On the dry evening of the seventh day, the tikbalang returned, his mane combed into place, his broad shoulders set back with anticipation. One by one your siblings bade you goodbye, to write them, told you how much they appreciated your action, your sacrifice, the immense depth of familial love and devotion that they would remember for the rest of their lives.
“Be brave,” your mother whispered in your ear, as she handed you a small bundle that represented every material thing you owned in the world. “Find a way to save yourself. My heart goes with you.”
“Here she is,” your father said, his hand on the small of your back, nudging you outside the cottage where the tikbalang waited, his equine eyes the dimness of nearly-spent charcoal.
“Climb my back,” the creature growled. And so you did, clutching your scant possessions in your arms, looking back at your home one last time, before what you thought was the end of everything.
It wasn’t comfortable on the tikbalang’s back, and his fur smelled of sweat and smoke.
“Are you afraid?” the tikbalang asked.
“No, I am not,” you replied, seeing no point in stating the obvious—how terrified you were, how you wondered when he would stop to eat you or fuck you or fuck you then eat you.
He took you that night high in a tree, high above unfamiliar rocky ground. He took you then, his cock thick and harder than your will not to be taken. When he pushed into you, splitting your sex with breathless urgency, you thought you would die. With every thrust you felt yourself grow smaller, every invasive motion threatening terminal division. But you refused to die. You refused death by fucking. You do not recall your thoughts, how you got from a place of despair back to a place where pain meant life. What matters is that you fought. What matters is that you lived. Afterward, when he was spent, when his turgid cock finally softened and eased out covered in blood and cum, you remember how the first breath you took tasted like the nectar of forever.
You thought your ordeal was finished, that the creature would permit you to return home, as you pressed your legs together in a futile attempt to be whole again.
How little you knew of men then, how quaint your belief was in the kindness of the universe. How could you know that what happened to you had happened to so many women like you, time after time after time, in places your thoughts could not even imagine? How could you know that your story, despite its intensely sharp and personal nature, was already a dull old tale, already told many times before, with bears or wolves in the role of your tikbalang and a princess or bright-eyed young girl essaying your part? How could you know that men always, always, always had to have to their way, when their cocks were engorged with blood? No, you could not and so you did not, and so you thought the worst was over.
And so you continued to ride him, as he, when time came for rest at night, continued to fuck you, until you both arrived, both sore in distinct places, at a great mountain. When the tikbalang knocked on its side with his pliable hoof, a door opened.
“Enter with no fear,” the creature told you. “Inside is my true home.”
With the conviction of people who know they truly have no choice in the matter, you held your head high and affected the appearance of choice.
“I’m not afraid,” you said between gritted teeth, and allowed yourself to be led into the darkness within.
The darkness did not last long, and after only a few twists and turns you came upon a palace hewed within the mountain, with many, many rooms brilliantly lit by rare candles, whose light shone like gold and whose smoke hinted at spices you could not name. The one in which you both stopped was so grand that candlelight could not find its ceiling. There, in the middle of the hall, was a table so huge that it made the chamber that housed it suddenly seem small.
“Take this,” the tikbalang said, handing you a silver bell. “Think of whatever you want to eat and then ring this bell. Whatever you wish will appear.”
You looked at him with disbelieving eyes, prepared unexpectedly to challenge him because of the absurdity of his claim, when your aching stomach, having nothing for the past several days but fruit and water, made you act otherwise.
“Let’s see, then,” you said, closing your eyes and thinking of food, remembering the most special viands your family ever had, and soon your memory cooperated and brought to fore the smell of roast pig, dripping with oil, skewered on a length of bamboo.
“Open your eyes,” the tikbalang said.
Where before, the vast expanse of the table had been empty, now it was filled to capacity by a hundred roast pigs, their shiny skins cooked to crunchy perfection.
You whirled around to look at the tikbalang.
“Eat as little or as much as you like,” he said. “All is yours.”
And so you did. Of course you did.
When you had your fill, the table suddenly became empty again. You wanted to ask how, and what happened to all the other pigs you could not possibly consume, where those went, but again your body betrayed you. This time it was fatigue, and a yawn overcame you.
“You are tired,” the tikbalang said, and he led you to a room where a bed stood ready to receive you, a bed fit for the most noble doñas of the great ciudad you could only dream of. Every pillow was covered in lustrous silk in a panoply of color, and the sheets were smooth to touch, cool and inviting.
And so you lay yourself down. Of course you did.
When all the candles died at once and covered the room in darkness, you did not care. All you wanted to do was sleep. So you were barely aware of the man who came to lie beside you, whose arms were not thickly muscled and whose head was not that of a horse. For, as is the way in stories like yours, it was the tikbalang, who had shed off his skin and nature. That first night you barely remembered the words he whispered in your ears, but in the many, many nights that followed, you grew less fatigued and kept your wits about you. And this is what happened:
You would eat, after spending the day wandering the endless candlelit rooms alone—you never knew where the tikbalang was during those times. You would have escabeche or adobo or pritong manok, also alone—you never knew what the tikbalang ate. Then you would retire to your glorious bed and make to slumber, knowing that the candles in the room would extinguish themselves. Which was his signal to arrive, discard his tikbalang skin, and in the form of a man lie beside you and begin to speak. It was in this way that he planned to win your heart. All through those times, you maintained your sleeping repose and measured your breaths, but inwardly, how you laughed!
How little this man knew of women, then, how quaint his belief in the supposed weakness of the feminine heart. How could he know that what he was trying to do, his sincere seduction which he began by opening his heart to yours in the darkness, had been attempted by so many men like him, time after time after time, in places his thoughts could not even describe? How could he know that the story of his cursed state, despite its intensely sharp and personal nature, was a dull old tale, already told many times before, with princess or bright-eyed young girl in your role of curse-lifter, and an arrogant man essaying his part? How could he know that women, when denied their ways, always, always, always found a way to punish their oppressors? No, he could not, and since you pretended sleep, he believed that you would be the one to save him from his curse.
The truth of the matter, as you lay in bed night after night, listening to his tragic hope, was that you did not know of all the other stories in the world—isolated in your tropical archipelago, had no inkling that there was a pattern to these things, to how they all played out, and it was this:
That you would fall in love with your rapist, betrayed by your heart and the wetness between your legs. Then he would vanish and you would quest for him, tirelessly seeking the aid of this hag or that wind. Dauntless in your conviction, you would find your way to the end of the world, east of the sun and west of moon, where you would face ogresses and riddles and win his freedom. And in the end, you would retire together, hand in hand,
and later fuck in perfect bliss.
But you did not know all that. Your ignorance of the great Stories rendered you impervious to fate or destiny or the way of things.
This is what mattered to you, night after night; this is why you laughed inwardly at his every word, at his every sad and tormented exhalation:
That when he wore his horse skin, when he wore the form of the tikbalang, he raped you high in a tree. He fucked you raw and almost killed you with his horse cock. That he was under the influence of some curse was as inconsequential to you as spit against a storm. He was the same man. He chose to fuck you. That night in the tree, he rammed his cock inside you until he came. He chose to violate you. And now, now he wanted your help because he thought that by talking to you softly in the dark, by revealing the secret softness of his helpless hapless heart, he could win you. Did he consider how he added insult to injury? Did he deem you some mindless dog that one could strike mercilessly one moment and then cajole with food, a warm bed, and heartbreaking words the next?
No.
As so you continued to feign sleep, and during the brief times in the day that the tikbalang and you were together, you pretended gradual attraction. The act simultaneously repulsed and thrilled you. And so you began to win him over, watching the trust accumulate by leaps and bounds, in magnitudes beyond the proportion of your own actions. Because the cursed tikbalang so wanted you to love him, to believe that you loved him.
You never did, of course. In your eyes, he was the creature in the tree with the cock covered in blood and cum. But by then you understood your power, the power of the small, the power of an object of desire.
And so you put the plan you had thought about long and hard into motion. With small accidental brushes and demure gestures and later bolder caresses, always paired with innocently phrased observations about his sorrowful seeming, making him first want to be in your presence and then to dine with you.
This part was the most important. You needed the tikbalang to dine with you. And so you took your time and lost count of the nights and weeks and months. You did not know that you had transformed your story into another sort.
And so eventually, you had your way. And the tikbalang would sup with you. And with the silver bell, you summoned all sorts of fruits and vegetables you imagined a horse would appreciate. Which he did, nibbling here and there, grazing there and here, as he followed you in a circle around the vast table.
You let this circumstance, this dalliance over dinner, continue for some time, until you were certain that he would not question whatever food the silver bell in your hand summoned.
And when you at last felt the time was right, you began to poison him.
Your choice, a fact you were certain of, was the tobacco plant that the Spaniards had brought with them from across the sea to your land. Your father brought back some precious samples of the plant from the ciudad, in an attempt to better your finances. A combination of his ineptitude and the influence of faraway hacienderos shattered his dream, but not before you and your siblings had observed that the few animals you possessed died after eating the plant. You did not know how or why. What mattered to you was that the single horse of your family, won by your father in a single unrepeated stroke of fortune at gambling, was one of the animals that died. That was enough for you.
And so every night, you imagined little discreet bits of tobacco leaves mixed in the succulents and fruits at the table. You grew inventive in how you hid it, masking the taste with the juice of mangoes or the mucilage of okra.
What you ate, he ate. What you took to plate, he did as well. Night after night after night.
And soon there came a time when, in mid-conversation, his broad equine shoulders began to shake and shiver, his thick neck began to twitch, and he staggered this way and that.
That evening, you were concerned that perhaps when he became a man, the poisonous symptoms would recede. But they did not. You felt the unnatural heat from his body beside you, as you feigned sleep. You felt his weakened heart thunder out violent protests that grew less and less intense as the hours crept by. You heard him briefly complain about how cold his arms and legs felt, as he swaddled himself in your silken covers, before he returned to telling you about his sad, sad cursed state, amid labored breathing.
You could not know that in the new story you had fashioned, this was a turning point. You could have had a change of heart, released the fettered true love that was secreted deep inside you. You could have been turned by his suffering, and in an epiphanic stroke realized how, in a reversal of fortune, you had become the monster, you had become him. By such a tremendous realization, you could have imagined a cure, summoned with the silver bell a panacea, and thus proven your moral superiority, proven that you were always the better person.
But you did not. So you did not.
You counted the hours until morning, as such was measured inside the mountain, and only then did you open your eyes.
It was the first time you saw him as a man. Sprawled twisted and prostrate in a tangle of silk, his face contorted in abject misery, his mouth forced open by his swollen tongue.
You pulled at the beddings that partially covered him and looked at his small shriveled cock.
That was the time, finally, when you released the laughter you had repressed for so long within, and it pealed and rebounded into the many, many rooms of the palace and from there into the depths of the mountain.
It took longer to consider how to dispose of his corpse than it took to get used to freedom.
Ultimately this is what you did: you imagined a feast of horsemeat and rang the silver bell. Its tintinnabulation produced an overflow of horsemeat, cooked in all the ways you imagined—and you nodded to yourself with delight, your theory that someone, somewhere, must eat horse vindicated. Then over the course of hours and with much effort you dragged the man’s remains onto the table and draped his tikbalang skin over him.
And declared that you were done eating.
And he was gone. Of course, he was gone. Man and cock and horse skin, whisked away with all the other unconsumed horsemeat.
You took ownership of the palace and found many more strange bells that could produce various things, which you amused yourself with, until you came to terms with the fact that there was one person you wanted with you, one person who was trapped in a situation with her version of a tikbalang.
You left the mountain alone and returned with your mother.
And that, for now, is how your story ends.
EVER, AFTER
ONCE UPON A time, there was a young girl whose mother had died. This, her father told her, was when the girl was small enough to rest in his arms.
I DID NOT expect you to find me, but I suppose someone in your new station has certain privileges. I do not mean to sound adversarial, but you belong to a chapter in my life I thought long closed. Yes, it’s true that I still live, but far away—or so I thought. I hope you do not take my candid response to mean that I wish the past revoked. I do not. I made my choice, and yes, yes, I left him and you. The reasons are small but manifold, and yes, if it gives you comfort, I do sometimes think of what might have been if I had stayed. But I didn’t.
1. My second husband. It was like I was half-blind until I met him. Then my eyes betrayed me, then my heart, then my lips. Reason was the last bastion of resistance, as I asked myself what other people would say, what they would think, how they would judge. Then I decided that in the end, judgments are worth less than the energy spent to make them, and I went with him. Of course I am happier. And yes, sometimes I imagine regret. But it is such as small thing.
2. You. Are you surprised? Are you rolling your eyes in disbelief? Are you asking, as I suppose you should, if I loved you, why did I leave you as well? Why didn’t I take you with me? The answer is this: in the new space I chose to occupy, there was only room for one. And yes, I chose myself. Was it not a selfish thing? Yes and no. And no, I do not care to know what you think. Because it will
not change a thing.
3. My garden. It is beautiful and demands only what I can give. My ornamental trees grow because they have to, because it is in their nature. I only help them along; devotion is my only magic. There is only so much a person can give, after all.
Her father loved her as best he could, but soon married a widow. Before long, he passed away.
FIRST, A CAVEAT: you know, of course, that I am dead. I do not know how much the love of those gone matters to the living, but if it is a comfort to you, here is my list. My honest list, my beloved daughter.
1. Your mother. It sounds trite and tired but it’s absolutely true. She was the first my heart knew, and the night she left was the time I think I began to die. If I could change things, I would change almost every day we spent together. I’d alter our conversations, or at least my part in them. I don’t recall every word but I know the sense of what I’d try for. And I’d ask her pointblank to stay.
2. You, of course. I remember when you were born, how I felt my heart expand to accommodate the love that came over me like a towering wave. I didn’t think I could love you, given that all that I was, I had already surrendered to your mother. But when I saw you, I realized that what I previously believed was utterly false. It grew stronger as you grew older; you look so much like her. I’m sorry that the truth places you at number two, but you asked and I am compelled to speak. But you must know that beyond this absurd list, I treasure you. No, I cannot “the most” or “the best,” but it’s true nonetheless.
3. Your stepmother. I know how you two do not get along, but I suppose you’d have to be a man to understand why I remarried. Or you have to be placed in a situation where the rest of your life looks like a dismal road. There is comfort in having a companion, someone of my age to talk to, someone to sleep with at night.
How to Traverse Terra Incognita Page 11
