An Excerpt from "The Secret Adobo Wars"

By Kate Osias

Konting Asin

THE WRITHING MASS of tentacles attempted to clamber out of the large clay pot, even as Soledad snapped the rubbery appendages back with her reed-thin pudlos. It would have been easier to cook pugita if it were dead, but getting this particularly recalcitrant pugita to that state was fraught with all sorts of perils and complications more convoluted than what Soledad’s formidable mind had projected.

Even as bakunawa, all she could do was to bind him to his last configuration. She knew better than to expect a leviathan’s curse to hold Enrique down for long.

“Yield, Husband.” Soledad struck a slithering tentacle. “Just yield.”

The pugita burst into action. Soledad was momentarily overwhelmed with limbs that twisted, grappled and splattered blistering water on her unprotected human skin. Three lightning flicks from her pudlos-bearing hand, coupled with the expenditure of Adobong Parat which then produced a brackish blue-tinged froth, forced the pugita to retreat.

“What else, Enrique?” she asked, eying the hovering salty cloud with distaste as it continued to flavor her slow-boiling octopus of a husband. “What else would you have me sacrifice?”

When the pugita finally died, it did so abruptly. There was no perceived weakening, no gradual erosion of activity. Just a sudden stillness, followed by an exhausted sense of quietude, as the pugita settled heavily against the walls of the clay pot.

The cresting wave of foolish sadness took Soleded by surprise.  These ripples of sentimentality surged weakly, then swelled more powerfully, as the finality of Enrique’s death crashed onto her.

It was over.

“Enrique,” she said, adding more salt to her octopus stew through her tears. •

> Kate Osias has won two Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards, earned a citation in the International The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and won the Gig Book Contest and Canvas Story Writing Contest. She co-edited the sixth and seventh volumes of Philippine Speculative Fiction with Nikki Alfar and Alex Osias respectively. Kate is a proud founding member of the LitCritters, a writing and literary discussion group.