Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 10

by Dean Francis Alfar

  Seb lost himself in the memories, as Gabriel pushed his head away, pulled him up close to kiss him, pre-cum still sticky on his mouth. His plum-mouth mouth gave Seb a full moon, viewed with a few friends in the Sunken Garden. The moon was a piece of puto on his tongue.

  Seb felt him enter him, and every thrust gave him something new. He discovered where toddler-Gabriel kept his toy soldiers from his greedy older brothers, in a secret box at the back of his closet. When he clasped his arm, he left behind a drunken encounter with a former professor, at a bar outside Katipunan. When Gabriel kissed him, he gave him a flurry of recollections, crunchy exam results mixing in with tangy break-ups, spicy debacles with parents swirling with candy-cane review sessions. These memories involved him now, and when he bit into his own face, he found it surprisingly sweet.

  Gabriel came soon after, and his coming left cracks. And through these cracks, memories of all kinds flooded out, bursts of light and prickles of taste, suffusing him, elevating him. He rubbed his own body, feeling the heat of his own skin, licking the tips of his own fingers.

  And then he too, came.

  September, first week

  HE WATCHED GABRIEL’S sleeping figure, tracing the outline of his cheek against the sun, following the path his body made, from the base of his back to the nape of his neck. He was the best meal Seb had ever had, the most filling and the most satisfying. For the first time in a long time, there was no trace of hunger in his body.

  Seb felt him stir awake. He yawned, stretching his long arms, and looked at Seb. There was something in his eyes. A look of disinterest, of mild confusion. He surveyed him, his eyes darting up and down, as if he didn’t know the boy he was in bed with.

  “Good morning, Gabriel,” he said.

  “Good morning, Sal,” he replied.

  Gabriel’s eyes grew wide. “Oh fuck,” he apologized, his voice crumbling away like bits of polvoron. “Seb, I meant. Seb.”

  “Putang ina, I’m so fucking stupid,” Seb muttered under his breath, getting out of bed.

  Gabriel muttered something about how he couldn't remember much, and about how sorry he was for forgetting. Seb felt guilt eating him up and spitting him out.

  “Remember the time we – uh – ah – you know what I mean,” Gabriel called out.

  With a sigh, Seb went downstairs, and made himself some breakfast.

  Lakan Umali is a fourth-year BA Anthropology student at UP Diliman. He will be published in Science Fiction: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults and New Voices. He has won the Amelia Lapena-Bonifacio Literary Award for fiction. He believes that dogs are the greatest creatures in the world, and that education is a right. He would like nothing more than a rainy day, a pile of old books, and genuine, progressive social change.

  Rapunzel Tomacder

  Fisher of Men

  IT WAS A beautiful Sunday in early spring, when another passenger threw herself into an oncoming train at Seikawa station. I was having sushi for lunch, and I’d already enjoyed a couple of plates of tuna and salmon when I received the call. It was around half-past-two in the afternoon. That’s when they usually did it.

  I wiped my lips with a napkin, and took a moment to savor the fish taste in my mouth. It made me remember those Sundays back in my hometown, when Papa grilled fresh fish from the bayside market.

  On ordinary days, he would usually bring home a few pieces of galunggong. But on especially good days, he would buy a maya-maya or a tanguigue.

  Papa prepared the fish with a certain religiosity. He would lay the fish on a stone block, cleanse them with running water, clear away the scales, innards, and other bad parts, and finally coat their sleek bodies with a generous helping of salt.

  Meanwhile, in the backyard, I would be furiously fanning the burning coal in the grill. I would patiently wait for Papa, as the fire roared in the summer sun.

  When the fire calmed down to a consistent crackle, Papa would finally emerge from the kitchen, bearing the immaculate fish on a silver plate. He would then line them up perfectly on the grill. I would hear a beautiful soft sizzle, and the salty, char-grilled smell would waft through my nose.

  My stomach often rumbled, just thinking about it.

  WHEN I ARRIVED at the station, some of my colleagues were already setting up the yellow security tape around the area. Others were driving away all the other passengers.

  There was one sarariman who refused to leave, and insisted that he was late for an important meeting. They finally convinced him to go when the stationmaster apologized to him. He went away tutting, and furiously tapping a number on his smartphone. The stationmaster bowed after him.

  I went over to my colleagues, and noticed the pool of blood on the edge of the platform. In the middle of it was a middle finger that was still stubbornly sticking up toward the beautiful blue sky. It seemed to say, ‘Fuck you, world!’

  The stationmaster told me what happened. At 2:24, just as a rapid train was arriving, a young woman, who must have been in her late twenties, ran toward the edge of the platform.

  Before the other shocked passengers could stop her, and before the driver could step on the brakes, she jumped, sending pieces of herself all over the place. The staff believed that most of her was still under the train somehow, and we needed to get her out as quickly as we could.

  I rushed over to the office, put on my blue cleaning suit, picked up the long aluminum grabber and a black plastic bag, and made my way down to the tracks.

  IN THE BEGINNING, the smell of decimated body parts was something I couldn’t bear.

  On my first day of work at Seikawa station, I stood on the platform and caught a raw metallic smell, like that faint hint of iron in dinuguan. Then, when I got closer to the body of the train, the smell of spilled brake fluid and gasoline assaulted my senses. As I walked along the tracks, the smell of human blood, skin, tissue, brain, bones – they overwhelmed me. I didn’t hurl. I wasn’t disgusted. But I remembered feeling exhausted and depressed.

  “What once was a person, a whole human being, is asserting his or her humanity in a last-ditch effort” – that’s how one of the jumpers put it. He was a Philosophy professor, who’d been studying life, death, and suicide in urban areas. He told me that he was trying to figure out how the suicidal being dealt with the prospect of death, in their very last moments of life. I guess he found his answers in the end.

  As for me, after the tenth limb that I had to pluck out from under a car, and the countless masses of tissue, blood, and skin that I had to scrape off a wheel, I just learned to live with it.

  I WAS REMEMBERING the professor’s blood-soaked silver hair and his dedication to his study, when I heard the young woman’s voice. They always began with the same question: “Is anyone there?” That’s how I always found their heads.

  “I’m here. It’s going to be all right,” I called out. I leaned down and peered underneath Car Number 2.

  And there she was, lodged between the wheels. Her head was intact, but only attached to a bit of her neck and her left shoulder. When she turned over and saw me, she shrieked and started to call for help.

  “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay,” I said, in my most soothing tone. They usually needed to be calm first, before anything can be done. I sat on the pebbles on the side of the tracks, smiled at her, and said, “I’m sorry for what happened to you.”

  “It hurts, you know!” she shouted, and glared at me, through tear-soaked eyes.

  “Yes, I know.”

  “How would you know?? You’ve never done it!”

  “I just know.” I smiled one more time.

  I must have creeped her out, but she seemed more puzzled than scared now. She became very quiet, so I said, “I’m Pedro, by the way. What’s your name?”

  “Pedro?! What kind of name is that?” I was both taken aback and pleasantly surprised by how frank she was. It was quite cute, actually, and so unexpected. I found myself laughing a little. Clearly, she was no ordinary woman.

  “I’m sorry,
” she said. “I’m just – well, my mother always says that I have no manners. So, I’m sorry. My name is Akari. Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, Akari. I would shake your hand, but we have to find it first.”

  At that, she giggled. That was a good sign. “You’re foreign, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “From a poor country far away.”

  “Why did you come here, then?”

  “Well, I needed to work, for my family. We don’t have a lot of money, and my parents are getting old.”

  “I see. So you love your parents. But do your parents love you?”

  “Yes, they do. How about your parents?”

  She seemed to hesitate a bit. “My mother hates me. My father left me. That’s all there is to it.”

  Akari didn’t seem comfortable sharing her story, so I just said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Tell me about your father, Pedro.”

  “All right. My father is a good man. And he likes cooking fish on Sundays.”

  “Oh! Does he make sushi?”

  “No, but he grills fish like a real chef.”

  “Really? Is his fish really that delicious?”

  “Of course!” I then told Akari about the million times that our dog, Whitey, would nab a fish from the grill.

  Papa would always watch the fish as they cooked. And Whitey would watch Papa watch the fish. Sometimes, Papa’s attention got caught by a stray goat, or a chicken threatening to eat Mama’s orchids. Whitey would then dare to prop himself up on the hot grill, and pull a helpless galunggong off, by the tail. I would then hear Papa shout PG-13 words at him as he darted off, half-snickering, half-chewing.

  Akari laughed hard, and said, “I really miss my dog. His name’s Choco. He loves stealing my sushi, too.”

  I THEN TOLD Akari about that one time Papa came home to an empty house. He was excited about the gigantic dorado that he’d just bought. He would later claim to have haggled his brains out for this special fish.

  He kept the dorado in its flimsy plastic bag, as he looked around the house for us. He called out our names several times, but no one answered. So, typical Papa, he simply went to the kitchen and started his ritual of cleaning the fish. That was until he saw the blood in front of Kuya’s bedroom.

  He dropped everything he was doing, and rushed over to the big crimson blot on the floor. He started to panic. He thought that my genius brother had yet again stuck his index finger into the electric fan. Maybe this time, the blades got him. Maybe his finger had finally gotten chopped off, after his 311th experiment. Maybe we had to rush him to the hospital, that’s why the house was empty.

  “To this day, Kuya and I still tease him about this story. He can call me ‘tilapia out of water’ all he wants, because I chose to work in a country where I stick out like a sore thumb. But this is nothing compared to what happened to him.”

  “What really happened, then?”

  “Actually, that Sunday, my brother and I had to visit our grandparents. But Papa forgot all about it. After he’d checked Kuya’s bedroom, he told himself to calm down and follow the drops of blood. And of course, they led him straight to the dorado that was sitting wide-eyed on the kitchen sink.”

  Akari laughed so hard I was scared that what remained of her jaw would fall off. She looked at me through happy and teary eyes, and said, “That was the funniest story I’ve heard in years! Thanks, Pedro! I wish you more funny moments in your life.”

  “Thank you, Akari.”

  She smiled. She had a nice smile – soft and warm. She was really beautiful. What a shame.

  “I think I’m ready to go now, Pedro,” she said, after a while. She smiled for the last time and closed her eyes.

  I used my grabber to put her head in the plastic bag.

  Rapunzel Tomacder graduated from the University of the Philippines-Diliman with a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature. (It must be the name, right?) She also took courses in English Studies: Language, which she used (strangely enough) to write poetry. Her poems have appeared in Kritika Kultura. She hates towers, long tangled hair, and waiting for someone to ‘save’ her. That’s why she flew to Tokyo to become an anonymous superhero/English teacher, who saves clueless half-drunk ‘salarymen’ from saying, “I go to shopping.”

  Richard Calayeg Cornelio

  Oblation

  TWICE HE’D CALLED me the Virgin Mary, and the first time he said it, I laughed like my life depended on it, an almost hysterical horselaugh that was more just air out my nose, till tears welled up and smarted my eyes, and in a minute we were laughing again, then I was both crying and laughing into his palm, and he said, matter-of-factly, “I can’t help you.”

  The second time, today, I didn’t feel quite as loony; it was a fine weekday, and we were sitting under a giant, gnarly acacia tree at the Sunken Garden, watching joggers make their 2.2-kilometer rounds, and students saunter in herds or shove past, running late for a class, in the state university where we’d both hailed from and met.

  Joaquin and I, we were a picture cut out of a seventies magazine, back when lovers spent a whole day lounging in the green grass and reading poems aloud and talking about love, till twilight fell, and the shadows of trees around them lengthened.

  Only we weren’t lovers, though more than a couple of times people thought we were, and so had I. Joaquin was in love with a married woman named Andrea, with whom he had a tradition of sorts: once every month since last year, they would meet in some obscure nightspot in Quezon City at exactly ten, then head back to some seedy motel near Timog Avenue where they would, in his words, “do things you can’t even begin to pronounce.” She was ten years older than he, and those ten years gaped like a wide chasm he’d very much like to fall into, if only because he’d always wanted to be wise and believed wisdom came with age – just as he’d thought dropping out of college and doing pornography was a heady choice in life.

  “How many among them do you think recognize you?” I asked, gesturing to three giggling girls who’d ambled by in their micro-mini-shorts. Back in LA, Joaquin was quite a name in the adult film industry, though he believed it was due only to the novelty of his being an Asian, a Filipino at that. In just four years, he’d fucked a hundred twenty-four women and thirty-one men.

  “Only that one in the cropped top,” Joaquin said. “I saw her checking me out a while ago.”

  “I’ve always wondered where you get your confidence,” I said.

  “You mean my cocksureness?” he said, a gleam in his eyes.

  “You’re such a dick.”

  “You know you love me.”

  He was neither a man nor boy, but a displaced person who couldn’t figure himself out, and nobody could quite figure out. Sometimes he spoke with fervor about things a five-year old might notice: a march of ants carrying off bits of rice, a cockroach on the sidewalk scurrying into a crack in the wall, or the funny way I talked with a lisp and walked with a limp. Other times he said things I needed to process for a minute before I could respond to, things a frail doddering grandpa would say, to random strangers in the park or to his children on his deathbed.

  In college, he’d sported a beard and reeked of marijuana in classes. He guzzled beer like a fish. He bought his own bike at seventeen and rode it at a breakneck speed. He composed songs and played his guitar, well into the wee hours of the morning, much to his roommates’ annoyance.

  In my journal, he waxed poetic and wrote, in characteristic dense handwriting, line after line of random musings, which I’d initially thought were culled from poems, some pretty morbid or just downright depressing, like ‘Things lost never find their way back.’ In some fit of ardor, just out of the blue, he’d quote Jack Kerouac or William Burroughs or sometimes even Buddha, or he’d lapse into a long meditative silence, and the hundred thoughts swirling in his head would be an alive thing between us, unreadable and out of reach.

  As well as
being ridiculously, head-turningly good-looking and dreamy, Joaquin always carried himself with a studied nonchalance, which worked wonders with girls and sent them giggling nervously and babbling despite themselves. Two mousy girls sitting on the grass near us, for instance, had been giving him weird kittenish looks this entire time, and before I knew it, they were all over him, and he was being interviewed for some project they had in Art Stud 2 or something.

  “What are the qualities you most like in a woman?” asked one of them, chewing her pen. Seriously, what did that have to do with art studies?

  “Perky breasts, clean ears, sexy mind,” he said. “And loyalty.”

  “What else?” asked the other one with the long girlish braids, clearly disappointed.

  “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe good skin. Good skin I can bite.”

  “Bite?”

  Joaquin unbuttoned the first three buttons on his shirt, pulled it back, and asked the girl to bite him on his shoulder. “Here, bite me here,” he said, pointing at a spot above his tanned pectoral. “You’ll know what I mean.”

  The girl looked weirded out for a second, then she shrugged her shoulders, leaned over, and very quickly bit him lightly. Then she laughed, and he laughed, too, and I didn’t know what just happened. There was a manic edge to the girl’s laughter I couldn’t identify, like all of a sudden she just lost it upstairs, and somehow it was Joaquin’s fault. After they’d left, I turned to him and asked, “Is there anyone who is in the least impervious to your charm?”

  “There’s this cashier at 7-Eleven who never once looks up at or greets me, probably even if I buy the whole store and lay it before her to ring up,” he said. “And of course, there’s you. A little.”

  Joaquin went on to read me Neruda’s Oda a la Tormenta, while I sat rigid against the tree, elbows on my knees, shoulders rounded. I rocked slightly and bent my head till it touched the tops of my knees, but I wasn’t crying, at least not yet. He stopped reading, and I could see him sitting frozen, thinking of his next move. We went on like this for a good half-hour. I was sure either he or I would speak, hesitantly at first, then in a minute we’d talk as if nothing had just happened, about everything under the sun other than what was wrong, or what had gone wrong.