They were all cracked open. Like someone had been feasting on them. But then I saw the little things on the sand. Moving across like a carpet of roaches.” She smiles the way she does when she’s drunk, like she’s about to tell everyone your worst secret. “I didn’t tell the old man the whole truth though. He already seemed upset. But there was something else out there, something watching me. Watching us.”
“Something?” Peter glances at me, before turning back to her.
“Maybe it was the Turtle Eater,” Lina says, digging a fingernail into the meat of her palm. “The guy on the ferry was talking about it. Some legend about a creature that devoured an entire beach of mating turtles, leaving only their shells behind. It comes out of the sea at night, hungry for more turtles to eat. But if he sees you, he takes the shape of an attractive man and tries to take you back to his home.”
“To do what?” Jin asks with a wolfish grin, putting an arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder.
“There are a few different theories—”
“To show you his collection,” Agnes answers. “He’s got hundreds of them.”
“Hundreds of what?” Peter frowns, though he’d never admit how much he hates horror stories. How he closes his eyes whenever a movie camera pans over a dark hall or creaking door.
“Hundreds of—”
Nobuko-san comes in with a tray of iced mango tea. The room falls silent.
“You guys are awake early,” she smiles, opening the curtains. Sunlight spears through, immediately heating the room. “Going for another swim today?”
“Maybe,” Agnes replies, watching the glasses of mango tea clink under morning light. She licks her lips. “I’d like to see the turtles again.”
When Agnes and I were in our freshman year of college, we went on a trip to New York City. It was only a two-hour train ride down and Agnes wanted to see what was so great about the Big Apple.
We couldn’t get tickets to the Statue of Liberty, so we took a ferry out to Governor’s Island and admired the rusted green lady from afar, tiny and still across the afternoon water, our tank-tops soaked in sweat as the summer sun seared down on us.
“Is that it?” Agnes asked then, sipping on a lukewarm bottle of Coke.
“That’s it,” I said, trying to ignore a screaming toddler who wanted his little brother’s goldfish snacks.
Agnes stared down at the foamy water. The ship swayed, water splashing up against the hull. She suddenly leaned forward over the safety rail, her feet nearly dangling. “Hey, I think there’s someone down there …”
The hairs rose on the back of my neck. I thought of our old summer camp and how she’d wander too close to the bobbing line of orange buoys that separated the safe zone from the rest of the dark lake, pulling me along with her until the lifeguard blew his whistle at us.
I took her hand, trying to coax her back from the edge. “You’re gonna fall if you keep—”
She tilted her head up toward me, a twisted grin on her face. “Hanako-san … Hanako-san …” she sang.
She suddenly wrapped her arms around me, nearly dragging both of us over the rail. I screamed. Agnes cackled as she grabbed a hold of the rail and pulled us back. The other riders glanced over at us, some shaking their heads. The ship jerked in the choppy water, the hull whining. “Did I scare you?” she asked, still grinning, finally letting go of my shoulders.
“No, you fucking weirdo.” I smiled back, my heart still hammering in my chest. She’d done this so many times: at public pools, driving over suspension bridges, by flooded lakes after a storm. Agnes said as a child, she nearly drowned during a family trip, so now she made jokes whenever near water.
It helps sometimes, she said, to distract myself from the fear.
“The eggs buried at the bottom become boys and the ones at the top are born girls,” Agnes says as the waves slide over our bare feet. Our toes sink deeper into the wet sand as the wave retreats into the sea. We would do this for thirty minutes straight as kids, wondering if we’d eventually get buried completely by the water.
“What really happened to you?” I whisper as the others set up the parasol and towels on the beach. Everyone’s acting like nothing had happened, but I’ve never been good at acting. “Where did you go? We looked all over for you.”
“To the bottom of the ocean,” she replies.
“Must’ve been cold,” I say, unsure if she’s joking, but she laughs out loud.
In truth, we’d looked haphazardly. It’s hard to go into a panic on the island when it feels like you’re surrounded by paradise, the sounds of the ocean everywhere you go. Peter had stopped to chat with one of the local snorkeling guides in the village after asking about Agnes. They shared a beer as the man showed Peter videos of his toddler’s scooter moves, the little boy living with his ex-wife in Tokyo. Lina and Jin found a family of boars near the village’s water tower, near the entrance to the forest, and got caught up trying to take photos of the babies. And me, I’d stopped to watch all the different hermit crabs on the beach, quietly wondering if this was all just another one of Agnes’s pranks.
You said she used to not show up to school for days and eventually come back with some new clothes, a suntan, and act like nothing had happened, right? Peter had said. What are you worried about then?
“You’re the only one who cares what happened to me, right?” Agnes asks. “It’s always been like that.”
I watch Jin lie down on one of the towels, propping Lina’s straw sunhat over his eyes, pretending to sleep. Peter kicks up sand in his direction, straightening the parasol. Lina offers them both strawberry gummy snacks. I watch them as if watching a silent play. Always an audience member, never one of the actors.
“Do you remember what the ferry captain said to us on our way here?” Agnes asks, opening a bag of scallop-flavored chips.
“‘It’s nice to be so young?’” I try to smile.
She smiles back, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Do you want to see him too?” she asks instead, offering me a chip.
“The captain?”
“No,” Agnes says. “The Turtle Eater.”
That night, after the others are asleep, Agnes and I change into our bathing suits and marine shoes, and head out to the woods.
There’s no moon. It’s dark, far darker than I’ve ever seen. The trees and mountains are invisible until Agnes flashes a light over the gravelly red path. The water tower stands over us like a hunched giant. As we enter the forest, the collective sound of the animals and insects becomes a creature of its own: breathing, impatient, hungry.
“Is this really a good idea?” I ask.
“I never said it was a good idea,” Agnes says, and I’m almost relieved by the quiver in her voice since it’s the most emotion she’s shown since coming back.
A hiss in the underbrush stops us both. Agnes’s hand is on my shoulder. She squeezes.
“Run,” she whispers.
And we bolt off. We keep close to the mountain face, feet crunching dead leaves and cicada shells, praying we don’t lose our footing and fall into the tangle of trees and swampy water below. Animals scream. Massive beetles grind their wings and sharp legs in a violent chorus.
Then, beyond the pounding of blood in our ears, I hear the crash of waves.
The forest opens to sand and purple sky, the last row of bleached trees like broken teeth. I suck in the salty smell of the ocean. The moon is so low, it could be a sinking eye on the water, bleeding white.
Agnes murmurs something through heavy breaths as our feet sink into the damp sand. I lean forward, hoping to hear her better, but she hurries ahead through the thin carpet of vines curling out of the forest, until she reaches the surf.
“Let’s go in,” she says without turning around. She shucks off her thin jacket, her bare shoulders gray under the sheen of moonlight. Before I can stop her, the waves are already lapping up her shins. I stare at her back, the black crisscross of her shoulder straps. I think of that time in high school when she peeled off her swimsuit in the locker room, of the tan lines around the straps and the burn marks just under her shoulder blades, impossible to see under her clothes. They’re just birthmarks, she used to say when she caught me staring, but the marks were never in the same place.
Something splashes. A head dips in and out of the dark water ahead.
“There’s something in the water,” I call out, shivering against the ocean spray.
“It’s just the turtles,” Agnes answers, the water up to her neck now. “They’re grazing.”
Nobuko-san had talked about how the beach was a great place to swim with turtles, how the dead coral crumbled, giving way to vast seagrass patches under the water. You could get so close to the creatures that you could touch their leathery shells. Just don’t put your hand too close to their faces—their bite is strong enough to take off your finger, she’d said.
I couldn’t shake the image of their brown-spotted heads and beady eyes snapping off one of my fingers, the clear seawater clouding red, so I spent the next fifteen minutes googling about sea turtles while we waited for our lunch. Sea turtles are primarily diurnal creatures, sleeping on the surface at night or tucked between rocks and coral. There are only two exceptions: when the females go to lay their eggs on the beach and when the eggs hatch and the hatchlings make their desperate pilgrimage to the water. Both these happen almost always at night, in order to minimize encounters with predators.
The water begins to bubble near Agnes’s back.
A sharp wave sweeps in, pushing me back. The tide is rising, my feet sinking into the sand. I stumble on a dead crab.
When I look back up, Agnes is gone. I scan the sea frantically from the shore, but it’s too dark to separate the waves from her body.
“Ag!” I call out, but my voice is drowned out by the howling ocean.
A head breeches the dark water. A leathery flipper saws through the water, then the other, swimming toward the shore.
It’s the turtle from earlier. But there is something disturbingly human-like about its eyes.
A flash of lightning spikes across the purple sky. The air buzzes with impending rain. Waves batter the beach. My brain is a slop of useless, incoherent thoughts: How many minutes can a person hold their breath underwater? How fast can sea turtles walk on land? Does lightning strike the ocean? What do the hermit crabs do if they can’t find a new shell to hide in?
It helps sometimes. To distract myself from the fear.
The turtle slides onto the sand. It's close enough that I can get a better look at its face now, its pock-marked head with fleshy craters, eyes like wet black marbles.
It twitches the way the hatchlings did in the videos I watched on my phone, their flippers large and clumsy on land. Foamy waves crash over its body, and the skin begins to crack: its keratin shell splits open to reveal a train of bumpy vertebrae, skin webbing over bone, flippers twisting into leg-like appendages.
I want to run. Or scream.
But I can’t move.
Water is flooding into my body. Or at least it feels that way. The creature looks up from the sand, its big wet eyes trailing down my petrified body. A fat tongue rolls over its wrinkled lips and then across razor sharp teeth. There’s a shadow of a smile.
“W-what did you do to Agnes?” I ask.
The creature’s eyes widen as if startled, and its neck jerks like doll joints. Its body contorts grotesquely, bones and beak cracking, flesh rending.
And then, I blink and it’s Agnes on the sand. She stands, dusting herself off. She’s in the white-blue swimsuit from middle school, the one she gave me when she dropped out of swimming class for good. I flinch when her long-nailed fingers reach out and stroke my face. There’s a tenderness to the gesture that, for an overwhelming moment, replaces all my fear with longing.
Her fingers move lower, curling around my throat.
“Ag …”
Her fingers tighten until they’re cutting into skin.
An ugly, gurgling sound comes from my mouth.
This isn’t the first time she’s tried to choke me—she’d done it once before in the school yard during middle school, the week after her mother died. Don’t tell me to feel better. I don’t want to feel better. I’m fucking angry she left me behind.
I close my eyes, just like I did then, trying to focus on the last wisps of oxygen stuttering out of my lungs, the feeling of floating. Back then, I’d stupidly told her that she wasn’t alone, not realizing that what she wanted wasn’t a friendly ear to listen, but someone to join her in hell.
“Will you join my collection?” Agnes asks, her voice like the echo of a million cicadas. “You will be beautiful forever then. You will feast forever with the mouth of a god.”
Her hands release my throat. I open my eyes as her head dips down, her sharp teeth sinking into my wrist.
I am going to die here, I think as the creature sucks hungrily, teeth grinding in like a saw. Blood dribbles onto the sand. It doesn’t even hurt, my right hand numb. I watch curiously as the creature feeds, feeling like an audience member in my own body. What does it taste like? What do I taste like?
Some say the Turtle Eater was just a person who accidentally ate a god and could never be sated again. Isn’t that what the old man at the ferry station said on our way to the island? Isn’t that what you wanted me to remember, Agnes?
I never believed in gods, but I do believe trauma, like rage, can be passed on like a shared cup of poison.
The first time Agnes really showed me the scars on her back was also the first time she told me why she was terrified of the water.
“During summer camp, my brother would act like he was trying to teach me to swim, slowly walking us both into deeper water,” she said, holding my wrist, tracing my finger along the fleshy scars on her body, always in places you could never see unless she was naked. “And then when he thought the lifeguard wasn’t watching, he’d force my head into the water and hold me down.”
“Was it just a joke?” I’d said, sucking in a breath when her hands moved onto my ribs and hips, drawing circles on my skin. My own scars were invisible to the eye but no less vivid. The late-night terrors, the screaming, a mother who locked herself in her room for hours with her passport and a kitchen knife, demanding to be freed from an imagined prison. The classmates who folded obscene threats into my notebooks, the elementary and middle school teachers who’d twisted my arm and told me I needed to listen better. If you want to fit in, if you want to stop making people angry, you need to learn to listen.
“They needed two counselors to pull me out of the water. One to hold him back. He wanted me dead, like he was possessed,” she said, her breath on my neck. “But it’s weird. All the years after that, even after my brother mellowed out and finally left me alone and everyone acted like it had all just been a ‘phase.’ Even after I moved out of that house and thought I’d forgotten all about it … the image of the ocean kept coming back. That salty burn in my nostrils, the sharp rocks under my feet, the sound of the waves corking as my head dipped under, the last flash of sunlight underwater before seeing the deep ocean drop-off ahead. The ocean felt bottomless. And it kept calling to me. Like I was never meant to get away.”
Lightning strobes, mirrored by the ocean, followed by a clap of thunder. Another body emerges from the dark water. Silent, like a shadow moving across the sand, it slinks up behind the Agnes-creature, into its blind spot. It’s another Agnes. Her lips curve up into a half-smile at me, raising a finger to her lips like we’re sharing a naughty secret. There’s a large stone clutched between her fingers, the ancient schists almost glimmering.
She slams the rock down onto her doppelganger’s head. The creature stumbles to its knees. Blood trickles down its lumpy scalp, a different color than the blood slathered over its mouth, a bluish gold.
“They say gods used to live in these waters,” Agnes says, bringing the rock down again. The creature thumps onto the wet sand, moonlight cradled against its back. “The internet’s full of shady websites about them, how they take the shape of turtles and grant you anything you want, save you from anything. God-like creatures from ancient times.” The rock connects again and again with skin and bone, blood and scalp bits spattering onto her face and chest. “It’s mostly rambling assholes trying to make a buck. But I wanted to see it for myself. I wanted to know if there was something out here that could save me.”
She drops the wet rock at her feet. Her fingers are swollen and twitching, covered in blood. Seawater drips down her body, the sand dotting into dark pools under her feet. She takes a deep breath and steps back, as if wanting to get a better look at her work.
“I saw it that first night. A shattered lantern and a bloodied diving suit, creatures swarming over where the head should’ve been. So many cracked eggs. More creatures crawling out of the water, crawling out of the diving suit. The grooved carapace of their backs. That’s when I saw Nobuko-san’s husband. A shotgun on the sand between his legs. A dazed, satisfied look on his face as he hooked bloody cartilage out of his teeth with a finger like someone after Christmas dinner.” Agnes laughed. “And I knew then: there are no fucking wish-granting turtles on this island. Only monsters. Desperate, dying gods. And when a god is no longer sustained by the belief of its followers, it seeks other forms of sustenance. It’ll even consume the flesh of its own believers to survive.”
I reach out with my good hand, but Agnes just shakes her head. No, no, no. Her voice strains the way it used to after a long night of drinking and everyone else had already gone home. Like she’s run out of lies to tell herself.
“I was gonna bring you all to him. One after the other like a four-course menu. You for the appetizer, Peter as the main dish, Lina as dessert, Jin like the shitty tea at the end. That was the only reason they let me live that first night after I saw him. The real him.”
I think of Nobuko-san bringing us the noodles topped with grilled intestines, the smoky aroma and chewy texture. Of her grandmotherly smile as she took our drink orders. Suddenly, I think of Peter, Lina, and Jin in their beds, still as corpses in that dark cabin. How easy it would be to unlock a door you already have the key to. How easily the waves could wash our bones back into the ocean, the island cleaning itself of us. How we all die and eventually become nourishment for someone else.
Agnes eyes were on me now.
“I was supposed to leave you here. To be feasted on. But I heard it again,” she says. “That voice in the water. The waves crashing around me like buildings falling. Like the ocean’s screams, demanding my head. And then a thought whispered to me through the panic: who the fuck gets to decide who dies and who doesn’t? If only gods have that power, then I want to be a god.”
Rain dots the beach and ocean, the sound like a chorus of insects rising to life. She grabs a hold of the creature’s limp arm. It still looks like her: the face, the lips, the cresting curve of her throat, the thick calves raised from a lifetime of running. Only then do I realize I can’t tell which is the real Agnes. I want to ask her to show me the scars again, the proof of our history, our shared suffering.
Instead, I watch her footprints in the sand as she walks over, dragging the body, the bandages on her wrist gone, taken by the sea, only the scabbed flesh visible now. Mesmerized, I think of her face at summer camp that night we snuck out of the cabin. How I never told her that for a brief moment on the beach, under those stars, I’d strangely wondered what it would be like to drown with her under those waves, both of us finally free.
“I’ll make a shitty website all about it someday. Let everyone know it can be done,” she says, closing the distance between us. Her arms loop around my body as she presses her lips to my bare shoulder. “That if you can devour a god, you can take its place.” Her lips twitch. I can’t tell if she’s on the verge of laughing or sobbing.
The ocean rages behind her like an open wound in the earth. Like a hungry mouth. I imagine myself in that dim school bathroom, Agnes’s hand on my throat like a warning as I called out to Hanako-san three times.
Hanako-san, Hanako-san, Hanako-san…
“Will you help me?” she whispers like a prayer.
I follow her gaze to the twitching body on the sand. Violent wind gusts across the beach, clearing a patch of clouds above the black ocean, a spotlight of stars. Something rattles in my chest like wood in a metal jar, something hard and sharp finally coming loose. My right hand moves on its own, reaching for a leg. Agnes reaches for an arm.
Could I kill a god? Relief pours through me as the answer opens like a door.
“Yes,” I breathe as we sink our teeth in.
Content Warnings: body horror, death/dying