Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 10

by Dean Francis Alfar

  Hasna paddled her way through the streets-turned-canals. The city seemed like a Venice-in-the-making, its buildings towering over her like grand cathedrals.

  The flood tides rose steadily, engulfing whole floors of buildings. The Qataris had grown accustomed to the floods, and only used their first and second floors as empty caverns, to hold the waters. Hasna’s canoe bumped into canvas canopies and old street lamps. It rocked and tossed with every nudge, as Hasna tried to gain her bearings.

  The rain proved to be another obstacle. It poured like an infinite fabric of water, bombarding the city, easily filling the canoe. Every few minutes, Hasna had to bail water out of the boat in a bucket, wasting precious time.

  But she proceeded still. As the hours crawled, she regained her capacity to navigate the boat, as her mother once had. A sudden gust of desert wind propelled her closer to the minaret, and before much longer, her boat seemed to aim straight toward it.

  When she placed the oar on the canoe’s floor, she knocked away an old metal box, hidden under her seat. Its metal casing was wet, but the water washed the covering rust away. When Hasna took the box, it rattled.

  She held up her stepmother’s umbrella, and with one hand, she tinkered with the lock of the metal chest. The box soon popped open, and she held it carefully, so as not to let the contents fall onto the boat’s wet floor. She wiped her hands with the dry parts of her shirt, and then started to scour through the box.

  Inside were photos, letters inside envelopes, and other knick-knacks. She sat back under the cover of her umbrella, and rummaged through the items. She found a handful of tamarind pods, which were dry and flaky. Her father used to grow tamarind in his backyard back in Jakarta, before they had moved to sandier lands. She remembered how, every time she had a cough or a bad fever, her father would pick some ripe brown tamarind, heat it up in a pan with water and sugar, then make her drink it, iced.

  The aroma of the tamarind always brought her back to a memory of the tropics, where Aling Dorita was also from. She remembered what had drawn her father and her stepmother together: a familiar glass of agua de tamarindo. Her father had met Aling Dorita in her Doha cafe. She had a chalkboard sign outside Single Bite, advertising a fresh batch of the tamarind drink, and he had been drawn in by it.

  After a few swigs of the bittersweet refreshment, they began exchanging recipes, and soon were exchanging contact information. Both easily reminded each other of home, though not en pointe, which made their nostalgia more personal and more refreshing. Aling Dorita was not from Indonesia, not like his previous wife, but she was from somewhere very, very close. So they had their similarities and their differences, and that dynamic was what stuck.

  Hasna rubbed the tamarind pods with her damp fingertips, which were now wrinkled from the cold rain. Soon, the spiral staircase of the minaret came more and more fully into view.

  But she wasn’t quite there yet, so she continued her rummaging, and found an old golden rose necklace. Its box chain was tangled and tarnished, and Hasna could not push open its lobster hook. She remembered how her mother used to wear this necklace on sunny days, when it was hot enough to wander about the city without having to cover up too much.

  Hasna’s mother was a little fervent in preserving her aurah – the intimacy of her naked skin – but on blistering days of her youth, she would go out in public with sleeves shorter than usual, with necklines wider than usual, often much to the chagrin of elders and the pious. Her mother used to bring Hasna around the city, to window-shop at the Pearl, or to stroll down the long Corniche beside the wharfs and the port, the yachts in sight.

  Sometimes she would give little Hasna treats to quench the heat. Qatar drew people and trade from across oceans, so Hasna could sample tiny tastes of things from every corner of the globe. She loved the aroma from the mango lassi cart near Education City. She loved the multitude of flavors of the halo-halo near the Museum of Islamic Art. Whenever they went to the Pearl, Hasna would get gelato in a small paper cup, and always in different flavors. Traversing the labyrinthine alleyways and avenues of Doha in the summer with her mother, to look for a particular store or a food coffee house, had always delighted Hasna.

  The canoe came to a sudden stop. Hasna looked over the starboard bow, and saw that the slack of rope from her boat had caught on a loose nail on an old date palm. She leaned over to lift the rope, and the boat soon went on its way to the spiral minaret.

  Hasna continued rummaging through the contents of the box. A handkerchief had snagged on the hook of her bracelet. She lifted the delicate satin cloth and examined it carefully, like a mother would her children. The handkerchief was embroidered, its golden edges in a scallop. There were initials sewn on one corner.

  She remembered the stories her parents told her about their wedding, how various family members pushed and pulled them days before the grand celebration, how her aunts fixed the bride’s hair and jewelry, how her uncles dressed the groom for pictures, how they argued about the costs and the venue, and how the chaos somehow brought them even closer together, even more than the wedding did.

  Hasna remembered. She went through the items inside the metal box, and remembered. And for once in her life, she didn’t feel at all lost.

  AT LAST THE boat came to a stop. Hasna hid the metal box in the driest part of the boat’s hull, and then paddled the rest of the way to the minaret, which was shining bright under the downpour, from the orange lamplights around it.

  With the slack of rope, she tied the boat tight to one of the lamps that made the minaret glow. Her stepmother’s umbrella at her shoulder, she trudged carefully up the tower, already half-blind from the lights. Hasna covered her eyes with one hand, and with the other began feeling the minaret’s walls, guiding herself carefully along the slippery steps of the staircase.

  It was a long climb. When she found herself at the very top of the tower, she saw that it held a gazebo, its dome supported by eight pillars. By then, her vision had blurred into misty blueness. She eventually reached the apex of the spiral minaret, and began looking for her mother and father.

  She looked and looked through her blurry vision, but she didn’t find them. In their stead were the bird spirits from the café. The owl and the hoopoe stood in the midst of the dome’s pillars, garbed as they had been earlier. They waited with some nonchalance, as Hasna trudged up the tower, recovering still from the blinding glow of the tower’s lamplights.

  Hasna did not sigh with anger or despair. Her breath neither grew hot or cold. She breathed, and then smiled. She crossed her arms and then leaned on one of the pillars.

  “You don’t seem too disappointed, dearie,” the owl said, while her wings toyed with her pearl necklace.

  Hasna looked at the pair. Her eyes held a tiny glimmer that rivaled the city lights. “They weren’t going to be here at all,” she said.

  Hasna swallowed a lump down her throat. “But the last time I maneuvered a boat was when my mother was still alive,” she said. “And that boat that carried me all the way here? It had a box full of mementos left by my parents. It was like they were with me on that boat ride.”

  The birds stared back at her.

  “So it was like I finally had a chance to say goodbye one more time,” Hasna continued. She bowed her head to the two spirits. “Thank you,” she said.

  The two spirits came closer to Hasna.

  “No, we should be the ones to thank you,” said the owl.

  “To see our daughter, resilient and strong, one last time,” said the hoopoe.

  Hasna raised her head, tears in her eyes. “Ibu? Aya?”

  The spirits raised their chins to give her a quiet nod. “Selamat tinggal, Hasna,” they said.

  The pair of spirits, the owl and the hoopoe, faded into the heavy rain. Hasna bent down, covered her face with her shaking hands, and wept.

  Renz Christian Torres needs a breather. If he's not running college organizations, helping run the school newspaper, or just plain running, he's scribbling
tales of fiction on his laptop. A child of the Silliman University National Writers' Workshop Batch 53, he tries his best to involve himself more in the local literature scene. Although his publishing milestones may be small as of now (Silliman Journal and Philippine Speculative Fiction volume 9), he doesn't plan to ever stop.

  Lakan Umali

  Hunger

  July, fourth week

  ON THE TABLE, Seb laid out the day’s worth of pilfered memories.

  He had stolen five, but the hunger had compelled him to eat two on the daily commute. It saddened him, because he had wanted to savor them when he got home. Savoring them seemed to stave the pangs off for much longer, but his hunger was so intense that, on the jeepney-ride home, he was forced to stuff the memories down his throat. And one of them had seemed so promising.

  It was a man’s second-to-the-last sunset with his terminally-ill wife. He wasn’t so evil as to take the man’s last sunset, but the second-to-the-last was almost just as good. He had wanted to let tongue and teeth explore the setting sun, the image of it reflected on the seaside, the way the man’s wife would look at the sea and then look at him, with salty eyes and salty hair, and the man trying to stay brave, oh-so-brave.

  The other memory was that of a botched student presentation, and he didn’t regret swallowing that immediately. It was a pill.

  Seb looked at the memories before him. One was of a tindera, cradling her newborn baby. It had a robust flavor and a strong consistency, provided by the mother’s undying love for the baby. The next was a security guard, on a midnight inspection of the campus. This one had an interesting, amusing edge to it, provided by the security guard’s fear that a White Lady would appear before him and take his soul.

  The last one was the biggest. His friend, Caroline, the only other person who knew about his special appetite, supplied it for him.

  “Take it,” she had told him. “Just take it.” He saw the memory she had wanted him to take. Caroline was wandering through Mandaluyong. It was near-dark, and she had just lost her fare-money. When she checked her cellphone, she found that she had no load, and her friend had not shown up for their meeting. She did not know the way back home.

  It was a long memory. Caroline walked for hours, turning a corner here, a corner there, shocked at the immensity of the city, which became less a city and more a labyrinthine nightmare. Her feet were sore, and her face was covered in dust and car exhaust. Near a 7-Eleven, she asked a strange man for directions to Jose Rizal University, and the man, taking pity, gave her ten pesos to take a jeepney.

  “You want me to take all of it?” Seb asked.

  “No, just the middle part,” she said. “I don’t want to remember all that walking.”

  “Why didn’t you just take a taxi, and pay him when you had gotten home?”

  “No money in the house. Ma's salary wouldn’t come in until the day after.”

  He shrugged. He went inside her mind, and took the memory. He tore out the segment that Caroline didn’t want, and gave back the rest. He put the memory, which was larger than all four combined, into his backpack.

  “I can still never get used to it,” she said. “That emptiness you leave behind.”

  Before he ate Caroline’s memory, he had to split it up into pieces, each the size of a regular pandesal. Her memory had a sour taste to it. It was not entirely unpleasant, but his face puckered, and his throat burned, as he swallowed each piece.

  He felt a vibration in his pockets.

  “So, how was my memory?” Caroline asked him.

  “I had to cut it up into little pandesal-sized pieces,” he said.

  “Oh, so two hours of my life is worth a few pieces of pandesal?”

  “Well, I usually get minutes. You, on the other hand, gave me hours. And for that, I am terribly grateful.”

  “So now you don’t have to steal from some poor, unfortunate soul?”

  She said it jokingly, but still, it stung. He didn’t want her to know.

  He took the memory of that half-funny, half-hurtful thing, and ate it, as well. It tasted like a McDonald’s burger left out in the sun for too long.

  June, fourth week

  THE HUNGER STARTED while he was taking a biology exam.

  As Seb was answering a question on parasites, he felt a faint grumbling in his stomach, and was struck by a hunger that was almost biblical in nature. It made him wish for locusts, rivers of blood, anything but that desire for food. It was as if all the contents of his stomach had suddenly vanished, leaving nothing but an empty, gaping hole that needed to be filled. He felt like puking, but had nothing to throw up.

  He imagined slow-cooked chicken with steaming java rice, oysters topped with papaya salsa, pancit with fresh vegetables and shrimp, lamb shanks cooking over an open fire, fat dripping off the bone, meat sizzling and turning a bright, inviting brown.

  He put his paper on his professor’s desk, and sprinted to the nearest canteen. He didn’t look at what he ordered. As long as it was rice with something edible, he was fine.

  He ate. And ordered. And ate. He only stopped when the hunger mellowed to a dull throbbing, his wallet almost empty.

  An hour later, the hunger returned. It was a beastly thing inside him, gobbling up every morsel of undigested food it could find. He stopped walking, clutching his stomach, asking the thing to stop, please stop, just leave me a crust of bread, a scoop of rice.

  Probably just a stomach flu, he thought. It’ll pass.

  July, second week

  “WHERE HAVE YOU been?” asked Caroline. “You look like shit.”

  “Wow, friend,” he said. “Thank you for pointing that out. Hadn’t noticed.”

  The day the hunger came, as soon as he arrived home, he beelined to the fridge, and carried away as much food as he could. When his mother found him an hour later, chicken leg hanging from his mouth, she made a face as if she had found him blowing a druggie for shabu.

  “I’m happy you’re starting to finally develop an appetite, honey”, his mother told him, after he cleaned himself up. “But don’t you think you’re overdoing it?”

  When Seb told his parents what was happening, they wasted no time in trying to cure their baby boy. They sent him to physicians, folk-healers, priests. They even sent him to a week-and-a-half-long retreat in Tagaytay, with a gaggle of old women suffering from stomach cramps, all in need of spiritual healing. But no one could destroy the hunger.

  Eventually, his parents just told him to deal with it, since by all accounts, he was physically fine.

  “It’s all in your head, dear,” his mother said. “Try not to think about it.”

  “I’m hungry,” he told Caroline. “And it won't go away, no matter how much I eat.”

  “Maybe the hunger is symbolic,” she said, laughing. “Maybe it represents your hunger to finally be loved, truly and wholeheartedly.”

  “Fuck you, that’s not funny,” he snapped, surprised at the sharpness, like an extra-tangy dish of paella.

  “If you need me to refer you to a doctor, I know a few people,” she said, arms raised in contrition.

  “Are you gonna eat that?” he asked, ignoring her offer and pointing to her siomai.

  “Nah, go ahead.”

  As he forked a piece, he saw Caroline, only much younger. He could glimpse Caroline, eight years old, in pigtails, comforting a crying child with a new box of grape juice.

  He reached out toward it and popped it in his mouth. Caroline’s memory and Caroline’s siomai were two distinct flavors. Her memory tasted like a warm sense of pity and worry, like freshly-baked bread with an especially salty side of butter. He let the memory roll over his tongue, let his teeth rip apart the box of grape juice, let his tongue savor Caroline’s compassion towards her fellow child. When he swallowed it, he was surprised to find his hunger gone.

  The siomai tasted dry and lifeless in comparison.

  After he was finished eating, he noticed Caroline staring at him.

  ‘What the fuck did yo
u just do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, licking the remains of the past off his fingers.

  August, first week

  “MY GOD, YOU have fucking low standards,” Caroline told him, after she saw Gabriel.

  “It’s like God answered all my prayers, by making his face,” he said, lightly holding her hand, as if to prevent himself from flying away.

  “His face is all lines and sharp angles. Like it was specifically made to teach children about geometry,” she said.

  “I bet he tastes like a sharp fine wine,” he said.

  “Fine, fine. Maybe he has hidden depths,” she said. “He kind of looks like the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Only taller and thinner and with messier hair.”

  “I’d like him to explore my hidden depths.”

  “You are disgusting,” she said. “Next you’ll be telling me what the memory of his morning piss tastes like.”

  When Caroline found out about this peculiar ability of his, she went about it with a scientist’s curiosity. She picked memories to give him, trifling ones that she knew she’d forget.

  “So, the one I gave you was –” she said, looking at the notes she had written before he took the memory – “the memory of me eating some rice and chicken tinola for lunch. What does that taste like?”

  “Like shitty left-over rice, and too-greasy chicken tinola,” he said.

  She handed him the four hours she’d spent waiting for an ex-boyfriend to show up for their study date. Little did she know that, at the same time, he was fucking one of his org-mates.

  “There’s a stale undercurrent of boredom in it, topped by something incredibly spicy and overwhelming. Like eating old bread slathered with Bicol express.”

  She gave him one of her favorite memories. A childhood trip to Baguio, where she saw pine trees for the first time. The memory was of her thrashing in a pile of pine needles, feeling the cool mountain air for the first time.

  As soon as he received the memory, he felt the weight of it.

  “Are you sure you’re okay with giving this away?” he asked her.