Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 10

by Dean Francis Alfar

  If that night were a movie, it would’ve been a series of disjointed images, or a Warholesque montage of shattered fragments, smoky blue and red lights dissolving into a kaleidoscopic, woozy pattern. I remember making out with a scuzzy stranger with a beatnik beard on the dance floor, and wandering giddily into the unisex washroom and there I retched, retched, retched into a pristine purple porcelain throne, as some good soul held my hair for me. Hunched over wretchedly, I watched the ground bits of hotdog I’d eaten for lunch and some unrecognizable green-gray gobs muck up the toilet water. Then I walked back into the club, into the horde of flailing topless bodies, and watched my date, in jockstraps all of a sudden, perform some crazy trick on the dance floor.

  There were things I couldn’t yet know that night. How the next morning I’d wake groggily in a blaze of white sun, still in my sweaty, stinking clothes from the night before, next to a woman who definitely hadn’t been my date, on a creaky, lumpy bed in a room I couldn’t recognize. How I wouldn’t even bring up this topic the next time I met the smallish, but cocky and a little breathtaking man with a marvelous large nose at the university one Saturday. How he wouldn’t mention that night either, and how it would never be mentioned in the next four years that we’d be together. How in those four years I’d guard my virginity like a dog with her bone. How things ended between me and this man, whose mother hanged herself with a heavy-duty extension cord, one pea-soupy night in an alley somewhere in downtown London, when he told me I was a whore for loving my best friend, and when I said I couldn’t love him because he was such a phenomenal asshole that all he’d loved, and could ever love, was himself.

  How, contented, I’d walk away.

  I couldn’t yet know how that night would figure in the grand scheme of things. And yet as I stood there, transfixed, watching him bring his enormous hands behind his taut back, maneuver his more enormous right leg towards a loop with the other, ease his head through the complicated hoop of his arms and lock it in place, draw his arms and legs through, the beauty of his sculpted body poignant and majestic, watching him disappear with no poof or some sudden burst of light – I knew, or held on to that sliver of hope anyway, that after years of giving up on finding the right one, maybe, just maybe, I’d for once in my life found him already.

  BY MID-AFTERNOON, JOAQUIN and I had tired of Neruda’s poetry and the snippets of inane conversation we’d overheard for the last three hours, and sluggishly we drifted down and around the Academic Oval, like a real couple, under a drizzly shower of milk-white cotton bolls that fell off their rotund pods with little plops.

  I put my arm through his as we strolled along together – though the air wasn’t cold anymore, I was feeling impossibly cold. For a second, I pressed my head against the side of his arm, but quickly pulled away, probably with more force than I intended, so that Joaquin looked down at me quizzically. He had legs astronomically longer than mine, and after every few steps I had to skip and trot and quicken my gait to match his. Around us, the footfalls of joggers deadened to a hum, in the way you imagine most things do, when in your head you’re in a music video, and a certain song is playing in the background to set just the right, emotive atmosphere.

  Two years ago, I was twenty-four, I enjoyed a seven-month writer’s residency in Michigan. I took a semester off my PhD classes and packed up basically my whole life, minus James who, I thought, was excess baggage more than anything. Joaquin took some time off work, too, and made Chicago a couple of nights later, faster than I’d expected. In the mornings up till afternoons, except on some weekdays, we’d go to this posh restaurant or the other, until winter came, and we had nothing to do but freeze in his friend’s voguish butch flat that had burnished oak floors and large floor-to-ceiling glass windows, affording a picturesque view of Lake Michigan. We’d nibble macadamia nuts fresh off the roaster, and huddle close together, biting the insides of our cheeks, backs against the radiator, a frayed rug snug and warm about our legs. We’d turn the heat on full-blast, and talk endlessly, just like we’d done over the last four years through email and over the phone.

  There were days we’d brave the blizzard, like idiots. With chapped lips and flaky skin, we’d step out into the blustery gray world, I in a bloody-red parka, a long cranberry scarf wound twice around my neck and a kerchief tied daintily about my head like a wimple, he in a navy peacoat and a muffler and a gray hoodie I’d given him the Christmas before. Lining the roads sheathed in glass, the bald elm trees were shivery; above, the brumous sky seemed to thrum like a slumbering beast.

  On one of those days, on a deserted snow-clad street, I heard a familiar song, which I initially couldn’t put my finger on, break out all of a sudden, but I looked around and there were only the two of us, treading down the street, trembling. He didn’t hear it, but it was getting louder and louder.

  Years later, walking around the oval under a niggardly shower of cotton, I’d hear in my head this song and its cheesy line – “I’m as nowhere as I can be, could you add some somewhere to me?” – and remember that one wintry day two summers ago, how the snowflakes sailed down and melted onto his wind-tossed hair, on the strong bridge of his nose, and how I wanted so much to reach up and touch them but I didn’t.

  A PROFESSOR OF mine in my freshman composition class, now my colleague at the department, was fond of recalling how the university’s Shopping Center had once been called Dili-mall, though really it was a far cry from a mall, and its restrooms were better reserved for the desperate and wretched. By late afternoon, I found myself belonging to this sorry camp, but whether I was more desperate or more wretched, I didn’t know.

  Afterward, though it was only five p.m., Joaquin and I agreed to have dinner at Rodic’s, a tapsihan I could only dream of eating at back when I was an undergrad, and had to scrimp and scratch here and there to fit the ballooning expenses into my meager allowance. Outside, the bleached-out sun shone feebly, and the streets were awash with the orange-to-purple light of dusk, the leaves knifing out of the trees as they waved in the nascent evening breeze.

  “What I dread,” I said, “is this child growing up and asking me who his/her/its father is.”

  “How about piano lessons or math homework?” he said. “Aren’t they more dreadful?”

  “He/she/it will kill me in my sleep,” I said, “my last coherent thought being, ‘I could’ve killed you, you know.’”

  “My father killed my grandma in her sleep,” he said, “smothered her with a pillow.”

  “Is that metaphorical or what?”

  “I was five then. I didn’t see him do it, but my mother did. I was already sixteen, seventeen, when she told me about it. But I do remember I got up late that night, parched. It was 3:43 a.m. I had a digital clock, see. So I went straight to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and there she was, standing near the fridge. It was crazy, you know, she’d been in a wheelchair ever since I could remember. So I asked, ‘Are you okay, Lola?’ but I swear to God, I felt so cold, the words came out only a raspy whisper. Then she smiled at me! At me! She was a cantankerous old woman, and to see her smile like that – it was like seeing the devil smile or something. Plus, she hated my guts all her life because I was her son’s son. Anyway, that was the only time I ever saw her smile. I went back to my room shortly after that, dazed. I was too young and too dumb, and the next morning my father told me what the doctors said, that she died of cardiac arrest at around midnight.”

  “Wow. I don’t know what to say.”

  “Just eat your egg.”

  “I know your father’s capable of a lot of things. But murder? To murder his own mother?”

  “We’re all capable of it. We all have moments of desperation.”

  “Was she floating in the air?”

  “Shouldn’t you be asking if she had blood smeared on her clothes or an axe in her back?”

  “I wish sometimes I could just lose it for an entire day and lash out at people, tear the wallpaper off the walls, murder my friends, my parents, my boy
friend, and get away with it.”

  “I don’t know. At times I feel I can do just that. It’s a mammalian urge, a curiosity, on some level, I guess. It’s natural, feeling it, believing you can do it, but to actually do it you must be really desperate.”

  “You’re the only person I know who’d rather be murdered than murder someone.”

  “You read books, that’s what you do for a living. You write. Teach classes. Have an MA in an obscure subject. I fuck. Or used to fuck, anyway. I could’ve been working in a lab, mixing chemicals or building something. But I chose not to. I’ve made demented decisions in life, but I’m still lucky. We’re both middle-class and better off than those runty kids in the streets looking for plastic bottles and scraps of iron, and that’s more than enough to be thankful for. Still, we’re so caught up in our petty bourgeois problems that we’re fundamentally unhappy – that if there’d be a day I could screw up my life in the worst way I could, without fear of anyone or anything or any supernatural force from above judging us, I’d do it. I’d slit my throat and end my existential angst once and for all.”

  “Then that defeats the purpose.”

  “Well, we have only a lifetime to waste.”

  I said, “I want to know if you’re staying or going.”

  “I love you,” he said, looking me hard in the eye. “But either way, you’re on your own now.”

  IN THE DWINDLING daylight, we took to the lamplit road in Joaquin’s Montero, bright amber globes streaming by and fading away on either side, as we idled over the asphalt. Down a tree-lined avenue, we swept past the tennis court, past the Carillon tower and the university theatre, past the College of Music where, on some nights, you’d hear the euphony of the beats of drums and gongs of the gamelan, of wind instruments doing scales at different keys, of eerie chanting voices you’d mistake for ghosts’ or the bated sighs of an old lover. I made Joaquin stop near a waiting shed, under which roof a guy with fire-engine red hair was kissing an impossibly Lilliputian girl full on the mouth for all the world to see. Then I asked Joaquin to stay in the car, while I walked over to see an old friend.

  There on his pedestal he stood swarthy and regal, head thrown back, arms spread to the sides in an eternal gesture of heroic sacrifice. At first all I could think about was the fatherless fetus in the pit of my stomach, swimming in amniotic fluid and oblivious to its mother’s dilemma, and the thing James had told me on our last night together, how his days felt like having a pesky little fishbone stuck in his throat and trying so hard not to choke on it, for he could neither hack it up nor swallow it.

  Then my mind went blank, long enough to see the man on the pedestal had already swept down from his mighty perch, in all his dusky resplendence, naked save where a skimpy fig leaf covered his nether regions, and upon me he dropped his earnest eyes I hadn’t as yet beheld.

  Reverently, he bent down on one knee, took both my hands in his, and it would be the most romantic thing this millennium, if only I could convince myself that there was nothing to be afraid of. But in a breath, the absolute shadows of the night would sequester the last strokes of the sun, the world would spin madly on with no thought for anything but its clockwork rotation, and where would you begin to go when you were pregnant and couldn’t go to the man you loved, who loved you but wanted nothing to do with you? For although at twenty-six you’d graduated with honors, and read Neruda and Burroughs and Kerouac, and talked earnestly about existential crises in a spot of sun on the green grass or over a pricy, scrumptious meal, and fervently believed you could take almost anything at this point, you might still find yourself caught in the befuddling middle, like a kid precariously balanced on the fulcrum of a teeter-totter.

  You might wonder, for example, whether you’d be the type of mother who would send a fortune to her rebellious son from miles and seas away, or the type who would cram a fetus into a pickle bottle and later flush it down the toilet. You might be curious if your child would smother you to death with a pillow, or bring you home a few kilos of rice to share for the night. You might forget that one crazy afternoon you were accosted by a gibbering stranger who said you needed saving, or that crazier night you saw a man vanish into thin air, like a bubble, in a nightclub. You might find irony in the fact that a porn star couldn’t knock a girl up, or in the fact that a rich kid dropped out of college while shrimpy kids roamed the streets endlessly every day, to hunt for plastic bottles and rusty strips of iron, begged inside jeepneys with their flimsy envelopes in hope of sending themselves to school. Walking in a blizzard or under a shower of cotton, you might hear a love song playing from out of apparent nowhere, or just hear the lyrics sung gallingly in your head.

  And, of course, you might ask yourself whose baby you were carrying. You might tell yourself that the man before you, offering himself up to you in all his grave gallantry, held the promise of comfort, of the certainty that, in his arms, you needn’t fear to meet headlong whatever good or harm was to come your way, in a time when comfort and certainty were not easy to be had.

  Tenderly, he’d reach for your fingers and touch them to your wet cheeks. He’d stand up, still holding your hand, but before the two of you could run off together into the sunset and reach the land of forever, you’d remember how it felt to be more alone than you’d ever felt in this wide, indifferent world, and forthwith you’d pull your sweating hand out of his and turn away from him. You’d know you were alone, but on you’d walk, toward wherever the roads might take you, and weather the chartless future with a hint of a smile dancing at the corners of your lips.

  Richard Calayeg Cornelio is a seventeen-year-old, majoring in BS Materials Engineering at the University of the Philippines, Diliman. He loves Peggy Olson, Atticus Finch, his mommy, and has yet to read Kerouac and Burroughs. In his spare time, when he's not dozing off on the train, he reads B- or C-format paperbacks – all of which he's covered with plastic (preferably gauge 8) – or fantasizes about bumping into someone with taut calves and rounded pectorals while jogging around the Academic Oval. Last semester, he failed ES 11 and has to retake it. Please pray for him.

  Joseph Anthony Montecillo

  Night Predators of Niladan

  night butcher

  MEL TIGHTENED HER intestines’ grip on the spire of the Niladan Cathedral. Standing at the heart of Tierragua’s capital, the cathedral boasted the city’s highest point. From up there, the winds blew strong and cold. Mel folded her wings over herself, to shield her from the cold.

  The scent and sound of the city came to her. The wine and beer being poured in the night mixed with the raucous sounds of brawling and drunken rambling. The impatient marching of guardia civil looking for a drink, or a woman, or both. The sweaty scent of sex, seeping from the brothels on the edge of the city. Over it all, the lingering stench of sulfur and soot.

  Dragonfire.

  No matter the time of day, the smell of fire lingered over the city. It was strongest at the cathedral, where the dragons slept. Here, the smoke of dragonfire mixed with incense, to form the stink of the holy.

  A scream echoed through the night. Her hunter’s ears heard what would otherwise have been drowned in the music of the city.

  She took off from the spire, her entrails trailing beneath her, and her wings spread out against the night breeze. She pushed hard, her wings pounding against the sky. The wind rushed into her hair, and the city blurred beneath her.

  The scream came from the outskirts of the city, where the poor built houses from wood instead of stone.

  The Kindlings.

  This didn’t shock Mel. Most of her hunts led her to the Kindlings.

  Another scream rang out, but was cut off just as quickly.

  Mel rushed to where she had heard it, staying high enough to make spotting her difficult. She smelled the carnage before she saw it. The familiar rusty aroma of blood came to her, from where she had heard the screaming.

  Mel found her in an alleyway. The girl had been cut open right across the belly, her guts spilling
out onto the ground. Blood surrounded her, in a slowly spreading pool. At first sight, she might have looked like another manananggal, only without the wings.

  Knife work. Human.

  A faint heartbeat pulsed in the girl’s chest, audible only to Mel’s ears. Blood continued to seep out of her, as the pulse grew softer. When it finally grew silent, Mel held back a shriek of frustration.

  Too late.

  If this had been the work of a manananggal, there would have been no entrails left. Mel hovered closer to the ground and dipped a finger into the blood. She breathed in the scent, and fought back the temptation for a taste.

  No. Focus.

  Mel kept her mind on the nameless girl’s blood. She let the scent wash over her, making it the only thing on her mind, until the hunter in her felt the need to devour, to rip, to kill. The bloodlust in her rose, until she could almost feel herself frothing at the mouth.

  Rip, kill, feast.

  She wiped off the blood, and took off into the night again. She breathed in the night air. Piss and shit, vomit and wine, sweat and cum, fire and smoke, it all came to her, and she tried to shut it all out and focus on the blood.

  Still fresh.

  A trace of the smell came to her from down the road. She followed it, keeping her eyes on the ground. The streets had started to empty, so she saw him alone on the road.

  Headed out of the Kindlings, he walked with a cloak over his shoulders and a hat on his head. She could smell the blood on him. Both the girl’s and his own, pulsing strong beneath his skin. She wanted to dive down and rip him to shreds.