PLURAL Issue 02 - October 2014

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E D I TO R I A L

T E A M

Carlo Flordeliza

carlo.flordeliza@pluralprosejournal.com

l Erika Carreon

erika.carreon@pluralprosejournal.com

l Neobie Gonzalez

neobie.gonzalez@pluralprosejournal.com

l Lystra Aranal

lystra.aranal@pluralprosejournal.com

l Erich Velasco

erich.velasco@pluralprosejournal.com

l July Amarillo

july.amarillo@pluralprosejournal.com

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PLURAL is an online journal that caters to fiction, nonfiction, and criticism geared towards prose.

w w w. p l u r a l p r o s e j o u r n a l . c o m Plural | 3

CO N T E N TS ISSUE

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2

-

OCTOBER

2014

09 Introduction

14

10 Facts About the Horse In the Ceiling

18

24

32

44

Beds

Drone Pilots Do It Remotely

The House That Ran Away

Invasion of the Monday Night Monsters

48

52 Near Death

56

Pocket Fairies

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68

78

Lion The Poet

Word Problems

Caloocan 143

Sigma

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FEATURED ARTIST

TRIZHA KO

TKO is a pseudopathetic obsessive troglodyte who likes to spend her time studying art styles/movements, their visceral affects, and experimenting with different media and interactivity.

Her work can be found at deathbyassociation.tumblr.com.

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I N T RO D U C T I ON

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Why prose?

This persistent inquiry showed up during the first year of the journal, from Plural’s conceptualization and development stage, to the release of the inaugural issue and the subsequent discussion with the editorial board and colleagues regarding the future of what I considered to be a worthy (and necessary) project. At this point, at the onset of the second issue’s release, and as the members of the editorial board continuously consider and explore the thematic nature of our own works, the rigidness and potential of the Philippine tradition, the politics (or rejection of politics) in new writing, and the myriad of possibilities embedded in fiction, in the essay, and in literary criticism, it is imperative to address why, of all things, we crafted a literary magazine geared towards a specific form.

There was no question about the choice of specialty. The prose form, its inherent structure, was part of our critical interest. We were fictionists. We labored on the essay. We consumed critical texts in an effort to produce new interpretations on narratives and ideologies that piqued our curiosity. Unfortunately, we had a certain amount of frustration in what was happening in our surroundings.

There was an absence. There was a gap that we all found too apparent.

Philippine fiction and the essay was somehow slow and, at times, stunted, stuck in the brilliant tradition the likes of Rizal, Santos, Joaquin and Jose established and fully realized, never moving forward, never pursuing something different,

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never complying with what the Russian formalists decades ago informed us: to defamiliarize. They were, at most times, romantic, subscribing to the uninteresting tenets of mimetic and reflective realism, at times pseudo-sociopolitical, seemingly unable to pursue a proper and enlightening discourse on the subjects they were addressing. This is especially prevalent in Philippine fiction in English. There are attempts to pursue other genres, to dive into the strange realms of fantasy, science fiction and horror, and even enter the ambiguous area of speculative fiction. However, they’ve been, at most part, safe and somewhat expected.

On top of that observation, there was a vacancy left by the sudden and disheartening disappearance of the Philippine Free Press, Story Philippines, the Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards and the other publications that featured fiction of varying forms. The few that remain either choose to narrow down their accepted pieces to a singular stifling constraint or refuse to take advantage of the wide space the digital landscape has to offer. These publications choose to print their pieces, only to be hidden behind young-adult bestsellers in bookstores or covered by men’s and fashion magazines in convenience stores, bound by the limitations of paper and printing budgets.

Of course, this is not to say that there are no engaging pieces being produced and published. There are dozens who continue to experiment, to play, to test the limits of the structures of prose, to innovate, in order to render a narrative.

However, only a handful of them are seen, and their options are limited.

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This is, hopefully, where Plural enters. Through our publication, we offer these craftsmen an opportunity to display their work. Through our bi-yearly journal, we present a venue for prose that’s unconstrained by a genre, by a word limit, or by a marketing and printing budget. Through our literary magazine, we offer a space where writers can experiment and test the limit of that form everyone believes they are familiar with.

At the same time, we earnestly hope that Plural can be a gateway for innovation.

Prose was the medium of Barth, Barthelme, Vonnegut and Wallace, and is the choice form of the likes of Saunders, Lin, Russell, Vandermeer, Mielville, Keret, Davis, Egan and Millhauser, of Apostol, Gamalinda, Syjuco, Yapan, Candano, Samar, Montes, Groyon, Victoria and Cruz Lucero. It has potential. It has possibilities. It will always have possibilities. And we want to pursue those possibilities, or at least display it and give it the readership and highlight it deserves. We find utter fascination in the idea that it can be elevated to different levels, that it can be altered to be truly something new, that it can be illogical, unfamiliar, unique and appealing once more.

Call it an advocacy. Call it assistance. Call it a boost. Call it a pedantic pandering on a form. Call it a serious and scholarly fascination and passion. Plural seeks, as we have mentioned before, to push, and even surpass, the boundaries of prose.

Carlo C. Flordeliza

Co-Founder and Editor

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F I C T I ON

h

x

Joel Libo-on, Madeleine Lee, Howie Good, Catherina Dario, James Bella, Noel Villa, Wil-Lian Guzmanos, Dennis Aguinaldo & Wina Puangco

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Fiction

01 10 FACTS ABOUT THE HORSE IN THE CEILING

Joel Libo-on

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1.

The horse in the ceiling is so huge that when you look up all you see is the ceiling but you do not think right away that it is the ceiling but a horse, and only through trial and error do we get to the point where we say that it is a ceiling but find it too late to retrieve the fact that horse was mentioned first.

2.

When people say the roof is on fire, the horse in the ceiling is in no way bothered by it. On the other hand when people try to raise the roof, the horse in the ceiling doesn’t only bring the house down but breaks down the fourth wall by pushing the envelope.

3.

While many think that they are its distant cousins, the elephant in the room and fly on the wall are only one of the various metaphors for it.

4.

Usually during first encounters, we come to think of it as stone in the head.

5.

There are instances when people ride the bus that will be hit by a truck and the people will be late to their jobs. The horse in the ceiling plays a part in this by being an unusually active radio frequency that will make the volume on some radio station appear louder yet grainier than the usual.

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6.

The horse in the ceiling is neither a god nor something involved in religion unlike the golden calf, but we pray to it unknowingly with prayers we don’t know we can pray about whether consciously or subconsciously. We can never know if these prayers were answered.

7.

Starting from the 2:35 mark until the end of John Cage’s 4’33” you could clearly hear the horse in the ceiling making a sound considered the closest brother of silence.

8.

Contrary to popular belief, the writings on the wall were not made by the horse in the ceiling, they are in fact the sole evidence of its non-existence.

9.

The horse in the ceiling runs so fast that the ground it is running on is moving while the horse in the ceiling remains stationary.

10.

In homes without ceilings, the floor is where the horse in the ceiling is.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ď Ľ

Franz Joel Libo-on is the author of Humigit- Kumulang. He lives in Novaliches.

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Fiction

02 BEDS

Madeleine Lee

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The first time I died I was fourteen.

I lived in a neighborhood where the houses were the same and the adults smoked weed. In the winters, we watched Jan Sterling on the television. We knew for sure that color televisions were magical—like spaceships or Soviets, maybe—and our mothers worried our bellies had fused with the carpet.

We moved around, though, in the summer.

Summers were for softball. It was summer when I died.

I was wearing a too-long dress because Tommy Dubroff was there, and I wanted him to notice me. He didn’t, of course. He was in love with my twin brother. I knew because his cheeks went ruddy red whenever the two were in the same room, and I hated it. I couldn’t compete with my brother. I couldn’t run fast, and my mom wouldn’t let me wear pants, and my eyes were too close together.

My brother was bigger than me, and he could hold his breath for a real long time, and he laughed like it was an event in itself. Tommy always laughed with him. Tommy drove me mad with little-girl-longing: him and his stupid blue eyes. They were bluer than the berries he sucked on that day, shirt tucked in, bat swinging from his fingers.

The softball bounced onto the street, and when I ran after it, I tripped over the hem of my dress. The car ran me over: 1963 Chevy Impala. Gone! I heard the brakes first, and then the sweet metal kissing my flesh. I died right there. It was a messy death. They stitched my body back together on Mama’s bed, and the children screamed.

“It hurts, don’t it?” they shouted. I shook my head, but I was good with lies.

n

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The second time was much cleaner. I was in Paris. That year was a cheesy year, and I figured there was no place cheesier to live in than Paris.

Here’s a funny thing about cheesiness: the cheesiest things hide the darkest secrets. The Eiffel Tower was built on the backs of starving men. I wanted a trendy condo with a nice view of the Seine. Instead, I moved into a smelly apartment with a racist Swiss couple down the hall.

I wanted to meet a boy named Pierre who wrote poetry and talked about stars. Instead, I met a tall, fat man named Claude who liked poker.

“You’re awful quiet,” he told me once: heavy French accent. We were in a bar, and I didn’t know what to do. “I like that,” he said before I could reply.

“Women talk too much.”

That night, I drank enough wine to forget my own name, and I didn’t talk, and that’s what made him smile, I thought. Women talk too much. I was so proud.

For three autumns, he called me his babe, and we did everything a couple could do except kiss. When he left, I wasn’t sad, just empty. I wrapped myself in the rancid sheets of a too-big bed in a trashy hotel, and I died. The maids made a sacrament of my corpse.

I was dead for a long time after that.

n

When I died the third time, I was in a hospital bed. I was forty-two— too old to have a baby, they said. But I’d wanted her so badly. I read her my old

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children’s books—the nonsensical ones about talking rabbits and happy fathers.

“Remember that time we went to get coffee?” I asked my swollen belly. A kick.

Of course, she didn’t. It never happened, but I liked to pretend. We’ll do that one day, I thought.

The day she was born was a Tuesday, and I remember because for two hours and thirty-four minutes, I cursed more Tuesdays than I’d ever lived through. I thought I loved her, but in that moment, I’d never hated anything so terribly. I wanted to destroy her. I wanted the pain to kill her before it killed me.

And I died. I died, but when I held her in my hands, and she looked into my eyes and trusted me before I even trusted her, I was born again.

n

I did not mind being hated.

I never had many friends: I was too quiet, too strange, too desperate to smile. I never had many friends, but that was okay because I had her now. I was her sister, not her mother. We slept in the same bed because we were scared of being alone. She chose Friday night I Love Lucy marathons over playdates. She told her class I was her best friend, and they laughed.

It was March 4, 1997 when she asked, “Where’s Daddy?” and I felt my hands clam up. He’s in Vancouver, with an accountant wife and two sons and a Golden Retriever. He works for the local news station. He’s investing in Microsoft. He still has the scar on his left wrist from that night he tried to rape me.

“He loves you,” I said, and I loathed myself for it.

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Sometime after that: she grew tall and skinny. She got three tickets to a Radiohead concert, and when I asked to come, she laughed. She told me she hated me. She hopped on a plane with a striking redhead, and I knew she’d never come back. I slit my wrists and bled until the ambulance came, and I died alone.

But she came back.

We had coffee together.

n

The fifth time I died, I died for real. My house was not big, and I was not old. The blankets were fraying; made in China. The ceiling had 96 tiles, four chipped, one in need of repair. Who knew what the room looked like. The T.V. was blaring; rambling on about a couple of planes in New York. I was there once, I remembered—another cheesy city; too many secrets.

She was with me, my best friend, and her hands felt very cold in mine.

It should have been the other way around. Beneath my body, the bed felt resigned, and I found it funny—how my life had been dictated by beds. I almost wished my first death had been the last one. It was easy to forget that with five deaths, I’d also had five lives.

Perhaps, I mused, it would have been nice to have it all end, on that scarlet street, in my pretty, too-long dress. But I was good with lies.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ď Ľ

Madeleine Lee is a high school junior living in sunny, debt-ridden California. She has been published in local newspapers and literature anthologies, as well as Teen Ink Magazine, The Oddville Review, and The Opening Line. Through her writing, she hopes to provide a voice for the issues faced by her generation. Currently, she works as an editor for Polyphony H.S, an international literary magazine for young adults.

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Fiction

03 DRONE PILOTS DO IT REMOTELY

Howie Good

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The Destruction of the European Jews Vol. 1 The butchers in town were either at fault or the ones faulted – something about meat being sent out of the shtetl and the butchers collecting money. I not only received a sign after praying, but hats or headgear were involved. There was even a guy in full goalie pads. I think about that every day.

Vol. 2 I have 10 ukuleles – 11 when you count the soprano with the checkerboard design I keep in my office. It’s not that I’m an addict. It’s just that I move sometimes like a fat amputee. There doesn’t need to be crime for there to be punishment. I grew up on Westerns. If you still get a paper, it tells you what the “Best Bets” on TV are. Now the cowboys are cops in Kevlar vests. After seeing the headlines, what’s there to say to the trees and grass? Johannes’s father urged the Jews to get out while they could.

Vol. 3 The postal inspector who came to the house wore a Glock on his hip. He admired the wallpaper in our kitchen, dark red flowers with sky blue centers.

“Keep moving, keep moving,” the cops ordered the gawkers clogging the sidewalk. I wouldn’t go to bed that night for fear of disappearing if I slept. And yet months passed without my even getting a cold. The millions still hiding in a pile of feathers asked how I did it. No great trick. You just hold your hand above heart level until the bleeding stops.

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The Lively Arts 1 Solemn music reaches us from an adjoining century, like blast waves spreading out in circles. Can’t breathe. The firmament all worms (this last, according to Mandelstam). Rescuers rush up the stairs without seeming to get any closer.

And we’re the people who trusted in secret attics to keep us safe. Before my very eyes, the Christmas trees burn.

2 Forensic investigators scoop a mound of monster droppings into evidence bags.

Back in the lab, they sculpt the stuff into a sort of ziggurat. Millions watching at home laugh hysterically. The force of laughing is such that it can dislocate jaws, cause asthma attacks, trigger the rare but possibly grievous Pilgaard-Dahl and Boerhaave’s syndromes, and make hernias protrude.

3 Can’t quite get things in focus? Some perish before they ever can. One small hint: if birds start talking Dutch, don’t interrupt. It’s the birth of the impossible, something just for the elderly tourists pointing camera phones. Why perhaps Venus remains yellowish and pockmarked, but, after dark, easy to mistake for a star.

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Unnatural History 1 Do the math – four local cases of children with leukemia since spring. Close the airports and schools! Evacuate the downtowns! The governor is on TV providing important safety tips. Whoever said it was a dog’s life was probably being ironic. Just look at Dewey asleep on the couch in the one patch of sunshine.

2 Stunned survivors come stumbling out of the murk, unable to speak above a whisper. The Swiss team on call rushes to the scene. (I can show you approximately where on Google Maps.) A bank of floodlights that had been switched on during some earlier emergency still hasn’t been switched off. Often the eyes become red at night.

3 The heart-shaped leaves suffer sudden frenzies. That’s when you start thinking, “What is it with the Swiss?” Even the smallest things used to count – a woodchuck standing up on its hind legs in the

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Drone Pilots Do It Remotely 1 I kept getting up to look out the front window, take a leak, play with the cat.

Each time I returned, the interrogation continued: “When you knock on a door, do you knock just once? Do you prefer your newspaper be printed in Braille?”

I shrugged, or howled, as the question dictated. Empty scraps of foolscap fell periodically from the sky. To this day, I’m still surprised that there’s no “e” in lightning.

2 We think by feeling. Yeah, every day. At least that’s my theory. Stars come out above the yellow of government buildings. K almost blew his cover, a tentative spy on a dubious mission. He has left a message for me to find. I can just about guess what it says, something like “If you don’t sleep, you can’t very well dream.”

3 The German physicist credited with inventing the semicolon cupped it with tenderness. “What is two plus two?” he asked and immediately answered, “Fish!” Everyone nodded as if they understood. The next day brought only more rockets fishtailing across the sky.

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Anniversary of the Plague Year 1 Fallen planes with swastikas on their tails dot the countryside. It must be Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. You take one pill for your head and two more for your heart, but can still choke on a sip of water. The dying are all forced to share the same rectangular view. There’s something moving out there, something walking in the woods, a serial killer with a pleasant demeanor and no place to make a left turn. I roll up my sleeve to show you tattoos of black parental mysteries, mother as pitchfork. They begin to breathe and glitter.

2 An introspective man in blue came in the other day looking for the 9th wonder.

I didn’t get his name, only noticed his shaved head, never realizing that wind waves don’t move as fast as speeding cannon balls. Someone will probably write a thesis on it – what, in literary circles, we call intertexuality, snippets of code gleaming and then going away in the darkness. All I see now, though, is a flock of gaunt, exhausted angels below the window, the starvation they endured for the sake of luminosity and because of which they seem to stagger just before their plumage fades.

3 First came disasters of our own making, and then came the carcasses of junk cars silhouetted against lacerated skies. Everyone asked about the meaning of the words “spectacle” and “witness,” even though a video of burning water posted to YouTube on Thursday had been viewed over 50,000 times by Friday night. And more important still were the contagious mice that a decade ago today left in tears for a damp and verdant city.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR



Howie Good’s latest book of poetry collection is The Complete Absence of Twilight (2014) from MadHat Press. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely, who does most of the real work.

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Fiction

04 THE HOUSE THAT RAN AWAY

Catherina Dario

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When it decided to leave, it did so gently. The house -- #33 on Blanca with the whitebrick walls, the weathered, dirty purplish once-burgundy roof, and the row of green shutters crookedly lined up like old piano keys – had tiptoed its way out of the village gates in the middle of the night and vanished forever. It did not even leave a note (I checked the mailbox when the police had left) or tapped my window to say goodbye – or it probably had. Mrs. BlindIn-One-Eye Benito complained of bats ramming against her sala sliding door all night. “It was probably the house!” I told her, as we both stared at the empty lot across the street with the rest of the neighborhood. She gave me a weird look with her good no-glaucoma eye. Nobody – not even after everybody went back to their breakfasts – believed me that the house had run away.

The police arrived before lunchtime, and I watched the two men from my window as they scratched their heads and stared at the enormous crater that the house had left behind.

When I saw them amble gingerly down the hole, I ran down the stairs and through the door. I tripped over a knot of dead branches that a neighbor’s gardener had dumped on the pavement, fell on my bare knees and yelped. The policemen turned around and saw me: a round, red-faced man crumpled in a cotton bathrobe cringing at his bleeding legs. As they rushed over to help me up, I cried: “I know what happened to it!”

“The house, Sir?” one of them asked, after a tentative pause. He had a shiny face and a flat nose. He was short and stubby, with fingers like sausages and legs like bulky husks of corn.

“Yes, the house! It went after the Javier family! They never came back, so it went looking for them! It’s probably on a plane by now – off to Madrid, I think – that is where they went!”

The men looked at each other and escorted me back to my house, where they asked for my housekeeper – “In the palengke. She won’t be back till 2” – or my misis – “I’m not married.”

– or anybody else that lived with me in my big, suburban home – to which I answered: “My mother, but she doesn’t like visitors.” After they had cleared their throats and whispered to one another, they scribbled a number on a piece of paper and told me to call them if I needed any help. “I do not need any help,” I said coolly, “But the house is probably on a plane by now. You might want to call the airport.”

“Sir,” said one of them after the ritual glance-exchange. He was taller than his partner, and he looked at me through small, narrow eyes that reminded me of piggybank slits. “A house cannot, er, ride a plane. It is impossible.”

“How?”

“We can stay until your housekeeper arrives.”

“No – tell me! How is it impossible?” I had taken a seat on the wicker sofa, and patted the cream-colored cushion next to me. “Sit down.”

“We’re sorry, but we have a lot to do today,” said Cornhusks.

“Ten or fifteen minutes. I just want to know why it’s impossible.”

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They looked at me then looked beyond me. The sprinklers in the garden whirred above the grass. There was the steady hum of crickets. A mosquito buzzed in my ear.

“Only people can ride planes,” muttered Piggybank Slits indignantly.

“That is where you’re wrong!” I crowed, standing up from my seat. I winced at my leg wounds, which glistened in the sunlight in deep-red rawness. Cornhusks, remembering that I was injured, snapped out from his momentary stupor and excused himself to phone a paramedic.

“No!” I said, grabbing his arm. “Let me tell you about #33 Blanca! It’s an enchanted house! It can walk, and run – and fly! It took me all the way to America once! In fifteen minutes!”

“Sir, we need to treat your wounds,” said Cornhusks, looking very upset.

“Please,” I begged, “Listen to my story.”

n

I moved to the village when I was five-years-old. I, along with my mother and father, had moved from the rusty, steel slough of Manila to the manicured lawns of Makati. Our house, which was three stories too large for our family of three, was a gift from my late grandfather – a big-time attorney who whisked himself off to New York after winning a case involving Senator So-and-So. After deciding which spaces would be the guest room, the (third) sala, and my father’s study room, my parents gave the entire second floor to me. “There are too many rooms,” yawned my mother, and floated off to the terrace for a smoke, “You can fill up the other rooms when you’re older. A gym and an arcade, maybe, when you’re a teenager. You’d like that.” She mulled over her cigarettes while I watched my father help the moving men bring in our things.

“Lift this, anak!” said my father, pointing to a giant box filled with Christmas décors. Before I could scramble up the moving van, he picked me up and put me on his shoulders. He said: “Look, Antonio! You’re flying!”

I flew, and as I spread my arms and grew wings I soared to unbelievable heights. Below me was the village. Back then, there were only a few houses mushroomed in between the enormous acacia trees that weaved through the sidewalks. In one moment, I was flying above the newborn streets fragrant with April’s mango flowers. In another moment, I was beyond it: gold-green tobacco fields sprawled below purple hills, then a seascape frothing by jagged rows of rocks. At night, I would squint under the lamplight and listen to my father tell stories. He, too, had flown great distances when he was my age.

That was the summer of 1967, when the noontime sun pressed against my skin and I would sit on the bathroom floor to scrape at the blackening crust of my shoulders, eager to find the raw, pink meat underneath. Sundays after mass, my father would take me to the clubhouse to play golf and eat french-fries and sandwiches. It was a ten-minute drive from our home, and I would sit in the passenger seat and stare at the almost-invisible ripples floating over the road.

“What are those waves, Papa?” I asked him once.

He pushed his glasses up his nose, only for it to slide down again.

“Don’t you watch those TV shows?” he asked, clasping his fingers together and making pew-pew sounds. “The ones with the cowboys. They ride their horses until they reach the middle of nowhere. They see those waves from a distance – crazy heat – and they’re about to pass out.

Then they see an oasis.”

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“What’s an oasis?”

“Some island in the middle of a desert.

There are trees and water and lots of fruit. One day, you and I will go exploring. We’ll go to the Sahara – I promise – find an oasis, and go swimming.”

Years later, long after the doctor showed us father’s CT scans, I would think about the oasis my father promised to bring me to. I often dreamed about jumping into the cool, pristine waters; swimming to the bottom of the pool, and finding my father there.

n

I can barely remember the years between his diagnosis and death, but what I’ve committed to memory was the house: #33 on Blanca, right across ours. One day, it was just there – standing atop a redbrick path that lay tidily between the asphalt and the flowery lawn – along with a big, wooden sign that read SOLD. I had never noticed its construction; never heard the metallic grind of steel-on-steel pierce through the French windows of our home. When I look back on it today, I realize that the house had arrived just as quietly as it had left.

The day the Javier family moved in was September 22, 1974, my mother’s birthday. The three of us were seated around the dining table, meditating over baked lasagna and Brazo de Mercedes. The silence was nearly unperturbed, if not for the drone of my father’s oxygen machine. My father, with his yellowing, paper-thin skin, sluggishly reached across the table to hold my mother’s hand. She pursed her lips, looked at the slab of lasagna that sat mawkishly on her plate. “There’s a new neighbor, I think,” she said.

Her front teeth were stained with lipstick. “From Valencia.”

“Valencia as in Spain?” said my father, withdrawing his hand.

“They’re in the sugarcane business.

Marita Benito – the lady next door – told me. I saw her in the grocery the other day. I think she’s going blind.”

My mother looked up from her plate. She looked at my father, who gave her a leathery smile.

She excused herself from lunch; said she caught a stomach bug.

That afternoon, I wheeled my father to the porch and we watched the movers bring in furniture. There was a white, ornate tocador, a grand piano (“We used to have one,” said my father. “Your mom got rid of it,”) a collection of bonsais, and a porcelain tiger. The first (and last time) I would ride a Bengal tiger would be, let me tell you, in the Javier’s Christmas party.

n

The Javier boy – he was the first that I met – was named Camilo Petronilo Luis. He moved to my school that year, and everybody made fun of him because he was tall and gangly, and ambled gawkily through the hallway like a wading flamingo. He had a thin-lipped smile that disappeared under his big, mulish teeth. Nobody could believe he was related to his sister, Josefina, who was two years older and studied in a magical all-girls academy far, far away. She was known for three things: her beautiful face, her generous breasts, and her taut leg muscles that could kick delirious, slobbery men all the way back to Spain.

“Camilo!” she would stand outside the school gate, careful not to scratch her painted nails against the rusty wires. “Can you be any slower? My shows are on!” She would pinch his flushed cheeks and yank him by the arm; his flimsy body disappearing inside their sleek, silver Beemer that purred in the driveway.

I carpooled with him to school one morning, on a Monday my father had a bout of pneumonia and had to be rushed to Makati Medical Center. My mother, burdened by the unhappy task of driving her pale, flaccid husband, trudged to the Javier household and rapped on their front door. The next thing I knew, I was inside the Beemer with Camilo.

“Are you in Ms. Camacho’s class?” he turned to me after a minute of staring out the

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window. He had a pile of books on his lap.

I nodded. “Three rows behind you, I think.”

He looked embarrassed. It was already August.

“It’s fine,” I said. Then, noticing his reddening ears, I asked him what he was reading.

“The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis,” Camilo replied. He picked up the first book on the pile, and offered it to me. On the cover was an illustration of a lion and an ivory-colored woman. I leafed through the pages.

“I don’t read much,” I confessed.

“I’ve been reading since I was three and a half years old!” he said proudly.

“Cool.”

“The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is about four siblings who go on an adventure.

They enter a giant wardrobe, and get transported into another world.”

We drove by the clubhouse. From the trees came a flurry of leaves.

“Can I borrow it when you’re done?”

And then we were friends.

n

There was nothing more beautiful than #33 Blanca in Christmastime. Tita Josefa (“Hijo, call me tia!”) and Tito Carlos had spared no expense, and the house was lavishly decorated. One time, I remember sitting in their sala with Camilo, pouring over our copies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while his mother and father barked orders at the servants. She sat on an armchair, furiously fanning her plum-purple face, and wailing whenever a maid wobbled under the weight of a poinsettia vase. His father, who always wore a gray velour suit with his jet-black hair slicked back, paced the marble floors back and forth. Unlike Tita Josefa, who screeched Hesukristo! whenever Aling Mela missed a spot, he would merely smoothen his moustache and mutter curses under his breath. Sometimes, when he retreated to his room, his wife would turn to us and ask what we thought of the decorations.

“Is the wreath out of place?”

“It is fine, Mama,” Camilo assured her, his nose buried in his book.

“What do you think, Antonio? Should we put lights in the gazebo?”

“I think that would look great, tia.”

“But we already have lights on the banana trees.”

“More is better.”

On the night of the Javier’s Christmas party, which was celebrated with sangria and platefuls of paella, the house stood aglow with bright lights and vibrant tinsel. The Holy Mass was celebrated by a tall, hook-nosed priest who eyed me suspiciously after the Eucharist had been offered. “You are not a Javier,” he said, his eyes blue and glassy underneath his spectacles.

Camilo explained that I was a guest of theirs. “His family isn’t celebrating this year, Father Pietro. His father is very sick.”

Father Pietro wiped his brow. “What is his illness? “

I told him. The music blared over the phonograph. Father Pietro tapped at his ear.

36 | Issue Two

I raised my voice and repeated: “Lung cancer.”

(Usually, I choose to omit this part of the story – the part about my mother calling me to the terrace as she put out her cigarettes. “Your papa will be having surgery on Christmas Eve. I will drop you off in Camilo’s house, and pick you up after noche buena.” I asked her where she was going to go, but she had put another cigarette in her mouth and waved me off.)

After Father Pietro had patted me on the back and expressed his sorrows (“I will pray for him, hijo. God will grant him good health.”), Tita Josefa announced shortly that dinner would be served in the garden. A buffet had been prepared at the gazebo: crispy lechon, roasted oysters marinated in lemon juice; chorizo and prawns mixed with saffron-seasoned rice. “Mama told me that there will also be almond cake and Horchata de Chufa,” Camilo whispered, as he shoveled mounds of oysters onto a plate. “Aren’t you hungry, Antonio?”

I blinked. He called out to me again, but I wasn’t listening. Absentmindedly, I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I pushed myself through the crowd of guests; the drone of loud voices that hung over my head. I don’t remember how I made my way to the bathroom, but when I found myself back in the sala I saw a Bengal tiger sitting beside the piano.

It was an enormous, 10-foot beast, and it stared at me through narrow, dark pupils frozen in amber. I could have easily dismissed it as a stuffed animal – a prized souvenir of Tito Carlos from his many travels abroad – but its long, orange tail swung like a pendulum, almost toppling the piano stool over. Its whiskers twitched. Its eyes remained fixed on mine. I could only slowly back away.

Once I was out of its sight, I dashed for the garden. I was ready to pepper Camilo with questions, grab him by his tucked table napkin and demand: “How in the world do you have a tiger in your sala?” But once I ran past the patio and skittered down the stone-paved steps that led to the long vines of blinking Christmas lights; the round tables draped with starched, white linen; the crowd of guests dabbing at their sweaty necks – I realized that I was no longer in the Javiers’ garden. I was knee-deep in green, murky water that ran through my legs in a strong, steady current. Behind me and beyond me stretched a river, carrying with it mottled branches and knots of dead leaves. I could feel the cold, pebbled mud underneath my feet. I curled my toes, and felt the heavy clay slide against my ankles.

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, wondering what sort of delirium I had slipped into. But as my eyes kept shut, I could hear the steady gush of water and the drone of crickets.

There was a bird, somewhere. A mosquito buzzed in my ear.

When I opened my eyes again, I was still in the river. Sunlight filtered through the trees overhead. I slowly made my way to the riverbank, dragging my feet against the current. I sat down on the thick undergrowth, feeling the damp earth against my bottom. If this was a dream, I thought, then it was definitely the most realistic one yet.

The leaves crunched behind me; a thin branch snapped under a slow, heavy thing that furtively shifted its weight closer to me. I looked around, and suddenly became aware of the salt that coated my upper lip. The crickets pursued their drone. The Bengal tiger emerged from the thick, tangle of trees.

Every time I remember this moment, I wasn’t sure if it was boldness or fear that kept me from running away. All I knew is that there was nowhere to escape to. The tiger knew the forest better than I did. But just as it was a foot away from me, it halted in approach. The tiger sat down, and we both looked at each other for quite some time.

Plural | 37

n

“Did you ride the tiger, then?” asked Cornhusks, interrupting me from my story. It was now past noon, and the sun burned over the garden. I told the two policemen to remain seated, and I went to the kitchen to prepare lunch. I filled a clean pot with water, placed it over the electric stove, and switched the boiler on. I rummaged the pantry for spaghetti noodles, and found the jar tucked behind a row of canned mushrooms. As I worked around the kitchen, I heard voices back in the sala. One of them was my mother’s.

She was dressed in her lavender-blue duster and a pair of Hotel Manila bedroom slippers. As I approached her and the two policemen, she turned to me and flashed her pearlywhite dentures. “Anton, I was just telling these two gentlemen to leave. Sus maryosep! I can’t believe you’ve been keeping them here for an hour.”

“They were listening to my story,” I replied. “I’m making spaghetti for everyone.”

“Don’t be a little boy, telling everybody those stories again,” my mother said tersely.

“You may go now,” she turned to Cornhusks and Piggybank Slits, “I’m sure you have a lot to do today. My son gets a bit too excited when there are people in the house – Anton, what’s all that blood on your legs, clean that up immediately!”

I skulked up the staircase, listening to the profuse apologies of the policemen and the impatient warble of my mother as she let them out the door. Once they had left, she made her way up the stairs and found me sitting on the landing.

“Anton, you just let those men in here like they were your barkada!” she spat, crossing her arms so that I could see her varicose veins bulging out of her yellowing skin. “You know I don’t like people in our home!

I wasn’t listening to her. I was someplace else; twelve years old again, on the back of the Bengal tiger. My cheek was pressed against its silken fur, which was glossy and almost golden

38 | Issue Two

underneath the sporadic spill of sunlight. When I was not looking up at the enormous trees and the tiny, winged animals that buzzed overhead, I would reach for the undergrowth and trace the leafy path with my fingers. Sometimes, I would hear the crow of a bird or the gibber of monkeys far away. I never saw any of these, and I didn’t see other tigers either. The jungle was ours.

I rode the tiger until my legs had grown numb and the muggy, tropical heat had cooled down after sunset. Afterwards, the tiger stopped walking and let me off. It looked pointedly at a clearing ahead of us, where there was light flickering in the darkness. As I went closer, I heard music playing – a violin, a piano – and a woman singing. It was Josefina Javier. I had returned to the house.

It stood in the jungle clearing along with a flurry of moths hypnotically circling the balcony light. An animal with a black face and a long tail perched the bed of moss that covered the roof. The porch was covered with leaves that crunched as I walked over them. I opened the door and stepped through it, wincing at the bright glow of Christmas lights and the bright tinsel. Slowly, I shut the door behind me; walked tentatively on the marble floors, horrified at the path of muddy footprints that followed me. Before I could clean myself up in the bathroom, I heard the grind of the sliding door against its frame. “Antonio!” shouted Camilo, running towards me. “Where have you been?

You’ve been gone for almost an hour!” His gaze fell to my slacks, which were damp and soiled from river water. “Did you fall into a canal?”

I panicked, rushed to the front door and hurled it open. Before me were only the asphalt road, and my house, no more than a silhouette that loomed above the faint glow of the street lamp.

“Antonio,” Camilo walked up to me. “Are you okay?”

I swallowed. “Yes, I am. I – uh – walked back to my house to get something. I fell on a puddle on the way there.

“I guess that explains the twig in your

hair,” Camilo said, and I immediately put my hand on my head. Sure enough, there was a small, thin twig wedged between the tufts of my hair.

“It was messy,” was all I could say.

I shut the door again, and went to the bathroom to clean myself up. As I washed my face, I debated whether the Bengal tiger and the thick, tropical jungle were only a figment of my imagination. It couldn’t have been, I thought, remembering the muddy footprints that poor Aling Mela had to mop up before Camilo’s parents could banish me from the house forever. It was a good thing she did, because the house – #33 on Blanca with the white-brick walls and burgundy roof – still had other marvelous places to bring me to.

n

My father passed away two years later, and in between the predawn ambulance rides when I would watch my father, gasping like a milky-eyed fish on the wooden plank of a fishing boat, be carried off on a dark blue stretcher – and the long, monotonous eulogies of a relative or a fraternity brother (“He was a remarkable man, a loving father, a devoted husband…”) I had made a trip to the icy plains of the Arctic, where I once sat down with silver-haired women and helped myself to Beluga whale. They did not ask where I came from; only gave me large, thick clothes to wear and polar bear furs to drape over my shoulders. The whale had been cubed and stewed over a fire, and I ate heartily as the women spoke in low whispers. They smiled at me sometimes, their narrow eyes disappearing underneath the wrinkles of their brown faces.

When we had finished our meal, I walked out of the igloo and into the kitchen of the Javiers. Josefina sat by the ceramic countertop, reading a copy of Seventeen. “Where did you get that parka?” she demanded. “It’s 33 degrees outside!” I did not know what to say, I only laughed and dashed up the staircase to Camilo’s room. He lay sprawled in his bed reading The Hobbit. He did not look at me when I opened the door, proudly wearing my fur-lined parka.

“Are you playing pretend again, Antonio?” He yawned. “Last week, you went to China.”

“And scaled the Great Wall!” I crowed happily. “This house is magical, Camilo!”

Camilo was the only person I shared the magical secret to. I told him on the way home from school once; we were seated on the backseat of his Beemer. It was the day after I had been invited to a New Year’s feast at the palace of the Emperor, I told him about the steaming pots of bean curd simmered in cuckoo brains, the platefuls of sea cucumber stuffed with waterfowl; peacock drumsticks with stir-fried vegetables. “I sat next to the Emperor himself !” I told him. “He had eyes as small as piggybank slits!”

He did not say anything at first, not until the car stopped outside my house and we found my mother standing outside. She was yelling at the gardener, pointing at the browning vines of bougainvillea that hung limply on the porch’s trellis. Camilo and I got out of the car, feigning deafness to her sharp trill that screeched through the neighborhood like a banshee cry. He helped me lift my bag from the trunk. It was particularly heavy that day.

“Sorry, I spaced out for a bit,” he apologized. “I think it’s great.”

“What is?” My mother was shouting something about pesticide.

Plural | 39

“Your trip to China.”

“So you believe me?”

He nodded.

“Your house is magic,” I told him.

He didn’t say anything, only waved at my mother who had glanced at us momentarily.

That was a month before my father died, and two months before I sat by our staircase landing listening to Tita Josefa and my mother speak in our sala.

“I don’t think Antonio should come to the house anymore,” Tita Josefa said. “Not until he gets some treatment.”

Treatment? I wondered, and then I realized that the Javiers probably thought I had gone mad. I scampered up the stairs and rushed to my bedroom, which viewed #33 Blanca from a large French window. I could imagine the Javier family sitting in their den, with Josefina painting her nails and stretching her long, muscular legs, Camilo reading a leather-bound book from Spain, and their parents stirring their coffee and reading the Sunday paper. One of the children would mention China or the Arctic – about the platefuls of deer lips served with boiled mushrooms or the fat parka I rolled around in after I had supped with the Arctic women – and Tita Josefa would shut her book and Tito Carlos would rub his chin (their feet would brush against the Bengal tiger sleeping under the teakwood coffee table) until they decided it was best to knock on the door and pay a visit to thin-as-a-paperclip Marisa Concepcion.

(The only regret I have today is passing by Camilo in the hallway at school, and deciding never to speak to him again.)

n

I took my mother’s advice – her meditation over Marlboro the day we moved in to the village – and built myself a gym and an arcade in the second floor of our home.

My father, who was no more than a heap of silver sand in a porcelain urn, had left a generous amount of money that was written to his son, Antonio Feliciano Concepcion, in sharp, black cursive. I withdrew the money and spent the rest of my high school years constructing a fully-equipped gym (with its very own sauna, believe you me) and a video arcade with coin-operated air hockey tables and pinball machines. The interior designer – I forget her name – had neon lights and three vending machines installed. The guys at my new school (my mother transferred me to a school in another city) loved dumping themselves on the beanbags and shaking their cold bottles of Coke until they frothed all over the carpeted floor. Those sleepovers, consecrated by beer bottles and electric guitars, were the more peaceful nights of my teenage years. Without the murmurs of my friends that lulled me to sleep by the spill of orange five a.m. light, I was anything but rested. Most nights, I would stare at the ceiling fan that quietly hummed above my bed. There were sounds I remembered too well – the hiss of my father’s oxygen machine; the metallic thud of the cremator as the flames crackled and consumed – and whenever I thought about these I would float like a ghost until I reached the end of the hall, parted the drapes and gazed at the house. Once, I saw a light and the silhouettes of animals walking through the halls.

There were deer and moose, I think. Another time, I saw the shadow of a giant tortoise.

40 | Issue Two

It was bigger than their grand piano, and I could imagine exploring a land where trees towered over castles and people could wade in cornfields.

I would fall asleep by the window by the time the sky bruised into a predawn purple.

In the summer of 1984, the Javier family moved away. Mrs. Blind-in-One-Eye Benito had come rapping on the door, squealing about an ailing uncle in Madrid (or cousin – see, I forget sometimes) who had urged them to come home and see to the family business. As Javier tradition demanded, the family held a despedida in their garden. My mother, who had promptly called the plumber to fix some pipe or another, insisted that I stayed home and made sure that Manong Fred didn’t steal anything. She arrived back that evening smelling of barbecue sauce and cigarette smoke. “It’s a pity that you couldn’t come,” she said, rummaging through her purse. She took out a tin of Altoids, popped one in her mouth and smiled sympathetically.

“Your friend – what’s his name? – he asked about you.”

“Camilo. What did he say?”

She zipped her purse shut. “You know me – it slipped my mind.”

I probably should have gone to visit the Javiers before they had packed up their things and booked a flight back to Spain, but I didn’t.

Perhaps it was the books I had to pore over and the exams I had to take, or the prospective job at a travel agency that I had seen tacked on a classroom’s bulletin board that kept me away from the redbrick path of #33 on Blanca. When the back of the moving van had been shut and padlocked, I was sitting in an office with a too-tight necktie and sweaty palms. Before me was a wall covered with postcards and photographs of crystal-clear beach waters, and mountains with snow on their tips. “The Sahara Desert,” said a man who ambled out of a gray cubicle and shook my hand.

He gestured to a picture of smooth, rolling plains of sand that extended to a periwinkle sky. I cannot recall what he said after. I think it had something to do with water.

n

When the Javiers left, they took with them the life with the house. The burgundy shingles blackened and bended under the weight of typhoons, the green shutters had frowned into the toothy scowl of a yellowing, almost-dead man, and the redbrick path had become caked with mud and moss and all things rotting. There was the occasional car and the perky laugh of a broker – “Watch out for the cat poop over there!” – who strode ahead of a timid family that trailed after him like obedient ducklings. Every visit ended with a mother’s shaking head or a crying child.

The house was never made a home, and it shrunk behind tall, dense stalks of overgrown grass.

As for me, the tropical forest of the Bengal tiger and the oyster soup of the Emperor seemed no more than a very vague dream. The shadows of the animals and the great tortoise disappeared into the darkness, and I no longer stood by the window and wished otherwise. I spent nights hunched behind my cubicle, typing out tour packages and making phone calls to embassies. Taped to the side of my desk was a postcard from the Sahara Desert, which a client had sent me. On the postscript said: Thank you for making all of this possible! I had read nothing else.

I did not think about the house for years – not unless another broker’s car was parked in front of the mud-splattered driveway, and I could only let out a laugh – until my mother had mentioned it one afternoon. I was driving her from Sunday mass, and when we passed by the clubhouse and took a turn on our street she let out a yawn and said: “I was wrong about you, Antonio.”

“What?” I peered through the windshield.

It had begun to rain.

“I was thinking about it during mass.

When you were a child, and had such a weird imagination.”

We approached a hump. I slowed down the car and felt the wheels glide over the yellowblack bulge of cement.

“When your Tita Josefa came to the

Plural | 41

house and told me all those fantastic stories – you went to the Arctic one time, Josefina even told her – I honestly thought you had to go to the doctor! Sus. Your father was already so much to deal with –

I stopped listening. The rain drummed on the car like fingernails tapping restlessly against a tabletop. When we parked the car, I looked at her as she commenced her ritual purse rummage. The wrinkles on her face reminded me of ripples in a river. “What are you looking at?” she asked me. I said nothing.

n

When the house ran away, it tiptoed outside the village so as not to wake anyone.

It did not bring anything with it, save for the gazebo in the backyard that it proudly wore as a hat. I’d like to think it waved goodbye, but the only thing on its mind was the plane that it had to catch, and the family it had to return to. As I looked at the empty lot and the knot of cars that slowly surrounded it, I could only wish for its safe trip.

That night, I drove to the church underneath which my father was buried. The crypt, which was a dark spruce-colored space glazed with black marble, was a place I had not visited since my father’s interment. I sat down on a bench that faced a tall, narrow wall of glass vaults. Behind them were rows of urns, almost invisible behind transparent, copper-colored panes. My father’s stood directly in front of me. I thought of what to tell him: #33 on Blanca and all the wonderful places I had traveled to, the Javier family – Camilo’s mulish smile, Josefina’s teasing smirk, Tita Josefa’s operatic trill; Tito Carlos’ caterpillar moustache – and how their abrupt departure had left the house in shambles, the gym and the arcade that I had built in my teens, my job at the travel agency, and all the postcards on the wall. I did not know where to begin.

42 | Issue Two

ABOUT THE AUTHOR



Catherina Dario has been published in the April 2012 issue of Reader’s Digest Asia and back issues of HEIGHTS, the official literary and artistic publication of the Ateneo. She has been awarded fellowships to the 19th Ateneo HEIGHTS Writers Workshop, and to the Virgin Labfest 10 Fellowship Program.

Plural | 43

Fiction

05 INVASION OF THE MONDAY NIGHT MONSTERS

James Bella

44 | Issue Two

On Mondays, when the sun starts to go down, a monster appears. Taller than three houses, I think. My dog and I would watch it kick buildings over like soda cans. It was the only fun thing to do right after school, watching it swat down helicopters and breathe fire on fighter jets. Right before it gets boring though, the robot appears outta nowhere to turn the monster into green goo. Five big planes, each having their own color, would swoop in and form a giant robot called the Wonderbot. Then the monster and the robot would act like my parents on a particularly hot Tuesday afternoon. The two combatants don’t kiss like my mom and my dad after a fight, though. Or at least, my dad doesn’t have a sword sticking out of his chest after my mom wins.

After the robot leaves, Kipper and I would run home as fast as we could to catch the news. I know, all the news ever has are stories about someone saving a puppy or the weather, and that’s lame, but they always featured the monster fight. It was through the news that I learned all the monster names, and what the Wonderbot was called, and even the people who drove the Wonderbot. Those five people in tights were called the Wonder Fighters, and they were the coolest ever. Especially Wonder Red, the tallest one, who always formed the head and the chest of the Wonderbot.

The first time I ever saw those two giants fight, I was holding Kipper to my chest. Not out of fear, but because I didn’t want him to suddenly run away. He might get covered in all the monster goop, and it’s already difficult to give him a bath outside our house. Kipper’s my only friend, too. For some reason, I have lesser and lesser playmates at school after Mondays.

I had this one friend, Tim, who lived in an apartment in the inner city. After the Shoggoth King of Tahiti struck and whipped his tentacle-thingies on a bunch of buildings, I didn’t see him anymore. I did see his mama though, gushing with tears. I miss Tim. He had the whole Wonderbot set and he’d let me play with it whenever I’d come over. I asked my dad to buy one for me, but the thing with my dad is, I barely ever see him at home. At least not on Mondays.

My mom always told me he was out for work or something. What I did have though, was the complete Wonder Red collection. I got it thanks to this small ritual me and dad had. I’d finish all my homework before dinner, then my dad would call mom when he was at the toy store (as long as the store wasn’t destroyed by radioactive flames, that is). If I’d finished my homework by then, I’d get a nice prize. And it’s usually a Wonder Red weapon, or a Wonder Red action

Plural | 45

figure, or a Wonder Red plane. Dad never really liked the other Wonders, especially Wonder Blue. Says he’s gonna make the team fall apart. I think he was the only adult I knew that cared so much about the Wonder Fighters.

I think it was around the fifth fight, the one that was super close to our house, that Kipper ran away. The Giant Chupacabra was inching towards our neighborhood, and the Wonderbot had landed so close to our street. I was so busy cheering for the robot while it stuck a Napalm Bomb in the monster’s mouth that I didn’t realize Kipper had run towards the fight. I was about to go after him, but my mother came to me like a cannon ball. She took me by the collar and dragged me home. She gave me an earful about how I should’ve ran home as soon as the monster was near our area. She especially made me remember, “I didn’t have a bomb shelter built under our home for nothing!” My mom started to cry then, and told me to skip the news and get some sleep in the bomb shelter early, but who on earth could sleep with all the screaming and the explosions outside? The next morning, before I went to school, I asked mom if Kipper had come back. My mom took one of those big, deep breaths that only adults do, then smiled wide before she told me Kipper had ran away and joined the dog circus. I was really sad, but I did hope that the dog circus would come to town soon so I could see him again.

I stopped watching the news after the tenth fight, mainly because it was the last time a monster ever attacked the town. It was also the night dad didn’t come home. I remember: it was the only time I ever saw something actually hit the Wonderbot so hard it put a hole in it.

As the robot stuck a huge sword in the King of Evil’s gut, the King of Evil shot a fireball out of its mouth and onto the Wonderbot’s chest. As the King exploded into a pile of goo, the robot fell back and crashed onto the city mall. After I ran home, my mom yelled at me and told me not to watch the news. She looked like she was gonna cry, too, kinda like Tim’s mom. What is it with moms and crying?

My dad didn’t come home for a week, and today, my mom let me watch the news again.

But I think it’s more like, she’s too busy staring into her cup of coffee to tell me not to watch the news. They showed the Wonderbot, even though the monsters were gone. The president had it repaired, and he even shook hands with the Wonder Fighters. It’s funny; I thought Wonder Red was the tallest member. He looked shorter than Wonder Blue tonight.

46 | Issue Two

ABOUT THE AUTHOR



James Norielle G. Bella is an undergraduate at the University of the Philippines Los Baños, working towards a bachelor’s degree in Communication Arts, with an emphasis in writing. His work has never been published, but he continues to write extensively on his Wordpress blog, A Sense of Vitreous Humor. He also serves as a member of Pantas, the premiere writing organization of the University of the Philippines Los Baños. He currently resides in Cabuyao, Laguna.

Plural | 47

Fiction

06 LION THE POET

Noel Villa

48 | Issue Two

So we heard he comes all high hell} drifting the bend on Steed} emanating funk-ware drum beats from tin can stereo} steeped to ears with reverb of bass} sonic vibes shocking dust off panes and doors of darkly backtown Junglescape}} Lion be his tag} he didn’t go by nother but ‘twas the say-say round turf some jiffies ago that Lion was poet supreme} and I no way mean any newforged verbomancer hot off the info-barracks machinery} clutching red hot papers and a pile of degrees} neither some brightside hipster savvies who reckon they got Beat owing to mama’s hand-me-down voxophones and psycho-rec classics (Bless all them tough-hearted men-o-sound)}} Say-say spoke the real: Lion was realest deal} he be ivory absolute} and nary a tarnish on his frock was ever had}}

If you a poet (and how in heaven’s pantheon you get to be one I ain’t got the merest) but if you a poet} you sit sky high on Junglescape vine}} They’s like a race from bygone mythos when divas sauntered the stratos way over the uppest ups of the world-city’s cowlicks}} Thing about poets was that they always need be moving} always need be reciting} else they’d dry up faster than a puddle on Thurstday}} Local fiction say they walk the earth} stopping in nations to grant sacred art unto those who got birthed with sleight of craft} deft of pitch}} They don’t mingle with none of us; we’ze citizens eke out a life} singing to each another till one days we pray a poet grace this dingy old backtown} provide sweet succor and take one of our number up into the clouds}} Course} we’d never caught visage of any one of the fellas}} Wethinks they don’t fancy a bushwhacking this nook of the globe} twixt the veils of overgrown ‘Scape}} Heck I only relating this on account of say-say spreading like jungle wildfire}} You’d imagine everyone’s fears be put to rest the instant a poet strode into town} but even in Junglescape} a poet’s presence be fable-grade}} I ain’t visaged Lion heretofore but if all you got’s the say-say then you got nothing else but}}

Local fiction also say a bona fide poet’s lingua be aurum-cast}} Molten verb their voxbox spews and if y’ever heard their spoken word} you’d trailblaze like a runner all banged up on nitro dreams}} Take care to engage with one of them too long in wordplay} for poetry is plague and it’ll ride your system downward} diffusing cloudlike} from neurons to nerve} and by the end} you’d be shit mound-like} steaming} on mulch and grit} ODed on lit}}

I got the say-say from a know-body of a know-body} six degrees separated and all}} Lion rode up to Junglecenter midst gawks and glints and skidded right to point on mayorman estate}} Drab in grunge slacks and slashed peacoat black was Lion} they says}} All this happenstance befell this dawn when we still lay home-dozed on loam}} Lion surely found what he be looking for} lucky old mayorman} having art’s favor all to his loneself }} Likely, they’ze

Plural | 49

long left this town by now} frail mayorman and Lion basking in Highlight of poetlandia} but say-say say otherwise} cos thus reclined Steed} Lion’s faithful} on varying porches of knowbodies cross town like a lone robo-hopper hopping grove-wide to far undergrowths under lees of snaketrees}} Seemed Lion’d been scouring the land for divaknows-what and ‘haps mayorman wuzn’t the one}} Thanks the pantheon Steed was there to carry him all the way}} She be a work of heart} arisen outta wedlock ‘tween mathology and hyperscience} not a sight for unworthies}} Lion left the key in ignition as if to say “I trust you not to take advantage of my trust in you}}”

A sun’s throw sooner and happenings were sparse like sod on a drought}} Had Lion been to Junglescape at all}} ‘Haps say-say was wrong}} I just did whatever it was I did and sung till the stars fell}} Then outta the thick moss-strewn fen} like an answer to my call} came a rumbling like all high hell}} I craned my sight into no-light and spied a knight jacked up on white} his bike all a blaze in the night}} He walked to my estate} rapped on the door} and I let him into my life}}

“We’ze been prepping for your arrival, sir eminence}” I gabbed}} “All this forever since Junglescape was but a growth of wee saplings}} Jazz us up on poetry} hold our tongues to open flame} forge our spades from melded word} bequeath us boons like gilded heirlooms}} So we may walk with you for lifelong}}”

“But all things which shineth as gold, be no gold as I have heard it told}” Lion spake} and I felt no magick on his breath nor tone fill me top-down}} Something was not in the right, things not eventing in regard to say-say}} He spake twice:

“Were you expecting all these earth-old myths to come true? There are no divas; I speak and bleed like you. What makes the poem is surely not the poet, but all the outside voices attached to it. The last place you look, you’ll always find art. Your say-say was ivory absolute, a real work of heart.” From where I stood, Lion looked less of fiction than what fiction had written.

His lingua wasn’t aurum-cast. His spoken word wasn’t molten verb. His poetry wasn’t plague.

Even Steed parked out there looked to be no robo-hopper. But—maybe I would have preferred him this way.

Lion disrobed and turned his garments over to me. I took them, fearing what was about to come next. He spoke again:

“You needn’t have looked anywhere else. You are now Lion, king of Junglescape, seeker of poetry,” he dubbed. “My work here is done. Now it’s your turn.”

So I set off into the world anew, like a babe in the cold, sleepless, doubtful but ready, still in search of Lion the poet.

50 | Issue Two

ABOUT THE AUTHOR



Noel Villa has a bachelor’s degree in Literature and he doesn’t know what to do with it. He writes, hoping it may give answers. He has worked for Malate Literary Folio and is currently a writer of EM Zine. Eleven of his short stories have been published. He is currently working on the novel of his dreams. In his spare time, he likes to say things.

Plural | 51

Fiction

07 NEAR DEATH

Wil-Lian Guzmanos

52 | Issue Two

The distance between the two MRT stations is the longest. Walls dissolve into sharp lines as the train rushes through the tunnel. A child lifts his finger, and traces the rain drops darting across the windows like shooting stars.

The sound of hurried footsteps approaching shakes the floor under his feet.

Jolted awake in her sleep, the mother, seeing several passengers force their way through the small door into the next car, grabs her child and makes a run for it. A man in a red shirt and black short pants emerges behind the screaming crowd. He’s a lanky young man, and one can easily mistake him for an aggravated passenger, until he sees the bloody fruit knife he’s holding.

Hours later the press will release numerous accounts of the incident: A drunk passenger on the MRT kills four, injuring dozens more.

A college student who wants to do something “big” goes on a stabbing spree. TV news outlets will broadcast videos after the bloody rampage: the figure of the young man, circled in bold red like a moving target, steps out of the train and walks aimlessly on the platform as people try to get away. A couple of men surround him at a distance. A bystander throws a garbage bin at him, but misses.

Plural | 53

The young man walks towards the passengers huddled in the corner. With his long umbrella, a middle-aged man keeps the young man at bay. The young man looks at him, but doesn’t see him. The woman yells at the young man to go away. A lady uses her phone to record everything. The train stops at the next station.

In a restaurant, in another city: the primetime news on TV shows videos of what has happened on the train.

A man sits at a table. Next to him, brochures of the museums he’s supposed to visit in the capital that afternoon. The taste in his mouth becomes rusty, meat becomes his own flesh. Steam rises from his bowl. He looks down at the simmering pool of water, and sees his gutted body.

54 | Issue Two

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ď Ľ

Wil-Lian Guzmanos was born in Manila in 1989. She currently resides in Taiwan with her family and her dog.

Plural | 55

Fiction

08 POCKET FAIRIES

Dennis Aguinaldo

56 | Issue Two

The Ax Once again, my daughter asked me to tell her the story. She had come in after a sound scolding from her mother. She said she wanted nothing of the fee-fi-fo-fum parts. What she cared less for was the logging scene. So I gave her a pair of scissors and traced with my finger exactly where she ought to cut the book.

As it was bedtime, I read in a whisper. I read very, very slowly, taking care to pronounce each word from what remains of the book:

Jack lives with his mother in a cottage. They are very poor.

They have a cow called Milky White.

She gives delicious milk, which they sell at the market.

One day Milky White gives no milk and they have to sell her.

End.

My daughter asked, Where did all the beans go? “Social realism,” I said. Can’t I have the beans back they touch sky those bright eggs?

“We gave you the cow,” I said, “live with it!”

I kissed her brow a light kiss. We shut her eyes good night.

“And who’s been sitting in my chair and broke it all to pieces?”

It was eight when my wife came home, an hour past her usual time. It had been a long and sweaty shift at the Escolta shop, she said, but at least there were customers. My mother had been texting and calling her, still trying to rearrange the apartment two days after her visit. Also, the president was a fool, getting his tarpaulin smile hoisted above what was evidently the cause of the traffic jam.

I listened, waited for her to finish, and kept myself from asking her more about the day’s traffic. Whatever the cause, the effect was home. Finally, she asked Where’s dinner?

“She’s done eating, so I told her to wait for you in the room. You should see the diary.”

Neighbors won’t hear half of what I heard, but that would be enough for them to talk about what it meant for this daughter—no, what it felt—now that this mother was home. The rice was still warm but I had to reheat the squid. I washed the dishes before I put ice in my wife’s glass of water.

Plural | 57

They weren’t done, but the room had quieted down.

Surely, my daughter would ask me to read her a story. However, it was not a night for the two chipmunks and a ship in the bottle. Not a night for another round of The Runaway Bunny. And the problem with this other book was that it had bears, and she’d already had enough of bears, for the week at least, having watched with her grandmother the plight of pandas in Japan after the earthquake, and one cub in particular, hugging the knees of its caretaker.

You need to be sensitive about these things.

First she tried the big bed, but it was so big that she was almost buried in it.

Then she tried the middle bed, but that one was much too hard and she slid right off.

By the way, no promissory note, said my wife, and we were happy. They’re giving the bonus after all. She drank the water before we hugged. Then it was my turn to enter the room.

The Blanket, a Fang, and an Ax After closing her little red book, the grandmother said, “So we name the three deaths this way: sickness, violence, and marriage.”

“I only heard two,” the wolf cried in protest, seated as it was by the door, set almost exactly between the toys and the dripping faucet.

“The third was but a sum,” said the man outside as he was pulling the window apart, one pane at a time.

58 | Issue Two

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ď Ľ

Dennis Andrew S. Aguinaldo teaches mythology and creative nonfiction at the Department of Humanities of the University of the Philippines Los BaĂąos. He received creative writing fellowships -- from the University of the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas, De La Salle-IYAS, and Ateneo. His stories and poems have appeared in magazines such as The Sunday Times and Philippines Graphic, and in anthologies such as The Literary Life and the PEN collected volumes.

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Fiction

09 WORD PROBLEMS

Wina Puangco

60 | Issue Two

Instructions: Answer the following problems as best you can, given the principles we discussed in class.

Show your complete solution and box your final answers. You may use pencil but render your final answers in ink.

1.

If I was 19 when you were 34, how old is your mother now, given that she was 16 when you were conceived and 32 when you were born?

Solution:

Answer:

2.

If we used to watch Nickelodeon in your mother’s room before we discovered MTV before we discovered Spankwire, what do you do on Sundays?

Solution:

Answer:

3.

Given that since three years ago I aged a decade’s worth while you learned what it meant to be 23, what year do I belong in?

Solution:

Answer:

4.

If driving along the highway at 80 kph gets me home in an hour and you live 3 kilometers from the ocean, how long before I learn to turn at the exit?

Solution:

Answer:

5.

If I will be 85 when I am married at 29 and you were five years younger than me the day we met, was I 13 when I left you?

Solution:

Answer:

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6.

If you prefer the kind of girl who can take care of herself, what now?

Solution:

Answer:

7.

Let’s say you have 30 bucks and you want to buy liquor at the store, how much does it cost?

Answer:

8.

If you were 99 when you went to bed and I was 9 when I woke up, how old were we last night?

Solution:

Answer:

9.

If I gave you a hundred bucks to get me a pack of cigarettes, how much change do I have?

Answer:

10.

If in 1998 we were shooting the shit, what are we shooting at now?

Solution:

Answer:

62 | Issue Two

Solution:

Solution:

11.

If you and your brothers used to fight over everything, are they still more handsome?

Solution:

Answer:

12.

If every June the rainfall increases by 1,000 millimeters and there have been three Junes since your last birthday, how high will the water be when I turn 30?

Solution:

13.

If it takes me 10 minutes to shower and twice that to get dressed, how long will it take for me to be ready?

Solution:

Answer:

14.

If you leave your apartment at 8:00 in the morning and travel 20 degrees east for 45 min utes, where am I supposed to be?

Solution:

Answer:

15.

If the average person lives to be a hundred, how old will you be in a car crash?

Solution:

Answer:

Answer:

Plural | 63

16.

If today I turn 16 after years of being 45, when’s the party?

Solution:

Answer:

17.

If they phased out instant messenger when I was 21 and you were sending me messages until you were 37, how old will you be when I get them?

Solution:

Answer:

18.

If at the beginning of the trip we had 500 liters of gas and the average liter can keep a car running for 5 kilometers, how much is left after 29 years?

Solution:

Answer:

19.

If the afternoon I didn’t kiss you I was 38, how old were your brothers when they listened in?

Solution:

20.

If I was 45 when you snuck into my room twelve years ago and I will be 70 in fifteen years—how old is your wife? Does she look like me?

Solution:

Answer:

64 | Issue Two

Answer:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ď Ľ

Wina Puangco writes stories in both the long and short (small) formats. She has been previously published in Stache Magazine and Plural Online Prose Journal. She writes for EM Zine and manages MoarBooks, a small independent press. Visit the following websites: winapuangco.com, moarbooks.net and/or emzineonline.com for more information on her and her work.

Plural | 65

66 | Issue Two

N ON F I C T I O N

h

x

Aidan Maglinong Reina Adriano

Plural | 67

Nonfiction

01

CALOOCAN 143

Aidan Manglinong

68 | Issue Two

A. Mabini street runs through Maypajo in Manila, bleeds into the Municipal District in Caloocan City, where it is eventually bisected by 10th Avenue, considered to be the biggest road in “main” Caloocan. The Caloocan City Hall and Caloocan City Plaza can be seen from Mabini, just before the street bleeds into Sangangdaan, an intersection between the road that bridges EDSA Balintawak to Caloocan to my birth place of Navotas.

10th Avenue goes on into the heart of Caloocan, into a district packed with decaying malls and large, ominous warehouses and factories. From 10th avenue branched out a network of smaller avenues, all of which had names like ‘9th Avenue’, ‘8th Avenue’, and so forth. When I was ten, we moved out from my grandparents’ house in Navotas to a sizeable apartment on a street located between 7th and 8th avenues owned by some wealthy but kindly ChineseFilipino business family. In front of our apartment, just beside the small allotment of parking space, the Tangs let us use, as part of the deal, this exposed canal around three meters long each side. At night, cockroaches could be seen crawling around it. In the mornings we had coffee on the front porch watching as the bodies of drowned vermin bobbed up and down the surface of the grimy liquid inside.

The world of 10th Avenue District was one that reeked with the pervasive, odious stench of third-world industry. Breathing was made hard by the strange smells emitted by the factories and warehouses and the smoke coming from the hundreds of trailer trucks that passed by every day. Not far away was Bumbay district, a neighborhood occupied mostly by Indian expats who had migrated into the country not long ago. The Bumbays frequented a carinderia on our street. Nobody seemed to like them except for our landlords’ maids, who used to chat with them on lazy afternoons. Bumbay District was tucked somewhere between Grand Central, a decrepit mall known for the number of people held up inside of it every day, and the network of street markets and bus terminals that stood on the side of the road where the far end of the Light Rail Transit was built on. The streets around the place, however, were never dead, despite the almost-oppressive sense of industrial rot the infrastructure around the place gave off. The streets were crowded with vendors peddling their wares, public transportation barkers, pedestrians going in and out of shops, stopping to check on whatever was being sold on the streets that day.

To this day, I can’t recall seeing the sun through the gray skies that hung above 10th avenue district, not even on the warmest of summer days. The smoke from a thousand gray factories stuck to everything, made everything colored in various hues of gray —¬warehouse full of smuggled goods gray, sketchy neighborhood gray, abandoned factory gray, kanal water gray.

Plural | 69

n

The area around A. Mabini, the street where the school I attended grade school at, and the Municipal Building, was considered by the people I grew up with as the happiest, liveliest part of Caloocan. In stark contrast to the somber industrial grime of my home district of 10th Ave, Mabini, as we all called the place, remains one of the most colorful corners in I’ve had the pleasure of making my playground. A. Mabini was never empty, with thousands of cars passing by everyday and rows of internet shops, restaurants, cafes, and boutiques. Located in A. Mabini were the Caloocan branch of La Consolacion College, said to be the biggest educational institution in the city, and San Roque Church, home to the local Catholic diocese and the biggest church in Caloocan.

n

One of things I discovered in Caloocan: gangsters. Guys who blasted rap music and wore clothes two sizes too big, walked around swinging their arms while smoking cheap cigarettes. They were also the guys who sprayed graffiti on my friend Aaron’s garage door. One afternoon after school, on P. Zamora, our friend John claimed to be part of the gang whose incorrigible insignia now graced the front of Aaron’s house. Aaron almost tore John a new asshole. Some other guy stepped in before Aaron’s fists could land on John’s face. I was 11. I sipped my coke as Aaron screamed profanities at John. John chuckled. “Haha, joke lang, pero mga-tropa ko yung G-unit na ‘yan.”

There is this alley that bisects the street, where the school I graduated elementary school from stands, we used to go to after school. Along that small street, people set up these smalls where they sold anything from substandard nail polish to sex toys which came with Thai instructions. As kids we’d go there every day after school to buy knock-off Yu-gi-oh booster packs and knock-off Bey Blade accessories. There was also a house there that set up a small food concessionaire where you could buy these greasy burgers with eggs, bacon, and at least three kinds of local cheese for fifty pesos. Dessert was ten peso ice cream cones from some rusting, clanking machine.

Beside the snack shop was this other smaller house outside of which was parked a passenger jeep that nobody ever touched. And everyday, just outside of this house, was Jay-jay.

He was in high school but no one ever saw him actually go to school. In fact, no one ever saw him wear anything other than a pair of boxer shorts with a bunch of holes around his crotch.

Everyday he would sit outside of his house smoking, jeering at random passers-by. Sometimes he was surrounded by his friends, some of which actually went to school. They all wore large basketball jerseys and had buzzcuts and fake earrings. When they were hanging around, you weren’t supposed to ever make eye contact with them.

Jay-jay was one of the first people from Mabini to get his hands on a boga, those makeshift mini-cannons made out of PVC tubes that went boom after you sprayed them with lighter fluid. It was December, it was my eleventh birthday, and I was treating my friends John and Boi to some fishballs by the corner of Jay-jay’s street, just outside the public school, when we

70 | Issue Two

first heard the boga. A few yards down the street was Jay-jay holding what we first thought was a gun. I squinted.

“Puta, baril ba ‘yan?” Jay-jay was laughing. He was barefoot and was-as usual-clothed in nothing but boxers. He held up the rusting, metallic tube to the sky. He gave another hearty laugh as the tube gave another loud boom. The vendors manning their stands stopped to stare at the youth. The kids from the public school, punks us “rich kids” from the private school never got along with, all stopped what they were doing for to stare at Jay-jay and his new toy. Suddenly a woman in a pink duster burst out of his house. The woman screamed at Jay-jay. Jay-jay pushes the woman aside, and the woman responded by slapping Jay-jay’s bare chest, before going back inside, screaming. Jay-jay laughs and puts down his contraption on the ground and following the woman back inside. I go back to my food. As I dipped my skewered kikiam and fishballs into a bubbling jar of sarsa, everyone suddenly goes back to whatever they were doing. The kids from the public school went back to throwing globs of mud at each other. The vendors over at their stalls went back to peddling their wares.

Bubbles rise of the surface of the estero running alongside Jay-jay’s street. The bastard broke into laughter again.

“Tangina adik, yan ‘no?” I remember asking John.

John was one of the kids everyone knew. He spent most of his time wandering the streets or burning his mom’s money at the internet shops. He knew everything about everyone around the Munisipyo. Knew all the groups and spots you had to avoid, knew all the shortcuts to this place and that. It was because of John that I survived Caloocan.

“Ewan. Basta alam ko si Jay-jay ‘yan. ‘Yan yung gangster talaga.”

We went back to our fishballs and kikiam. Mang Pishbols muttered as he emptied a new batch of uncooked fishballs into the pool of bubbling frying oil inside of his stainless kalan.

“Baliw.”

n

John Cena was my favorite professional wrestler growing up. We all adored him in school-he rocked these awesome sneakers, acted ghetto, was always the nice guy in

Plural | 71

the ring and his entrance theme was this rap with a sick beat. We all wanted to be gangsters like John. We pretended to be wrestlers everywhere-on the streets, in our bedrooms, in the school canteen, in our classrooms after class. Some of the things that made you the coolest kid in school: non-bootleg models of whatever toy everyone was buying at time (some of the things that made us kings of the school yard beyblades, crush gears, Yu-Gi-Oh cards), having the balls to look at porn with your parents’ prepaid internet, having the latest gaming consoles, having WWE shirts. We all wanted John Cena shirts. I had two.

Walking around school and the streets in WWE shirts made you cool in 2004 and 2005, granted you were ten to eleven years old. And whenever I was wearing one of these shirts out on the streets, I’d see these kids look at me with envy. Like this one time, I was buying a slurpee at 7-11 on Mabini, these kids just look at me and hissed: “Ganda ng t-shirt mo ah”, all the while looking like they’d mug just for it. And one time I wore it after school and went to Jay-jay’s street to buy some another deck of counterfeit Yu-Gi-Oh cards, the kids from the public school started looking at me like they’d throw stones at me any moment. When I walked around wearing a John Cena shirt, I also felt a little braver. My friend Bhoy and I were both afraid of stray dogs when we were in the sixth grade, and whenever we were out and saw dogs coming our direction, we’d cross to the other side of the road. But every time I put that shirt on, I felt I could beat up anything or everything I saw, so dogs weren’t a problem whenever I had my John Cena shirt on. Felt like I was the ultra-buff and ultra-cool wrestler whose face was plastered all over my shirt. No one can mess with John Cena. Ain’t no one. You can’t see me.

Of course, all that shit didn’t apply to grown-ups. We were hanging around at this basketball court we’d go to on weekends, waiting for our turn, when one of the guys from the teams occupying the court goes up to me after making a basket, flexes his arms, beams at me, and shouts “What’s up, John Cena?” He was shirtless and had tattoos on his chest. He scared the fuck out of me. A few months later, I was wearing that same John Cena shirt at this tutorial center I went to for a while. I was minding my own business, waiting for my mother to pick me up when some high schoolers from Notre Dame, a school nearby went up to me and started doing John Cena poses, while trying to hold back their laughter. I nodded and went straight out of the door, found somewhere else where I could wait for my mom. As far as I can remember, I never wore that shirt again.

n

Our friend Rommel lived in one of the denser, less fortunate neighborhoods around the Munisipyo area. All the houses there looked like they were all built in the 50s and had never been renovated a single time since then. Thin rusting heaps of metal twisted and welded to make them look like fences passed for gates in this place. To get to his house, we had to pass through a small street that began directly beside the Municipal Building. On this street was the tutorial center I went to when I was in Grade 6 and my favorite bakery in the world. This street eventually bled into another larger avenue, where a network of dingy neighborhoods branched out. I never bothered to get of their names, never bothered to go there on my own.

72 | Issue Two

On Saturdays, we usually hung out at Rommel’s place. I didn’t like it much there, but we were sixth graders and Rommel had porn. So every Saturday we would march to Rommel’s place in that squalid neighborhood at the edge of the squatter’s area, braving the stray dogs that lingered on his street and the droves of shirtless men who hung about the place with tattooed backs just to get a glimpse of whatever he had gotten his hands on. Our favorite was this one about a bunch of nurses having affairs with the patients they were assigned to. John and Rommel found this gem lying on the streets one day. Picked up the scratched, dirt-smeared CD after noticing that there was a busty, naked anime nurse drawn on it . Inside of his room, we’d spend hours burning through his collection.

Once we got bored, we’d head over to a basketball court nearby to shoot a few rounds. I didn’t like that court much either. The kids who hung out there were assholes who played dirty and gave you dirty looks if you were passing by for the first time. Other times, it was the grownups who didn’t bother to put on shirts who owned the court. The same group of men who had tattoos on their backs and necks and didn’t bother to put on shirts or wear so much as slippers when they played, but looked like they had guns or knives tucked in their shorts. Interestingly enough, we almost had our first actual sapakan as a squad there.

It was the Saturday before exams, and all I could think about how having as much fun as I could before my mother started shipping me off to the tutorial center every day of the week. The boys and I had left Rommel’s place, and were passing by the court when this group of kids hooted at us to come and play. We didn’t like playing with people we didn’t know, and I can’t seem to recall how and why we gave in, so I’ll wager it was because we didn’t want anyone thinking we were pussies.

Soon as the game started one of the bastards started calling us names. This one bastard started shouting “Taba!” every time I took a shot. When the ball went to Bhoy, who was at the time at least half a foot shorter than everyone else, he’d yell

“Bantayan mo yung pandak!”

Pretty soon Bhoy started looking pissed. After one of the fuckers got another basket to fall, Bhoy called for a timeout. He went to the far end of the court and hissed at me to come with him.

“Babanatan ko na ‘yan.”

The boys and I huddled together. The kids from the other team looked over at our huddle, then went on to shoot some hoops around while waiting for us.

“Tara, ako dun sa naka blue.” I looked over at the tallest guy from the other team, this bastard who had this toothy smile that made me want to bash his skull in.

“Di natin pwede awayin ‘yan,”, hissed Rommel.

“Puta. Bakit?”

“Mga tatay niyan kagawad dito.” See, Rommel was always the type to act gangstah on the streets even though he was that guy everyone could kick around at school. My earliest memories of short-lived rap icon Chamillionaire was seeing posters of him covering Rommel’s room and him blasting Chamillionaire’s music every time he got his hands on a computer.

There was also this case of how he liked walking tough every time he was out on the streets,

Plural | 73

staring down other kids he didn’t like much, strutting like he was king or something. So it didn’t make much sense when Rommel was first to play sissy when we were counting on him to go on gangstah mode.

“Kaya natin ‘yan.”

“Hinde, pabayaan na natin.”

John was first to side to Rommel. “Onga, balikan pa tayo niyan.”

“Tangina nakakapikon eh.”

“Wag mo na pansinin. Alis nalang tayo, okay?”, John grins.

Bhoy and I looked at each other. “O tara na, iwan na natin yung mga kupal na ‘yan.”

And as decided, we gave some bullshit reason for bolting, then rushed off back to Cybr, our favorite internet place in the city, me and Bhoy grumbling all throughout the trip. Outside of Cybr, we checked our pockets to make sure we still had enough money for at least an hour of Ragnarok.

We never returned to that court, never returned to Rommel’s house either. A few weeks later, Bhoy was banned from hanging around Mabini after getting into a near-altercation with this kid called Justin Penoy who was the top dog in the area and could send any crew in Mabini after him. My parents made me go to review classes for the entrance exam of some science highschool on weekends. We started going out less and less. By the time graduation got pretty close, we were rarely out around Mabini anymore.

n

My parents decided to enroll me at a school in Quezon City a few weeks after my elementary school graduation.

On the day my mother broke the news about our decision to move out of the place to our landlords, my friends and I decided to have a small get-together at the ChowKing on 10th avenue. After a hearty meal, Rommel and I went outside for some fresh air. We feel like dads smoking cigarettes outdoors after dinner. We were twelve years old and didn’t have the balls to smoke then, so we buy pieces of Mentos and chewed them while watching the cars go by, for the last time trying to look tough in our turf for the past four years.

We went back inside to be welcomed by group hugs and a couple of tearful goodbyes. Double check if everyone had everyone else’s numbers.

74 | Issue Two

When I got back to my place I was welcomed to the sight of balikbayan boxes all over the place. My mother greets me with a big smile, tells me to get ready. We had two, three weeks to pack and get ready for the move.

I went straight to my room, and straight to my knock-off Yu-Gi-Oh collection, which I kept in this tool box I carried around school back when Yu-Gi-Oh cards were the big thing two years ago, so I could be like that character from the Yu-Gi-Oh anime, Seto Kaiba. After going through every deck inside of it, I went downstairs, tool box in hand, pick-up one of those boxes my mother left around the living room, and place my beloved collection inside of it.

n

I was introduced to friend of a friend in college who coincidentally came from the same high school as four of my elementary school friends. Almost every sentence that came from his mouth had a cuss word. True Caloocan blood. Apparently one of them got knocked up in college. Another one, this girl I crushed on for years, went to La Salle, which she declared was the school she was going to go to years ago when we were kids. The other two were friends from my main crew, Dan, and someone I may have mentioned earlier, John. I didn’t hear much about Dan, but John supposedly turned into an even greater class clown. He goes to UST now, and if I what I heard holds true, he can still be found hanging around Mabini.

n

When I left Caloocan seven years ago I took with me at least ten ways of saying “putang ina.” In the streets of the city dubbed the most backward in the burgeoning Metropolis, I learned how to find out whether you could start hanging out at an internet shop or not, learned how to ride jeeps, learned how the young men who called themselves ‘gangsters’ and dressed like 50 cent spent their time. My folks hated our stay in Caloocan, hated the traffic and the esteros and the smoke and pollution, but to me it was where I learned what it meant to find home. Admittedly, I was envious of this friend of mine who got to spend his best years with the first friends I ever made in the first place I ever called home. At the same time, I couldn’t deny that I was more than overjoyed to finally talk to someone who made his bones in the same streets I walked as a kid. I found someone of the same blood. Someone from home.

n

Grand Central Mall was burned to the ground on March 17, 2012. I went through pictures of what was left. Most unforgettable of the lot: what remained of the massive marble staircase between two escalators. Massive heaps of twisted, burning metal had fallen on top the staircase, and the two escalators beside it, charred, skeletal. I remember running up those stairs as a kid with my mother trying to keep pace. I remember that place being the only part of Caloocan my parents never let me go to with my friends. n

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We pass through Caloocan to get to my grandparents’ house in nearby Navotas, the house where I spent the first ten or so years of my life at, on Christmas Day every year. For the heck of it, my family and I make it a point to take the long way and pass through the 10th avenue district, through that murky, gray, sunless corner of the earth we once had to call home.

He would opt to take an extra turn and pass by our old street and check on old our apartment.

For six Christmases the apartment looked unchanged. On Christmas Day 2012, nine months after Grand Central burned to the ground, we passed by our apartment on Cordero Street and found the place completely renovated. The gaping estero in front of it had been bordered up, someone had thickened its façade, painted it mahogany brown, painted the Tang Compound’s gate blue when it used to be green. Across the street, the metal sheet factory stood unchanged through the years. n

Some of the things seen from my grandparents’ fourth floor terrace: Manila Bay, Navotas shipyard, the infamous squatter’s colony by the sea. On Christmas every year I go up to the this part of the house I spent the first nine years of my life in, look out at the world below me, count how many things changed over the three-hundred and sixty-five days since my last visit. I think of the city of Caloocan, and what was it that made it more of a home than Navotas was. I went on counting which of the toys I left behind when my parents and I moved out were still lying around. There were fewer toys left every year. In the fancy talk I’ve picked up since leaving Caloocan—the morbid fascination with change and stasis that characterizes the fixation with places once called home, or, the beauty of unabashed nostalgia. These days, I can’t be bothered to watch professional wrestling and try to talk fancy when bored. If I could, I’d take the whole rotting lot with me on the trip back home. But there was only ever enough space for this year’s gifts, new toys, new clothes, new books. There is always a next time.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR



Aidan Manglinong graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University in March 2014 with a degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts, Major in Creative Writing. The essay “Caloocan 143” was part of his nonfiction thesis.

Plural | 77

Nonfiction

02 SIGMA

Reina Adriano

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My father taught me how to add numbers in my head. With the way he trained me, the things that happened in the study room provided recurrence.

He would take ten dice in his hands, the edges bumping each other against his palms. Upon release, an instantaneous impact of the cubes would bruise the floor. Miniscule dots clustered on a black and white impression, all spread out.

To add them together was the only thing needed to be done.

The instructions, hinted one by one, were not so easy to forget.

No struggle to hold the pencil or to count with fingers. No voices too. Leave the eraser untouched, he pointed out. Response should be in a single breath, hesitations were not welcomed. There was an obligation for me: to think of the digits as a family, the carry-overs an extension. It was when the scene repeated - by minutes, by hours, by days, by years.

8

The piano in our living room had 88 keys. My feet, barely reaching the floor, dangled at the sound of compliments. Relatives would then ask me to do a short performance. The music I played reached their ears, but there was nothing that reached me back.

To train a child at a young age was to witness the transformation of a butterfly. My parents would play humble at the mention of prodigy. A scientific study would intrude the conversation between an aunt and an uncle. They claimed that music and numbers are connected – both had something to do with the counting of beats and measures. My mother’s fantasy of becoming a pianist herself was my cue to leave. To accompany solitude, I would replay the same version of her story in my room.

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The piano teacher, who waited beside my favorite instrument in the afternoons, would usually perform a Beethoven for me to follow. Once the page was turned to a new piece, I should have been able to play the last one without looking at the sheets. All that was needed was a pause to encounter the tune in my head, then a signal to play it from memory.

At the age of 12, my high school education in Manila pushed us to move out of the house - the old piano left behind, engulfed by the silence of years to come. We had the house rented, but no one among the new inhabitants expressed interest in playing in the piano, save for an occasional glide of the fingers across the keys. Loose sheets from my music book fluttered to the ground like broken butterfly wings on a summer’s day. The piano served as an ornament of class and prestige.

Bringing it with us would be carrying the burden of the past. My parents bought a new one instead, along with a violin for a change. The piano in freshly-coated varnish resonated even better than the one before, but there was something different that was hard to point out. Maybe it was how my foot could reach the pedals, or how the praises were already directed at me instead of my parents.

The last time I touched the old piano from a visit, only 80 keys were working; the other eight yielded silence. + 3

There were several tables set on stage, three kids for each. The committee provided papers and pencils, markers, then a whiteboard. The banner bearing the title for that year’s competition hung above their heads.

The next question was read. Stillness entered the room with the simultaneous bowing down of heads to write what could be written. The light shone on the performance – the vigilance of ears, time as the only sign of movement.

No calculators allowed. If one could see the minds at work, everything would be a blur.

On stage: arms folded across her chest, one girl, around 10 or 11, tilted her head toward her teammates and murmured the answer. There was no sign of a solution on her paper, much less of an evidence that she even held the pencil.

But not one of the two boys wrote what she said. They continued scribbling equations down, trying not to make a fool of themselves. It was taught to them that the mind was a dangerous tool and faster compared to the pencil. When

80 | Issue Two

the bell rang, they lifted their board up, clean. The answer announced was the same as the one the girl said. From the front seats, I heard a barely audible “I told you so.”

They replied it didn’t matter; only three points were lost. They were confident enough to risk a difficult question in the midst of a mental calculation.

Ignorance loomed heavier in the atmosphere than the mistake itself did. When the contest ended, the rest of the audience never saw their names engraved on the plaque. No one ever remembers the mark of a pencil, much more the absence of it. + 2

The chapel spoke of a presence. A statue’s outstretched hand was wiped with a handkerchief. It was an age-old custom that could not be questioned for a scientific basis. In reverence, my younger self lifted the handkerchief to my lips. To define a prayer, I let one dissolve into silence. My mother, a devotee of the immaculate figure in white, taught me to ask for favors from Her.

Surrender means to borrow one of the Virgin Mary’s many titles - a religious tradition passed down and kept. Many others named Pilar, Carmela, Lourdes, Dolores, or Fatima had the same case. My name signified royalty, but there was nothing at the sound of it that made it special.

Back home, I traced the belly of my mother with my fingers, hoping my new sister would be aware of my existence on the other side of the womb. I loved to think how our fingers would be aligning themselves, a mere assurance that the prayer would be granted. There would be another queen in the family - the third one, in fact. She would be the next one to be trained with numbers.

The study table would be noticing my increasing absence and her prolonging presence beside my father.

First names shared among siblings meant commonality, a sisterhood.

But I regretted the moments when my father would call me out at home; two others would look at the same direction. + 2009

I saw my first dead man at the age of 13. There was no point in trying to find familiarity. The ashen face, the perfectly-kempt hair, and the unparted lips did not make up what I thought to be my grandfather. When I peered into his coffin, it was an effort not to remember.

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What remained of my memories of him were fragments. Lolo had the fine ability of creating warrior kites and carving a particular Bicolano wooden toy gun, the sumpak. The moment he made mine a few years back, I brandished it like a weapon ready for battle. The sound it made frightened chickens in the backyard more than the small pieces of paper that I fired towards them. Until a crack made its way in the middle of the polished wood, I never let dust settle on it.

When he died, his other grandchildren clutched the toys he made tightly to their chests, as if he would rise from the coffin and take it away from them. But my life was already robbed of the pieces that bound the fragments together: his smile that revealed itself whenever the tobacco slid out of his mouth, the kites that flew hundreds of feet high and slit each other in the air, as if death should be in view of the public, and the sumpak that was supposed to be used as a weapon but ended up in the toy carts of children.

My memory now betrays me. His face keeps changing, like stories told a little too short or too long. But I remember the last number on his epitaph. It read, 2009. I have never been to the province since. + 19

My father promised he’d put my medals together in a frame. Photographs of him up on stage were a rarity; the ones where my grandparents would put the medals on him were scarcer. For remembrance, they instead kept a collection of his achievements: a surge of inspiration; but also, an air of pride. As to why he had not framed mine yet, he believed there would be more to come.

Prior to moving out of the house for the third time, he wanted to let go of things that didn’t matter much. We’d been sorting out papers – previous issues of magazines, unsent letters, wrongly-categorized documents, quizzes with no stamp of excellence – to be sold to a nearby junk shop. Empty bottles of wine and tin cans came next.

Something heavy shuffled inside a box. Stacked together in smaller boxes, the years accumulated like the dust that invaded them. Dad asked me, “How much are we selling these?” I laughed, taking it as a joke. Maybe he didn’t mean it the way I thought he would. He counted 19 of them, quickly, as if they were old and valueless coins he couldn’t wait to get rid of. All were engraved with the same name. Not a title bearing Good Deportment or Most Honest could be read. Each contained an experience from a distant past – the sound of deafening applause, the warmth of a hand grasped too quickly, the smile of a child. We kept segregating the other materials we found. The medals went along with the other junk in the warehouse of our new home, isolated, untouched.

82 | Issue Two

+ 25

It was a Tuesday when I saw my friend in the cafeteria. Instead of listening to his professor in the classroom, he was handing his payment to the lady behind the counter. In his hands was a tray that weighed under a plate of his favorite meal, the bagnet, a whole cup of rice, and a glass of water. Somewhere else on the other building, a chair remained unusually empty in the middle of a discussion. No one would ever notice; if someone did, a bathroom break would be a perfect reason. Neither of us liked the topic; to say it was beyond our capability to understand was a surrender of intelligence. But there was a difference between cutting the subject and taking it a semester in advance. Escape could be in many different forms.

Upon seeing me, he put down his meal on the same table where I was.

I asked him, “Don’t you have a class?” He smiled and said nothing as he shoved the spoonful of rice in his mouth. I ate lunch with him that day.

Many times before, among the company of friends and food, we wondered where we would be without the burden of numbers. Calling it a gift is already an insult to ourselves. If we could separate our way of thinking from the computations we do, or in the usual case, from the half-filled answer sheets we submit to our professor. If we could be defined by our attempts, not by the final solutions we had written. Perhaps, there would be fewer times of laughter among failures. To lose more of what we are in the hopes of wanting less. When he finished his meal, he told me his break was over and went back to the classroom. His seatmate would lend him the notes he missed. I checked my watch; twenty-five minutes have gone by. Life doesn’t need forever to think of what could have happened.

+ 20

On the desk fell two stacks of exam papers with a loud thud. The height of one stack was five times higher than the other. Although the sight was nothing new, the two lopsided towers of papers sent shivers down the students’ spines. To get used to it was the only way to survive.

The professor was the type who would match his students’ name with their scores instead of their faces. That was how he knew us all. He would hand back the papers in order by the number of red marks on them, the least to the most – as if numbers could define one’s identity. He believed that ranking propelled his students to push themselves further.

The evening of Valentine’s Day was spent skipping questions I didn’t know. It was hopeless trying to study the notes when the professor would give out an entirely different exam. I met unacquaintance when I reached the back

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page without actually answering anything. It was doubtful to claim which could have been emptier: a day without a rose in hand or the sight of the answer sheet left nearly blank.

I knew my own paper belonged to the larger stack, but when I received it, I laughed at the big red mark at the top of the page. Nightmares for me meant not even reaching half the total score of an exam; I had one that day. Necessity then invents reasons. To redefine failure, I counted twenty more people called after me. I sighed in relief.

After the shock subsided, the professor proceeded to draw the capital letter sigma on the board. A string of terms ran across the board - increments of difficulty. His equation challenged us to add them all up in the shortest time possible, the least tedious manner. I wondered how. + 71

He lived up to the age of 71 before flowers were strewn over his coffin.

Mood swings and old-fashioned thinking were always the result of senility. My high school teachers challenged me to change my views. The professor emeritus had earned their respect when he taught them years ago. Pioneering the course I was about to take was a large contribution in the field of education.

It was a suggestion when they told me to take him and see for myself, but in fact, it was an opportunity they offered.

Some days before he bid us goodbye, a cap of a marker fell from his hand. His posture suggested fragility. And yet, perseverance: the computer chair, which transported him from his cubicle to the classroom, was empty beside the desk. The handwriting on the board looked weary, but it did not waver through the long equations solved in such fine discipline. The lecture, abruptly halted, made silence linger. The absence of his voice on the lapel added to the tension that crept to us faster than the numbers did. His lip trembled. To look at the whole class in embarrassment was not in the image of a professor.

It took us seconds to understand his message through his eyes. A classmate who was only nudged went in front and retrieved the cap for him. He then continued where he had stopped.

When the plaque bore his name and the dash in between the years he endured, I didn’t have the courage to enter the chapel. There, his body lay in the coffin; now, in resignation, in peace. Seventy-one years of intelligence, and I didn’t get the chance to learn it all from him.

84 | Issue Two

+ 105

I woke up to the sound of shouting. Many times were like this. The engine revved from the outside, although that was not the cause of the noise.

Vehicles sped past both windows of our car, but my parents’ words against each other were faster, sharper. I picked up keywords: tuition fee, weekly allowance, electricity bill, rent. None of them mattered to me. Nowhere are lies, but verities staining good memories. Distance, both physical and not, varied in and out of the car.

My sisters and I were at the back seat. To distract myself, I tried adding the numbers on a car plate before it disappeared behind another. The answers becoming automatic to me defeated the purpose. In a matter of seconds, the argument in the front seats intensified, now including more words such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. I then started converting the letters to numbers. My sister, upon waking up, joined my little game. She confessed that could only add the three numbers on the plates. I let her.

Compared to my parents, our voices were whispers. The largest number she could get was 27, as far as three 9’s could give her. I did not get past 105 as our car stopped in front of our gates. Soundless.

+ 116

Morning offering: 1 minute; Prayer before and after meals: 1 minute; Angelus/Regina Coeli: 2 minutes; Visit to the Blessed Sacrament: 5 minutes; 3 sets of Hail Mary, plus the Prayer to the Guardian Angel before going to bed: 5 minutes; Mass: 30 minutes; Rosary: 25 minutes; Evening meditation: 30 minutes; Bible reading: 15 minutes; Examination of conscience: 2 minutes. Daily.

One hundred sixteen minutes subtracted from the day. In the jeepney, I lost count in an attempt to recite five decades of Hail Mary’s without the beads. I saw vignettes that would be haunting me: old ladies’ shadows melting behind the wax candles, their voices echoing in the midst of chanting Latin prayers.

Sometimes, even when remembrance demands attention, forgetting seems easier. The end of the semester was about to announce freedom. But there were other things I had to think about – broken commitments, family arguments, unknown solutions, deficient funds, unanswered prayers – and I tried to compose myself by witnessing another sunset of the year, which was so surreal to exist in a place where pollution filters the light and turns it into a violent shade of orange; and then I wondered how many more sunsets should I see before –

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“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was a week ago.

I’ve been too lazy in my studies for the past few weeks. ”

The sins absolved: 1.) Neglect. 2.) Ignorance.

+ 639154221533

It was past 9 in the evening when my phone started vibrating.

Unregistered number strangely revealed a familiar voice. Slurred, yet recognizable. If scent could be transmitted like sound, I would have instantly known cigarettes and alcohol were involved.

His musings came in proper order: apologies, a hush, some laughter, explanations. He said he dialed my number because that was the first thing he could think of. Or remember. No questions were asked. I imagined him twirling his hair as we spoke. He could memorize a string of numbers in one try, especially if it belonged to me.

He found himself outside the door to freedom; how it happened, he tried to recollect. He claimed that blinding lights flashed before his eyes. I wondered whether he was becoming a poet or that was what he really saw.

There was a way of knowing whenever he consumed too much alcohol: I love you’s sent in the middle of the night; in the morning, a question, “Did I say something wrong?” Sent items deleted. Memory clean. He seemed to be an equation I could not solve. Adding certain parts of him did not make up a whole; perhaps there was more to him that I could barely point out.

A few years back, I read out loud the question from the book, to which he, half-listening, only nodded, as if he would rather check the answer at the back. He asked me what I thought about the problem. With confidence, I mentioned the formula to be used. He nodded again, but my hands didn’t move across the pad in front of me. “I don’t know how to apply it,” I sighed in defeat.

It was when remembering became meaningless; he showed me that following the method would be more efficient. He flipped to the chapters we needed and solved the problem just by learning the examples.

Resentment now materializes like smoke – in scrolls of confusion and acceptance vanishing into the evening sky. We talked long enough that cigarette smoke could waft in between our distance. Too many “Do you remember?” and “What about the time when…?” made us forget even more.

The next morning, he received a violation from the furious dorm manager. He read one of the rules stuck to the wall. “People under the influence of alcohol are prohibited in the Kalayaan dorm.”

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+ 6

I go up the stage at the announcement. The scene seems familiar, but it doesn’t, not at all. The committee congratulates me for a job well done. Quick words of praises replace the tap on the shoulder. I look back at six months of training and smile at the fruits of the effort. Not bad for a first-timer, they say.

I stand small beside them, the giants of their expertise. The medal they give to me feels cold in my hands, its long blue ribbon lacing around my fingers. It is unlikely that six months could create a moment of holding a tangible achievement.

The champion goes up the stage upon the call of his name; by the steadiness of his walk, he is probably nervous but at the same time, excited. Applause drowns the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. The keynote speaker, the former president of the university, nods at me. I meet the child in the center of the stage as he bows low enough in anticipation. By the time he looks up, the medal will now hang on his neck. It glints in the sunlight that passes through the roof of the stage. The boy smiles at me. I hear a whisper: “Thanks, Coach.”

He proceeds to shake hands with the committee before going back to his seat.

+ 10

In his eyes, I saw an entirety of a moment. Some things cannot be contained for too long. I find it more liberating to pass it on.

When numbers only present loss, I start using words.

There is a tableau in the jeepney I ride; a still life in the midst of the busyness of a city. It only changes every minute or so, when the sound of “Para!” breaks the silence, or a hand unfreezes to pass back the change from the driver.

Excluding myself, I could make stories about the strangers in the jeepney. Two are sleeping, on opposite corners. One huddled against another, hands entangled. Someone is on the phone. Another: earphones in, voices out. That woman near the edge, a mother. She needs to stop over the grocery to buy the food her son’s been craving for. Then again, she may be going to the nearby bingo place.

The student is depressed from a flunked exam - he escapes to music; maybe, the new album of his favorite band has been released. A couple gets back together to create the perfect jeepney love story; no, a couple is seeing each other for the one last time. Someone is missing - his or her phone cannot be reached, or: a long-lost relative finally found somewhere in the province. It’s amazing how one could be two things at the same time, how a life embeds itself in another. In a single moment, one could live in several ways. All that was needed were stories to pass the time.

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+ 1/7

Perhaps Daan Tubo, Katipunan is capable of rendering imagery to the place itself. Its walkway is too narrow for vehicles to pass through. The residents claim that a long and winding pipeline underneath stemmed throughout the area. Cracks on the ground create scars on the surface of the road.

While walking along the street, the smell of the detergent could be caught from the clothes that hung on the windows of the homes. Water drips down on anyone who passes by. Their shirts taste bitter from all the soap. Plywood creaks from every sway of the wind. Living there would seem constricted in the middle of a town where high-rise buildings triumphed as the norm of luxury.

The entrance to the house I am to visit looks dark from the outside. The grandmother who welcomes me boasts that the flood never reaches the house.

A miracle, she exclaims, by which the altar of the Holy Family in the corner provided hope in the most destitute times.

My fellow tutors ask where the mother is. “Gone. Cancer,� the grandmother replies, as if the words were a piece of gum stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her daughter-in-law died two years ago. The father is working in a construction site. She then points to a bench where we all sit. It was where they last lay her body. Everyone jumps in fright.

On the floor lay three kids. One of them, my student, is answering those addition flash cards. Upon inquiry, she exclaims math is her favorite subject.

There are medals hanging down the frame of her graduation photo on the wall.

I help her out in flipping the cards as she recites the answers. She gets them all correctly. The small blanket shared by them wrinkles underneath. Her brother rolls to the floor.

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Piles of clothing too large for any of them lay on top of the iron board rusting away near the kitchen. The grandmother explains she presses clothes for boarders near the place. How many customers, I ask. She raises two fingers; one, a teacher from the school across; the other, a student living in a condo.

When we stepped out, there was a little less of the sunlight. We reached the point where the other children met us halfway, their clammy hands wrapping around our arms. The drunkards belted out a song, sitting down on monobloc chairs and raising their bottles of beer to the sky.

I would be devoting one day out of the seven every week for them.

+ 15

There are three angels perched on top of the Quezon City monument. They evoke benevolence, resembling omnispective gods admiring the panoramic view of the surroundings. It takes an hour for the sunlight to reach the hem of their robes to the top of their head. Space is reduced in a second: through a telescope from a nearby observatory, you’d be able to see their faces, so close that the cracks on their cheeks would resemble a crevice on the surface of the moon.

What should have been an evening of measuring the distance between celestial objects became hours of admiration for spiritual beings. I estimated 15 degrees from the horizon to the foot of the angel facing my direction. It was less than the distance between the Moon and Jupiter, but it was enough. Fifteen degrees already meant freedom from the rest of society.

About thirty feet below, the festival of lights helped me see through the expanse of darkness. The simulacra of childhood and romance appeared in the form of a child’s foot up on a carousel and a pair of shadows lengthening on the benches.

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Some months ago, the government authorities had the monument reconstructed. The crisscrossed metal bars of the scaffolds enclosed the angels in cages - their wings folded instead of pointing out towards the sky. Paint dripped down on their faces and a new layer of foundation was added to make the edifice last another decade. There was the irony in that – divine creatures held captive and forced to watch over humanity. One of the faces seemed to be frowning the last time I viewed it from afar.

(After the equal sign, there is no meaning in adding the digits anymore.)

On the desk, a familiar scene: pencil unsharpened, eraser reduced to half.

I tried to hide the solutions that came to my mind. In frustration, my wrist went raw, my left thumb red. The smudge of graphite’s refusal to be removed was an act of stubbornness. I accused mental math as the fugitive to conceive the voice of my father, next time, restrain.

I once tried enumerating the people, places, and things that started to slip away from my memory. Perhaps, a pattern would emerge, and expecting would become unnecessary. But when loss becomes the pattern, one just learns to stop counting. Some things slowly fade away before they can be passed on.

Impermanence generates loss, and loss comes back not in words, but in numbers.

90 | Issue Two

ABOUT THE AUTHOR



Reina Krizel J. Adriano is a junior at the Ateneo de Manila University, taking up Applied Mathematics, Major in Mathematical Finance, Minor in English Literature. She is trying to make sense of the numbers as well as the words in her life. “Sigma” is her first published piece.

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92 | Issue Two

EDITORIAL TEAM

CARLO FLORDELIZA Jose Carlo C. Flordeliza received his Bachelor of Arts in Literature and Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degrees from De La Salle University-Manila.

He was a fellow of the Iyas Creative Writing Workshop in 2008 and the Silliman University National Writer’s Workshop in 2010. His works have appeared in the Malate Literary Folio, Ideya: Journal of Humanities, the Philippine Free Press, and the Philippines Graphic. He has also been anthologized in A Treat of Short Shorts and the Iyas Anthology. He is currently completing his first collection of short stories while revising his first novel.

ERIKA CARREON Erika M. Carreon is currently working on her thesis as a Creative Writing masters student at De La Salle University-Manila, where she also graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Literature. Her poetry was featured in Philippines Free Press and High Chair Issue 15, and her short story “Two” was published in Kritika Kultura’s 23rd issue.

NEOBIE GONZALEZ Neobie Gonzalez is a student at De La Salle University–Manila, taking up her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing. Her works have appeared in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Broke Journal, Used Gravitrons, and New Slang. Her essay Voices from the Village (2013) won a Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature. She is currently crafting her own collection of fiction, perhaps a few memoirs, and an igloo to stay in.

LYSTRA ARANAL Lystra Aranal is an MFA Creative Writing student at De La Salle University-Manila and is the 2012-2013 Fiction Fellow for the DLSU CLA-RAS and BNSCWC Mini-Grant Recipient for Creative Writing. Her fiction, essay, and poetry have been published in the Philippines Free Press, TAYO Literary Magazine, Esquire Philippines, and other contemporary Philippine anthologies. Her short stories Bright Lights (2012), Rén (2013), and her one-act play Debrief (2013) won her three Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.

She is in the process of completing a collection of short stories.

ERICH VELASCO Erich Velasco is a writer and graphic artist currently pursuing his Masteral Degree for Creative Writing at De La Salle University-Manila. Some of his works have been published in Malate Literary Folio. He is currently in the process of writing.

JULY AMARILLO July Amarillo is an essay collection away from completing her MFA degree in Creative Writing at De La Salle University-Manila. She’s also a layout designer whose most recent works include zines, online journals, and poetry books.

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PLURAL is looking for new writing, particularly fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism. We welcome original and previously unpublished manuscripts ranging from short stories to novel excerpts.

Visit our website to learn more about our submission guidelines. Our first issue is also available for download from there in .pdf, .mobi, and .epub formats.

To know more about what kind of work PLURAL is interested in, check out our blog for book reviews and blog posts by PLURAL editors.

ISSUE 2 96 | Issue Two

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