OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology

by Dean Francis Alfar

  Once I read a news item about a Chinese orphan who was abandoned because she was born with her internal organs growing on the outside of her body, unprotected by skin or bone. I’ve started imagining Paul’s heart was like this, beating raw and thickly outside of his ribcage. Somewhere in the course of our marriage, he pushed against this, pressed the organ firmly back into his bones. I’m sure it was difficult for him. I keep picturing his heart growing more purple and bruised with each successive beat.

  I suppose when his mistress came along, he felt relief.

  I wasn’t trying to hide anything from him. I wish he knew that.

  #

  I forgot to say that Paul’s ex-mistress is a singer. She stopped performing once she had the child, but that’s how Paul met her, at some cabaret club where she regularly sang. Once, after he’d already left me, I snuck into the club. The walls stank of stale beer, and I immediately hated the place. I sat in the back and waited through two mediocre acts before she came on. At first, I laughed to myself. She was short, not particularly pretty, a little chubby in the arms. Her makeup was a little too heavy. She was younger than me, this was true, but I had been prettier.

  It was after the first song that I saw what must have electrified Paul. She was like him. It was in the way her voice swelled, like it was wrenched out from her toes. By the time she took a water break, I felt all my previous pettiness held no salt.

  I sat through her entire set. I even tipped her.

  #

  The lights just flickered, though the machines are still beeping and wheezing. Paul’s eyes don’t even twitch. I stare at him in his sleep and wonder if he dreams when medicated. It would be a waste for him to live out the last of his days in complete darkness.

  I want to hold his hand. It’s mottled green and purple from all the needles and IVs. My mother once told me you could tell somebody’s true age from their hands. Paul’s pale crinkled fingers look nothing like his true age though. In my fatted palm, they call up a contrast that belies our five-month age difference. They’re too cold. I call the nurse and ask for another blanket. She tells me his circulation is poor and it can’t be helped. I’m the one with poor circulation in my extremities, I want to tell her. “You know what they say,” Paul used to joke. “Cold hands, warm heart.”

  I wonder if he ever told his mistress that I was a cold-blooded bitch because he never saw me cry. I wonder if that’s something they used to laugh about together.

  #

  After the Nostradamus man, there were a slew of boring lovers who asked nothing of me and so I asked nothing of them back. I had gotten to an age where frequent casual sex was the norm—married, unmarried, divorced—it was all the same to me. Then for a little while I slept with a musician who was fifteen years younger than me. He was beautiful and sweet, in his early thirties, still hoping to make it big with the release of his third CD, still holding out hope that once he’d made it, he could finally afford a mortgage, three dogs, a couple of golden-haired children. It was all I could do to nod and smile supportively. After a few months, I left him for a man in his sixties, the president of some financial services company who was twice-divorced with two children out of college. He liked me enough, and maybe he would have even let me be his third wife, except then Rob called, and now it’s been months since I’ve returned the divorcé’s messages.

  #

  At around twelve, I began to believe I’d been cursed with a telekinesis with which I made terrible things happen. This was before Carrie came out, although I was reminded of my childhood fear when I saw the movie years later. Like any kid, I sometimes entertained spiteful thoughts when I was upset, but it seemed the world somehow had a way of resolving things for me. Once I’d been jealous when a girl in my class adopted a new puppy; three weeks later, it ran away. Another time I’d gotten angry at my father for not letting me go to a friend’s house, and the next day he got into a minor fender bender. I was positive I wished bad things into existence just by putting thoughts out into the universe, so I tried my best to control myself. I practiced at night when I lay in bed, learning to turn a switch off whenever I started to think anything unkind. I became adept at blanking out when normally I would have a reaction. Eventually though, I grew up and out of this superstition.

  #

  Paul was the one who wanted the children, to be honest. He wanted them more than anything else in the world. He wanted a large family, like the one he came from. I think if he could have birthed them himself, he would have.

  The first one stuck around the longest, long enough for us to know the sex and give it a name, long enough for me to quit my job and for Paul to paint the bedroom with clouds. He talked to it all the time, so it would know his voice when it came out. “It’s unfair,” he said to me. “Babies know their mothers instinctively, because of the heartbeat or something. But us fathers have to work at it.” He whistled so much in those days, kissed me so often. When I woke up startled every night, the first thing he did was rub his palms over my belly.

  The three that came after that first one clung on with decreasing ferocity, like they knew there was no point in even trying.

  #

  Some men came in and taped the windows with giant rolls of duct tape. The crack and whine of the tape as they pulled huge X’s across the glass made me wince. Of course Paul noticed nothing. I tried to make a joke to the men, about how it would be ironic if after all the chemo and surgery and drugs, Paul died because a window pane shattered over him. They looked at me strangely, did not find me funny. I thought being related to someone dying meant I was allowed to make jokes in poor humor. Then again, “ex” anything probably doesn’t count as a relation. If anything, “ex” is the opposite of being something to somebody. I look at the giant windows, crossed out like a five-year-old’s idea of death. There’s very little difference between an “ex” and an “X” I now see. X means no more. No longer. Stay out. Stop. X marks the spot where everything ends.

  #

  I walked the entire length of Manhattan on the day Paul moved his things out of our apartment. It was brisk outside, late October; cold enough to require a heavier coat, but not so cold that movement couldn’t warm my limbs. Even before Paul left, I’d enjoyed strolling the streets alone. I liked being alone in a crowd. It was in the almost touching, the thought of molecules rubbing in the space between two strangers. That day, I walked for over six hours, first down to the tip of the island, and then up to the George Washington Bridge and its little red lighthouse, where I sat and remembered that once Paul and I had picnicked here after a bike ride. The river was still and glassy.

  When I came home, the apartment was quiet. I felt relief. There’s a difference between the silence that exists because sound doesn’t, and the silence that hovers humidly like a storm that hasn’t yet hit. It’s a difference in density.

  In fact, I reasoned aloud, now there would be less silence. I could have conversations with myself out in the open, instead of stifling them for fear of pushing into Paul’s world.

  I tried that for a while, talking to myself. But it made me feel crazy. I couldn’t even tell if the things I told myself were true or just things to say. I didn’t know whether to address myself in first person or second person. Speaking seemed suddenly dangerous and uncertain. So I don’t do that anymore.

  #

  If we’d had a child, Paul would have been an excellent father. He would have been the kind to make every single school play, piano recital, baseball game. He would have stayed up late helping our child glue macaroni on poster board or fashion parachutes for cardboard egg cradles or whip up terrible cookies for a bake sale. Our child would have learned to ride a bicycle by age five despite living in the city and would have cultivated an appreciation for jazz by seven. They never would have fought. Our child would have confided in him about girls or boys. Our child would have loved him, idolized him. And right now, our child would be by his bedside, terrified at the thought of being left alone.

  #


  The problem with slow death is that you tell yourself there’s time. You believe there is a chance to reverse the process, to cauterize the wounds. The problem with slow death is that no time is ever the right time to confront it. Even as something is disintegrating in front of you, you find reason to look away. You even find reason to believe this is all for the best.

  The first day I came in to see Paul was too close to the end. He looked surprised to see me. “Who told you?” he wanted to know. His voice was accusing. Then: “Are you here to gloat?”

  I should have set him straight then. I should have told him I was not who he thought I was.

  Instead I told him about the weather. I told him about the sludge of winter finally draining away, the first tulips appearing on the central dividers on Park Avenue. I told him about the silly girls in their tank tops in fifty degree weather, the kind of girls we used to make fun of. I told him about the lightening of days. The occasional rain.

  “You haven’t changed,” he said when I was finished, the fight out of his voice.

  Was I supposed to have changed? He was the one dying, not me.

  #

  The windows tremble, but Paul still doesn’t wake. The amount of morphine running through his veins is constant and high, and the truth is, I have little reason to believe he will ever wake again. “It could happen,” the doctor told me yesterday with caution in his voice, “but lucidity is unlikely.”

  I don’t have the gift of that heart, I would tell Paul if he woke to its red beat against his stomach.

  I touch his chest and feel the pulse knocking against my palm. I close my eyes and imagine the windows pushed so hard they burst, indistinguishable from rain. I imagine a funnel of glass and water cycling through the room, gathering up the equipment, the magazines, the bed sheets, the paper cups, Paul, me, sweeping us out into the darkness of branches and asphalt and storm and river. I imagine Paul floating in his hospital gown, leads and tubes and wires drifting behind him like tentacles. I imagine trailing in his wake, my hand beating with his still warm heart. And I imagine all of these lines of life entwining in a helix, the two of us together, drowning in the night sky.

  Cunning Synchronicity

  By Berrien C. Henderson

  A.D. 20—

  No one knows when it happened because history died. Perhaps the plasma TV’s flickering off in a Manhattan loft when the owner turned his head, then back on when he turned around. Some game, innocent enough.

  Or maybe it came with a businesswoman’s PDA, rearranging its own keystroke inputs while refusing to be touch-sensitive to the crippled data-stylus or her invasive, twice-weekly manicured fingertips.

  It moved and grew with rough-shuffling pace to more mischievous design: the rob scooter that front-braked on a downhill grade and threw a ten-year-old to the curb, the sensor-laden revolving door at the Marriott deciding to crunch an elderly gentleman’s cane.

  Viral evolution gave sway to fiendish intent: a pilot’s holoverlays superimposed themselves astigmatically. Human error, some said. They found him spread across a field where kids fought Kurzweilian virtua-battles for their latest World History 1 project.

  From the A(AI)P: U.S. Military Predator Drones Coordinate Friendly Fire Fiasco with Reapers

  or

  Kyoto Kitties Give Burlesque Virtual Hello.

  Oh, and much, much more as history whimpered down against what became the Turvingross Constants, an exponential series of incidents of machine software awakenings, high-gradient epiphanies, sentient spikes soon blooming like red algae along a panhandle beach (and now we know how those damned fish felt).

  A simple bug-out kit for yours truly, a neo-Luddite exodus from cities and away from hubs and nodes in decades-old clothes that can’t think for themselves and with a few novels tucked in my pockets as survival guides against the cunning synchronicity of snickering bots and sneering evolved algorithms as FATAL ERROR pop-ups mocked my egress.

  Godsend

  By Joel Pablo Salud

  The remote town of Santo Niño was hardly the village that stirred the senses. Its sleepy mornings were breached only by the pensive wings of seagulls, the pounding of coconuts along its only narrow road, and the half-hearted gait by which the sallow sun leaves its steps among the rocks that line the coast.

  In the evening, along a nearby fishing village, pinpricks of light peppered the waves. It attracted whatever was left of the young schools of fish that wandered off the safety of the corals. Each day the villagers received from an untamed sea their modest wages as harvesters of the deep, resting time and again from the daunting chore by feeding, resting, and making love. It was to preserve the peace that a Castilian garrison with its towering fort proudly loomed over the coastline town, like a brooding warden over its captives, on guard against anything and anyone who wished to disarm its claim over the islands. The lordly Easterly winds would ever so often rip the calm on which the town owed its continuum.

  But when the brightest star of the East suddenly appeared above the small, unassuming populace when there were none in previous centuries, dazzling and effervescent in the thick of a cloud-ravaged night, the young Father Clemente knew their once taciturn existence would leap frontward in a frenzy of activity. He had read much on the subject of the prophesied Star of the East among the banned manuscripts hidden away in the dusty shelves of the church’s library. He risked night after night of what could be his one chance at being hailed as a true scholar of the Church. His youthfulness had much to learn about the subterfuge and intricacies of dogma. It was without paradox that all things anathema somehow had the infinitesimal flavor of honey in it, thus the excitement of each mute and sinful discovery.

  The commonplace townsfolk, on the other hand, was never of the mind to venture far into wisdoms inexplicable. The enduring legend of the day—that a holy child, much in the same manner as the Redeemer from Bethlehem—would be born on the day of the ocean’s grand yearly harvest. The one distinction was that thunder and lightning will follow the infant’s heels, enfolded by a half-lit moon, haloed by a ray of light more cherubic than it was real. It was to save the people from so dire a poverty that the condition can only be portrayed as the beastly appetite of a marauder. The child was said to be the redeeming light from which the darkness of colonial brutality would have no other choice but to flee. They believed and took the prophecy to heart simply with the faith of the innocent.

  With the appearance of the star, at last, the day of redemption has arrived.

  Gazing upward into a heavy swathe of clouds, Father Clemente reached for his cape and hat and rushed to his brothers at the Cathedral of San Ildefonso. “My brothers! Wake up! Open your eyes! We have been blessed to witness the coming of the God-Child! Wake up, my brothers! Our waiting is finally over, our prayers have been answered! We must take our leave of the morning vigil and hurry to the place of his birth! Take whatever is valuable to you and let us offer them as gifts! Please rise up my brothers! Let us hurry!”

  Fathers Julian and Melensio rubbed their eyes as they stretched arms and legs on the concrete slab. It was a cold, hard floor of polished granite mixed with limestone. Yet these were never more comfortable than what once had been a ductile bed of parched leaves. “The roosters have yet to feel the heat of a newborn day on their beaks!” Father Julian, the elderly scholar among the three, spat from his mouth without so much as looking at the young priest. “We have stayed till the wee hours in prayer, my brother Clemente. As God is my witness, my throat is still sore from the incessant chanting. You better have good reason to disturb our sleep!”

  “He’s right, Father Clemente,” the soft-spoken elderly Father Melensio added while he stumbled to reach for his bifocals. “The Lord of Hosts tenderly warms the faces of His creatures first before waking them up a new day! God never disturbs a man quite so unpriestly as you have now done. What in heaven’s good name is going on?”

  “I have seen the prophesied Star of the East!” the young priest said,
wide-eyed in unspeakable wonder. “The prophecy of the new redeemer—the island’s redeemer—has come to pass! I have heard the voice of Mahlik the Seer and he is calling on everyone to pay homage to the child. I have taken the liberty of bringing what is valuable in this church—the gold chalice, the gem-studded crown of the Virgin Mother, the consecrated waters from the river! Please, let us hurry!”

  Among the red dahlias at the far end of the patio of the Church’s upper floor, Father Julian instinctively relieved himself while holding up the hem of his priestly garment. “Have you gone totally mad, young priest? Hasn’t it occurred to you that those you call valuables are holy, and that they belong to this Church? What nonsense are you up to?”

  Father Julian croaked with a tinge of irritation. “Father Clemente, let me tell you about this supposed Child-God you just mentioned. It is, by the word of the Church, a mere fable among the townsfolk of the village, nothing more. There is no truth to this idiotic tale. The story was first told at the turn of a long-gone century, in 1499, among the Gentile fishermen in the villages along the coast. It’s the product of a simpleton’s imagination inebriated with local wine. He was said to have written a manuscript about a child’s coming birth with the appearance of a bright star while he was engulfed in wine and his own vomit! It’s already 1899, and we are now a colony of Spain! The world is on the verge of an industrial revolution over and beyond what that little tin for a brain of yours could ever imagine. Look around you. We have faster horse-drawn carriages, marvelously designed architecture, advances in science and medicine, and books on all subjects! We now have ships that traverse vast oceans! I was even told about this ingenious contraption whereby you and I can travel long distances without having to gasp in horror because of the mounds of dung horses left behind! It’s a brave new age, my brother, one that would change the course of history, politics, even religion! Why do you let your confidence in the one true God be tested in this manner?”