Man-shaped by Crystal Koo

You journey to slay an ogre to end its terror upon a village.

First published in Pandan Weekly in July 2026. Content warning: violence and gore.

​From the author:

This was largely inspired by a story a professor told the class I was in when I was a young student—it’s difficult to explain more without spoiling the story. There have been many retellings of the same story in different cultures, but I wanted to place it in a Philippine-adjacent fantasy culture in this instance.

This was initially workshopped in SEA Lit Circle under the title “An Act of Exertion.” Since then, I’ve edited it heavily and have had other writing friends take a look as well.

The priest punches a coin-sized hole into your ear. The men around you erupt into cries of celebration veined with relief. Their own ears are intact; they won’t be sent to the mountain to fight the ogre this year. Not when the stars have chosen someone else: you, kneeling, doubled over a lustrous black plinth of charred wood, your ears a mess of blood and flesh.

You wake after they have closed the wounds on your earlobes with flame and returned you to your father. He had looked away when the priest had torn into your ears but as everyone chants your name, he beams like a sun. They douse you both with palmshine like newlyweds.

Now the holes in your ears are plugged with gold; they sag from the weight like an old man’s.

Your father’s saltery reeks of kelp and silt. You take a small basket, which is squirming with fin and scale, from a boy not much younger than you. You carefully count the money his catch is worth, one copper coin after another, before you put them all into his briny hands.

Across the road, the washerwoman sits cross-legged outside her door eating overripe thornfruit. A week ago, the ogre had taken the washerwoman’s daughter away, leaving only an arm in front of her door. She guards her daughter’s arm by the doorway, buried underneath where she had found it.

One evening, your father was drunk and told her to take heart, to look forward to when his son slays the ogre, to cling to the hope of outliving it.

She told him no one had returned from the mountain.

This is true. Not the bearded silversmith with the flintlock last year, not the first gold-eared champion sent to the mountain. It has always been like this since the day the ogre first appeared, when the village had outlawed head-taking. The ogre comes undeterred, inveigling its way through boar traps and sharpened fences meant for its capture, unlocking doors and snapping the necks of livestock and village folk with clever, simian hands.

Last week the woodwright found his missing goats dead in a field of copperleaf weed. Skin flayed, bones and muscles intact.

You’ve only begun to grow a moustache. You spend an hour every evening at the bathroom mirror with lamp and razor, ignoring the drain flies that convene around the pit toilet.

This morning, they discover that the flayed goats the woodwright had buried were dug up through the night. The decaying muscle has been polished off from the carcasses in one sitting. Bones litter the copperleaf field like skewers on a feast day.

It is your father who tells you about this over breakfast, carelessly, but his tone is odd. It sounds deliberately casual, as if denying the possibility of fear. He can’t look at you.

You’re a terrific shot. Your hands are a mechanical blur, a storm of five-fingered wings. You wade into the sea with a crossbow above your waist and return to shore, arms festooned with squid. Your catch flashes a last, bright white before it goes limp.

Your father has taken to bringing you with him when he plays dice with his friends. An element of distraction has invaded the game and his friends play poorly.

“The ogre will kill him,” has been ruefully whispered to your father more than once as he bends over to take his winnings.

At night you hear him weeping into his pillow.

A feast day is thrown for you. You’re placed on a dais, alone on a table layered with pork and thornfruit, as the town eats at your feet. The revelry grows louder and more frantic; people tug you by the hand to dance. You refuse, your food half-eaten, your jug of palmshine untouched. Far away you see the dark outline of Mount Capre and its fog.

They used to have feasts like this in the old days when a boy made his first kill, the freshly cut head on display on a banana trunk. The priests inlaid his ears with gold to show how coming to a feeling of potency and autonomy had been arduous work, an act of exertion.

On your way home, the washerwoman rises from her doorway and reaches for your ears. She says the soil of this village has always cried for blood.

A week later, they send you away.

A jasmine garland hangs from your neck. Your arms are sheathed in sleeves of buffalo-horn spikes. Your crossbow and a basket of pickled fish are strapped on your back; a machete and a quiver of bolts hang from your sides.

Not a single vendor’s cry skitter this morning on the main street. They have all come to see you off. Their minds leap past their huts, the woodsmoke and their turgid banana plantations, toward the glutinous cloud that eternally rings the peak of Mount Capre, where you will go in perfect courage.

Your father is nowhere to be seen.

The vegetation on the mountain is unrecognizable. Light grubs dimly among the swampy puddles and dead leaves; coils of knee roots cling to the forest floor.

It’s only when you stumble through a clutch of woody vines that you realize you’re the only creature in the forest. No snake eggs under a mound of leaves, no small clumps of boar skeletons or half-eaten birds play out the ancient ritual of survival. Only flowers and lichen hang from the trunks in hieroglyphic patterns.

There’s no sign of the men who had come before. No spearhead or arrow, or scarf or bone. No blood-soaked, shit-sprayed body with only half its limbs in place.

An inert paradise, awash in dark green and an incomprehensible stillness, stretching endlessly long.

The sky is orange. You crest an incline, stepping over the long, withered arms of tree roots buttressed by moss-flecked granite and dead leaves. The fog eats you alive.

It is dark when you find the mouth to the cavern, your face damp.

The air is warm and wet. In the tunnels you find what the men had left behind. Spearheads, shattered glass from a lamp. Large inhuman gashes gouge the walls. Bones break through the cave floor like a grotesque harvest.

You only hurtle on, now lost in the maze, your gas lamp throwing frenetic shadows on the walls. Your breath has turned foul and you are clumsy with animal terror and exhaustion. With a cry you fling your gas lamp ahead of you, scrambling at its direction as the glass shatters and the light goes out, smothered by the limestone silt.

You are in a large chamber lit with torches, savage little things made from branches and bone marrow that hang from the walls and columns. They fill the room with smoke that rises to the roof of the cave and floats out of a jagged opening, where moonlight and rags of mist come in. The ogre stands at the other end of the cave.

Shattered guns and broken spears scatter on the floor. The ogre looks at you with sad eyes, its arms ungainly and predatory. Its ears, like yours, are filled with gold.

You vomit.

Almost too nimbly for its size, the ogre lopes toward you. As it reaches to uncork your head from your body, you make a sudden, pulsing movement. There and gone and there again. The ogre stares at you uncomprehendingly. Then its face collapses.

You unload bolt after bolt from your crossbow. A bouquet of steel flowers at the ogre’s stomach and the ogre falls backwards. Your left arm is rock-steady; the arrows tear away from you. You are full of the transfiguring power of the kill, a delicate hysteria which can ruin or make a headtaker.

Everything is right, it could not have gone better.

The ogre shakes with the false cold of pain until it stops moving. You are out of bolts and you are crying.

You saw off the ogre’s head with your machete. Your hands shake; you are close to fainting but you cling on to the image of the lavish celebration that will welcome you back into the village. The drinking feast for weeks on end, fields untended and seas unfished and unnetted. Wine and rice around the huts, jars of camphor broken and dousing the streets.

The fog enters the cave smelling of petrichor, going in and out of your mouth in a sick, steaming gas. The ogre’s body has turned into a pile of dust. It dissipates, layer by layer, eroding itself to the ground.

You are groaning and gasping like a half-dead man hauling himself out of a shallow grave. Your head opalesces and grows translucent like the tail of a soft-bodied firefly.

Your feet have turned into bulbous stumps. Your arms lose their lines and turn into stubby flagella bursting out of your clothes. Your legs stretch. This man-shaped, nacreous cytoplasm you have become distends in different directions, like a slime doll shaped by the savage simplicity of a gigantic, invisible child.

Your weight grows. The ganglia that are now your limbs coagulate and solidify into simian hands and claws, your legs like trees, your toes curled like roots. You are fifteen feet high, your member naked, your eyes unfocused. The crossbow on the floor looks tiny from where you stand.

The jungle is unchanged. The trees are unnested by birds, the floor uncrawled by creatures, like the set of a shadow play: unmoving, the green a shade too bright. It is night when you reach the village. Already the leaping monkeys have awoken to hunt.

You are hungry and tired, your ears heavy with gold. It is time to go home.

Crystal Koo was born and raised in Manila and is currently based in Hong Kong. Her short fiction has been published in a variety of venues, including Interzone, Lightspeed, and The Apex Book of World SF 3.

BlueSky: @crystalkoo

Instagram: @anewartistry

Website: cgskoo.wordpress.com/publications

Thank you for reading!

Pandan Weekly is a zine and weekly email series produced by SEA Lit Circle, a community of writers and readers from Southeast Asia and the diaspora. At SEA Lit Circle, we inspire each other to write fresh, compelling work that’s true to ourselves, and we encourage each other to read and be more open to new works, stories, and perspectives within and beyond the region.

Subscribe to Pandan Weekly’s newsletter by leaving your email below.

We’d love to feature your writing. We want the works you wish someone out there would resonate with; works you write for fun, for your peace of mind, or for you to understand the world or yourself better; works you wish you had grown up with—works that beg for connections, or empathy. Check our submission guidelines through the link below.