Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 10

by Dean Francis Alfar

  But you get exactly one of these men as your suitor. It is not that you are hampas-lupa, but your job at the bank makes you look that way, when you compare it with his job. Which is, head of wealth mismanagement of Papa’s money.

  At his first attempt, you – what’s the word – make him basted. This causes him to redouble his offensive. Flowers and poems that you find equally offensive. The more you say no, the more he woos you. From the cheesy gifts, he shifts to materialistic ones. Jewelry and perfume that you find insulting. But he does not let up. Like he knows you have already fallen in love, and things are already beyond your control.

  You hate him. You hate him with all your heart. His smug, mestizo looks that could actually pass for Español. The height, the hair - susmaryosep! – the hair, the way he walks, everything. His Ivy League diploma. His friends who are just his clones, down to the clothes they wear – the branded and the bespoke – and the language they speak, SpanGlishTag or TagSpanGlish or EngSpanTag. Then there’s the patriarch and matriarch. You shudder at the thought that you will be like them in a few years’ time, living in that gaudy, palatial home with the maids and the pets.

  Having a family. You hate that thought, having none yourself, except some distant relative you know nothing about, other than rumors that he is a squatter living like a rat in the slums.

  “I hate you.” This, you say to his face. This sounds very wrong and very weird, for you have already fallen in love.

  Never be the jealous one – another one of your rules. So you try to play it cool. You do things that people in love do. Which is, to ignore what is happening in exchange for what, exactly, romance? You don’t understand any of it. You hate him with all your being one moment, and now, you love him with all your heart.

  What is even more difficult to understand is the bliss that comes with it. You meet Papa and Mama and the maids and the pets. There is something so ordinary about your future in-laws (for after all, you are a Maria, and holding hands should lead to marriage) that it is subtly sinister, and it’s neither the greased hair nor the over-the-top fragrance.

  Even the treatment of the housemaids is a non-event. There is neither physical nor verbal abuse – no favoritism, either, nothing of the sort that would make it obvious that one of the silent, subservient uniformed girls is the product of Papa’s loins. The only inhumane thing you can think of is that their uniforms are a bit matching with the curtains.

  After three more weekends, you concede that they welcome you.

  But perhaps the most difficult to understand about the whole situation of suddenly falling in love is this: he, the coño boy, is somehow happy with you. What the –, you ask yourself. What the –, indeed.

  It gets even more bizarre. For aren’t you supposed to be miserable? There should be nights of tears and abuse and shouting and alsa-balutan. He should give you a black eye. Maybe a swollen lip. Something you would be eager to explain away as slipping on the stairs, or walking into a glass door. You should be the battered woman. You should be suffering in silence, tears falling down your cheeks during rainy, moonless nights. You should be keeping a diary, in your handwriting that is so legible it borders on calligraphy. And this very same diary should be pilfered by someone, preferably one of the maids or in-laws.

  After a few more weeks, you find out– surprise, surprise! – there is no other woman. How long have you waited behind the door or by the corner wall, to hear him whisper precious declarations of lust and infidelity? How often have you searched his pockets, sniffed his clothes, opened his messages? How many sleepless nights have you suffered, waiting for him to talk in his sleep and moan another woman’s name? You even wish it could be one of the maids – the petite one who is quite the looker, even in the kukur uniform. You wish they were hatching a plan behind your back, something to do with love as much as money, like inheritance or land titles. These things are not totally implausible, what with you falling in love with a coño.

  But no. None of these come to pass, and truth be told, you, too, are happy. Yes, you are happy. Again, this just seems too easy. You try to be a martir, but how can you? Every moment with him is either a tableau of marital bliss at best, or domestic boredom at most.

  So you break this other rule. You strive to be jealous. Since the maids – oh, how you desperately wish it was one of the maids! – are already out of the question, you try to be jealous with yourself. For you should never be happy with him.

  You keep this jealousy inside, squeezing it into a fiery ball that you house within your womb. You let this jealousy grow into anger, and this anger into hate, and this hate into fiery, murderous rage that is bursting to be birthed.

  There is only one rule you haven’t broken yet.

  Never fall in love with someone who looks like you could kill him in a fight. This is the last rule you break. No, not the falling in love part. The fighting part. The killing part. Cariño brutal sounds like foreplay, compared to what you have in mind.

  “I love you,” you say to the one you love.

  Dagul

  YOUR STORY ENDS when you meet your untimely demise.

  You never see them coming – the twelve rods of rusting corrugated rebars that enter the windshield and head straight into your upper body, punching through the leather jacket (Of course you wear a leather jacket; you are a maton, aren’t you?) and your tight black shirt, into your flesh, your bones, penetrating even the driver’s seat, and the impalement continues toward the back.

  The car finally stops, and the agony begins. There is something in your ears, not exactly a ringing but more of a scraping, as if an excavation is happening inside your ear canals, as if someone is digging right through your brain. Your konsensya perhaps, although you doubt it. You don’t have a conscience. Not having one comes with sowing violence and reaping fear and being called ‘Dagul’.

  Your eyes dim. There is a heaviness that you feel, not in the lids that you will to open, but the weight is anchored in the seeing. You have to make an effort to see.

  The pain now takes a stranglehold of you. Everything hurts all at once, but what hurts the most is breathing. You attempt to shout, but no sound comes.

  You just keep what you are thinking to yourself. That this is it. This is the end. You would have preferred a shootout, so you could at least say something trite, something threatening, something both trite and threatening, with words like “‘bala’” or “‘impiyerno’”.

  Alexander Marcos Osias

  A Long Walk Home

  WALKING HOME is safer in the province.

  This is what Alisha tells herself, as she follows the damp path home from the poblacion. She also tells herself that she really had to stay, that it would have been rude to leave Melinda’s birthday party so early, that she wasn’t drunk, that leaving so late wouldn’t have been a problem if her sister had come to the province too, that she had a fully-charged cell phone, and that the barangay tanod had extra patrols out tonight anyway.

  She almost remembers why there are extra patrols, when she slips on a wet patch of soil and lands clumsily on her back.

  Her first thought is for her cell phone; her next thoughts are for her attire: skinny jeans, blouse, and dirt-road-friendly sandals; her last thoughts, before picking herself up off the ground, are for the pain in her right shoulder – she must have landed wrong.

  The cherry-red cell phone is pristine; it never fell from her grasp. However, she can feel the dampness of the thin layer of mud clinging to the back of her clothes. She needs to get home and change right away – perhaps Manang Ning can get any stubborn stains out. At least the pain in her shoulder is receding, ever so slowly.

  Alisha pushes herself to her feet and, shrugging her latest debacle off, strides purposefully down the path once more. It rises and dips for a goodly amount of walking time, before leveling out and turning sharply into the trees.

  She hesitates. There is menace in the air, strong enough to give her pause, yet vague enough to allow her to brush the irrational
sense of unease from her consciousness with several platitudes: it’s all in your mind, you’ve passed this way before, walking home is safer in the province.

  ZENDA AWAKENS TO the sound of a double beep from her midnight blue cell phone. She grumbles at the hour – 1:00 a.m., according to her radio alarm clock – before reaching to read the message. She expects it to be something simple, like: Safely at Manang Ning’s house or It was so much fun or I want to go home.

  She blinks several times, before she’s satisfied that she’s reading the message correctly.

  Help, says the message. I’m lost.

  Zenda mashes the buttons of her phone, in a furious attempt to call her sister.

  ALISHA FEELS HER phone vibrate in her hands, taps it, and quickly holds it to her ear. She hears her sister ask where she is, what happened, and why hasn’t she called Manang Ning; she struggles to relate a coherent answer.

  She babbles, about how the road that had seemed so straight in the daytime is now full of winding curves, about how the small copse of trees is now a thickening forest, about how her cell phone signal has become increasingly erratic, as she’s tried to make calls for help.

  Zenda, drawing on years of shared secrets, vicious arguments, and sibling shorthand, manages to decipher her sister’s flurry of half-crazed ramblings, and gives several curt imperatives: stay put, conserve the cell phone battery, and wait for her next call.

  When Zenda hangs up, Alisha looks at the screen of her cell phone and waits for it to ring again.

  ZENDA’S CALL TO Manang Ning’s landline is picked up after the first ring.

  Manang Ning’s voice screeches over the line, frantic and angry and expecting Alisha to answer. Zenda identifies herself , mumbles an apology for calling so late, and, with a few choice sentences, explains the dilemma that Alisha is in. Zenda tries to give Manang Ning Alisha’s number, but Manang Ning tells her that she’s tried it multiple times – all she gets is an annoyingly calm voice, telling her the number she’s dialed is out of the coverage area.

  Zenda implores her to try again.

  Manang Ning mumbles assent, and begins yelling at someone else before hanging up.

  Zenda immediately calls her sister again, but cannot connect. She repeats the attempt, and hears the sing-song voice of someone who is not her sister. She tries twice more, gives up, and begins to text a message.

  CALLED MANANG NING, says the message from Zenda. Why can’t I call you? Did you move? Stay put!

  Alisha smiles, blinks the tears from her eyes, and tries again to stop the traitorous rhythm of her feet, as she moves farther and farther away from the landmarks she knows. She fails.

  Low batt, she texts. Her phone has died every time she tried to answer an incoming call, but after each agonizingly long restart, it always claims to be fully charged. She doubts her phone, she doubts her senses, she doubts her sanity, and she revels in a surge of hope, when she sees the words Message sent appear on her cellphone screen.

  Just beyond the next bend in the crooked road ahead of her, a light flares, warm and welcoming. She grits her teeth, as her feet suddenly increase their insidious pace.

  With icy focus, she forces her thumbs to dance across her phone’s keypad. Pray for me, she types, and hits ‘send’.

  ZENDA IS ON her knees, in front of the crucifix above her bedroom door. She is reciting the Our Father, letting habit and muscle memory – ingrained by years of enforced prayer at church, school, and home – take over. She tries to focus on the meaning of the words in the prayer, tries to feel them in her heart, but her thoughts are constantly hijacked by worry and the nagging guilt that she should be doing something more.

  Then Zenda realizes that she’s stopped praying, and starts the Our Father once more, promising herself that after one Our Father, one Hail Mary, and one Glory Be, she will attempt another call to Manang Ning.

  Halfway through the Hail Mary, she receives a text that she steadfastly ignores, until she finishes her rushed prayers. Then she snatches the phone from the bed and reads it.

  Theres a house, it says.

  Don’t go in, she replies. She dials Manang Ning’s number, reminding herself to set it to autodial in the future.

  ALISHA WONDERS ONCE again why it takes so much effort to form a coherent thought, so much effort to will herself to remain seated on the tree stump, so much effort to remember how to spell words on her cell phone.

  It dies on her all the time now. She keeps turning it on, keeps forcing herself to look at the screen, keeps ignoring the towering two-storey nipa hut in front of her. It seems new and solidly built: its beams long and solid, its sides wide and immaculately woven from dried leaves and grasses.

  She gasps, as its tall capiz windows wash warm yellow light across her features.

  Her phone flickers, and she catches one word – Don’t – before the screen goes black.

  ROSARY IN HAND, Zenda begins on the last decade. She’d started with the Joyful Mysteries, until she’d remembered that it was already past midnight, that it was Tuesday, and therefore appropriate for the Sorrowful Mysteries. The last Sorrowful Mystery was the Crucifixion – an omen that Zenda pushed out of her mind with deliberate calm, before reciting the Our Father once more.

  And once she’s done, she reassures herself, she will call Manang Ning and everything will be fine.

  Even now, she tells herself, angels are somehow whispering into the ears of the people searching for Alisha, somehow guiding them down the paths that Alisha has walked in the starlit darkness, somehow pushing cell sites beyond their technical limits to penetrate whatever signal-starved forest her sister has been drawn into, somehow forcing connections between malfunctioning cell phones and landlines.

  Everything will be fine.

  SHE GLARES AT the house before her.

  She will not go in. The night is cold, and the house promises warmth; her stomach is empty, and the house promises food; her mind is tired, and the house promises rest and sleep and better times when she awakens.

  But she will not go in. She cannot recite prayers, she cannot scream for help, she cannot even remember her name, but she will not go in. She will cling to the stump, she will keep trying to switch her cell phone on, she will keep telling herself that she will not go in.

  There is a sound from behind her.

  She looks away from the house.

  Obscured by her own shadow and backlit by a trio of gas lanterns, there is a young man calling to her. She cannot understand his words, but hears the fear and suspicion in his voice.

  She mumbles a plea for help, struggling to shape her lips and tongue properly, but it comes out a garbled moan.

  He shouts and raises a bolo that has always been in his right hand. He is shaking his head and is coming at her swiftly now, every angle of his posture promising imminent violence.

  “AMEN,” SAYS ZENDA, her hand already reaching for her cell phone.

  SHE RAISES HER arms before her instinctively. In her right hand, her scarlet cell phone suddenly flares to life, scant inches before the oncoming blade of the bolo.

  ZENDA PUTS DOWN her cell phone. She wipes the tears from her eyes and smiles.

  She will wait for the men of the barangay tanod to bring her sister, from the abandoned house that they found her at, to Manang Ning’s house. She will wait for the priest and the doctor, already waiting at Manang Ning’s, to check on Alisha and pronounce her healthy and well. She will wait for Manang Ning to call her, to tell her everything that they know, and everything that will be done to bring her sister back home to Manila. Then she will finally talk to her sister and tell her that everything will be fine.

  And then she will kneel down before the crucifix once more, and pray the rosary until the sun rises on a new day.

  Alexander Marcos Osias is frequent explorer of many science fiction and fantasy worlds, both as a reader and a writer. His work has been published in The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, Diaspora Ad Astra, A Time for Dragons, InterNova: International
Science Fiction, Fast Food Fiction Delivery, and several Philippine Speculative Fiction volumes. He’s lived all over the world, including places like Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and the US. Now residing in the Philippines, he enjoys precious quality time (as much as Manila traffic allows) with his lovely wife and rambunctious son.

  Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

  Mene, Thecel, Phares

  DO NOT TOUCH me. I have no words left.

  Joseph stared at the words he’d written on the slate, but he could not remember writing them. He sat as still as the grave, watching the jaundiced afternoon sun filter through his garret’s only window.

  In the distance, he could see the lights from the dirigible towers, coming to life. A Locomotive Aerostatique was approaching the city, floating through the sky like a giant inflated spleen. Against the dying light, the airship was a monstrous shadow, an ominous black egg hatching weary crowds of nameless, faceless people, heroes and dragon fodder alike.

  Joseph hated Berlin at this dreary hour. When the Angelus came, the steam turbines discharged the day’s effluence into the upper atmosphere, turning the soft pink of twilight into a muddy river of gray. But of course this was Königreich Preußen, he thought, and there was no Angelus – just the sharp burst of cannon fire at 1800, signaling the end of the working day.

  “EXPERIENCE TEACHES US, no less clearly than reason, that men believe themselves free simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.”

  – Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order (1677)

  JOSEPH WAS BETWEEN lives. His family had spent big money to exile him to the University of Heidelberg.