“God, please give me enough time.”
He prayed over and over until an avalanche of water crashed over his head.
When Tito opened his eyes, he was holding Beth’s hand and the rosary between their fingers. His other hand held an opened bottle of tuba with the liquid a few inches from the opening. He remembered taking a swig of tuba before running to his daughter’s house a few streets away.
How did he get here? Tito wondered as he stood up.
The water was already ankle deep. No time to waste, he thought as he pulled his wife to her feet with both hands.
“Are they safe?” Beth asked as she wrapped the rosary around her wrist.
“Yes. I made sure,” Tito said before he took a last swig of tuba and dropped the bottle to the floor.
As they crossed the doorway to the sala, they heard the sound of crashing thunder from the East. The glass windows in their bedroom broke apart from the floodwater entering their house. Above the ceiling, the wind was tearing the roof apart like it was made of paper.
In the sala, the water was almost to their chests. Furniture and other objects floated around them, blocking their way to the front door.
Beth stumbled and her head dropped beneath the water. She was weak and did not know how to swim. Tito submerged to grab his wife with both arms underneath her armpits and haul her to the surface.
Beth gagged out several mouthfuls of water.
“I won’t leave you,” Tito said to his wife.
“You’ve been here the entire time.”
Beth forced a smile at her husband. It was the last amount of strength she could muster. Her head dropped back beneath the water. Tito grabbed her shirt at the back of her collar and pulled her head to the surface.
“Stay with me. I won’t ever let go,” he said to his wife. He dragged her several feet to the front door.
The front door was a sliding frame made of two-inch-thick hardwood. Tito always had difficulty forcing it open even with both hands. With one hand holding onto his wife, his task was made more difficult with floodwater already up to his chest and steadily rising. He drew on the warm tuba still inside him as he gathered all of his strength to pull on the handle and slide the door to the side.
It took Tito several seconds to open the door, more time than it usually took. Only the screen door barred the way outside. He pushed forward, shoving the screen door away from him while his other arm pulled his wife through the open doorway.
We’re out!
Tito wanted to scream in relief and exhaustion as he waded toward the front gate several feet away. The current had already forced it open. He glanced back at his wife, whom he was dragging by the collar of her shirt. Her head was bowed down, eyes closed, her face bobbing up and down the water that was already neck-deep.
Stay with me, he wanted to shout at her as he pulled his wife closer to him.
Only a little while longer until we reach higher ground, Tito wanted to assure his wife.
He wanted Beth to smile at him, to give him strength, but her face floated listlessly in the water as if she had already drowned.
No, this can’t be happening!
Tito raged within. Anger strengthened his resolve to keep pushing forward and reach higher ground to save his wife.
Without the walls of their house to weaken the current, the floodwaters carried Tito and Beth to the neighbors’ house across their own. They rammed into the metal fence in front of their neighbors’ house with such force that Tito grimaced in pain. Yet the impact was not enough to make him lose his grip on his wife. He would not let go. He could not let go. She could still be saved.
Only a while little longer until they reached higher ground, Tito assured himself.
The current pushed them along the fence to the corner of the neighbors’ lot. Tito’s feet were no longer touching the ground. Only the metal fence kept the current from carrying them out to the open where they would surely be lost.
His fingers traced the pointed arrowheads marking the top of the fence. Tito inched forward with his wife in tow. Reaching the corner of the house, he saw his neighbors taking shelter on a second-storey terrace. Their house was a bungalow for the most part except for a second-storey terrace visible from the outside.
From several feet away, two of his neighbors saw Tito struggling against the current. They saw him holding onto his wife whose face was already buried beneath the water. They shouted and gestured with their hands for Tito to try to reach them.
“Let go! Let go!”
The neighbors shouted at Tito to let go of his wife for he was in danger of being swept away while holding onto her lifeless body. Tito heard their pleas but he did not listen. He had made a promise to Beth. He would never let go no matter what.
The cold embraced Tito except for a tiny ember of warmth in his chest, the last memory of the tuba he had drunk earlier. He still had strength remaining to save his wife even if it cost him his own life. He spit out the floodwater entering his mouth and he pulled his wife’s head above the water.
His neighbors tied a makeshift rope made out of knotted blankets to the railing of the terrace. They threw the other end to Tito. It landed a foot from Tito, an infinite space from his fingertips.
If he could only grab the rope with his hand, he could haul his wife over to his neighbors and to safety. Tito reached for the rope. Its end brushed his fingertips. He reached again. He grabbed the edge of the rope.
Now for Beth, Tito thought. He pulled his wife closer to him so that the neighbors could grab her and haul her to the terrace.
All this time, the merciless current kept pushing and pulling at the two of them, threatening to drag them out to the open. It was a tug of war between him and nature as Tito drew on the last remaining strength in his body. He wanted to swing Beth over to him so he could grab the rope more firmly and then the neighbors could pull the two of them to safety.
The cold swallowed all warmth within Tito as he made one last attempt to pull his wife to him. But the current was too strong. It tore Beth from his grasp and carried her away beneath the floodwaters.
No!
Tito whimpered as he saw his wife’s body dragged away and disappear from sight.
All is lost, he thought.
His neighbors’ cries brought him back. He remembered that he was still holding onto the edge of the rope. His neighbors shouted while motioning to him. “Wrap the rope around your arm so we can pull you up.”
Tito tried to do so but all strength had left his body. All the warmth in his chest had gone the instant the current tore his wife from his grasp. He could not hold on any longer.
The storm surge pried his fingers from the rope and carried him away like it did his wife.
When Tito opened his eyes, he was lying on the shore a few feet from the edge of the water. He could not believe he had survived.
The sky was overcast, yet sunlight streamed through an opening in the clouds to where he was. Warmth suffused his entire body. It was similar to the sensation after drinking tuba yet the warmth was not limited to his chest and his stomach. His entire body felt light and he felt strong, as strong as when he rushed to his daughter’s house earlier to save them from the storm.
Beth? Where is my wife? He thought out loud.
Tito sat up and looked around him. His wife was already walking toward him along the edge of the shore. Beth was smiling. She was barefoot.
Tito wanted to cry but instead his mouth widened into a toothy smile. Somehow his dentures were still inside his mouth. They had not been carried away during the storm surge.
The thought was so silly that he broke into uncontrollable laughter. He was still laughing when his wife reached him. Tito stood up, laughing the entire time. Beside him, Beth laughed with her husband.
They were alive. His daughter and grandson were alive. Everyone in the other house was alive. Everything was all right in the world.
He looked around them. They had been carried all the way to the West, t
oward Cancabato Bay. It was about 800 meters from their house to the Western coastline. It was a miracle that they had not been carried out to sea where they would surely have been lost.
His daughter and grandson’s home was the last house on the main street. The main street led from the guardhouse all the way to the edge of the pavement a few meters beyond his in-laws’ perimeter fence. About 500 meters more from the end of the concrete, the sea lapped at the shore where Tito and Beth were standing.
The wind was still strong, but it had weakened to the point that debris no longer flew through the air. For Tito and Beth, the wind was little more than a gentle breeze compared to the tempest earlier that tore the metal roof of their house.
Tito and Beth held hands as they walked toward their in-laws’ house. The entire landscape around them was covered in mud and littered with debris. The water had completely receded so the only remnants of the flood were trapped in small puddles on the ground beyond the pavement. On the way, they passed a damaged SUV that had gotten caught in a tangle of fallen trees and other debris. They thought that the vehicle had come from inside their in-laws’ driveway.
Once they were in view of their in-laws’ driveway, they realized they were mistaken. The front gates guarding the driveway were still intact. They were made of metal grills so the floodwater only passed between the bars. Their in-laws’ two SUVs were still inside the driveway, bearing dents, deep gouges, and broken windows. These injuries were sustained from the vehicles repeatedly banging against each other during the storm surge. Tito and Beth hoped everyone in their in-laws’ house was in better shape than the vehicles trapped inside the driveway.
They walked to the smaller gate for pedestrians beside the wider gate for the vehicles. To their surprise, the bell, an actual metal bell, in front of the gate was still intact.
Tito ran the bell once.
The sound was clear and resolute. It was Tito’s signature bell ring whenever he and his wife walked over from their house a few streets away. After ringing the bell once, they only needed to wait less than a minute before the front door opened. Once inside, they would see their daughter, Jackie, and their grandson, Mito, once again.
A minute passed. Nobody opened the door. Tito decided to enter the house with his wife.
After passing through the front door, they saw that the entire first floor was covered in mud and debris. Mud had reached the ceiling. All of the windows had grinning cavities where glass used to be.
The stairs were to their right after entering the front door. Tito and Beth climbed the stairs to the second floor.
There were two sets of rooms on the second floor. The rooms facing East where the storm had come no longer had ceilings. These rooms opened to empty skies framed by torn roofing. The rooms facing West still had ceilings and most of the roofing above them was intact. It was in one of these rooms that his daughter’s family and their in-laws’ had taken refuge during the storm.
Tito and Beth heard two voices coming from the room facing the stairs. The first voice, their daughter’s, was talking softly to Mito, trying to calm him down. The second voice, their son-in-law’s, was reassuring their daughter, saying that her parents were all right. Tito and Beth wanted to tell them the good news. They were all right after all.
Tito and Beth followed the voices to a bathroom inside the room. Mito, their grandson, was in his mother’s arms, crying and pointing to where his grandparents were standing. Jackie, their daughter, paced back and forth. She tried to shush him, saying that the storm was over. They were safe. Beside them, Miggy, their son-in-law, rubbed Jackie and Mito’s backs, trying to calm the both of them.
“We’re all right,” Tito and Beth told their daughter.
The others did not seem to hear them except for Mito. He was crying and pointing in their direction.
Miggy heard his mother’s voice calling him from the top of the stairs. He stepped out of the room. Tito and Beth followed him but remained just beyond the doorway. His parents spoke to Miggy in hushed tones.
“I’ll tell Jackie what happened. You hold her,” Miggy’s father told him.
“I’ll be the one to carry Mito,” Miggy’s mother said.
Only then did realization dawn on Tito and Beth.
Both looked at their hands, whole yet luminescent as the morning sun. Both looked at each other, nodding in acceptance.
Their eyes narrowed slightly in sadness. Beth looked like she wanted to cry, but all tears had left their bodies. Only warmth remained.
Miggy and his parents entered the room. In the bathroom, Mito had fallen asleep and was resting contentedly on his mother’s shoulder. Jackie looked at the people entering the bathroom, worry on her face.
“Don’t worry. We’re all right,” Tito told his daughter.
“We’ll send word to you and your brothers from heaven,” Beth told her firstborn child.
Tito and Beth looked at each other. They smiled, grasping each other’s hands with tenderness. They would never have to let go of each other ever again.
Tito remembered his first childhood in Navotas and his second childhood in Tacloban, where he spent almost every day with his grandson. Beth’s smile widened as her husband’s memories washed over both of them like the emerging light of dawn.
As Tito and Beth looked up, their feet left the ground. The last to vanish were the smiles on their faces.
This story is dedicated to my parents-in-law, Augusto Z. Santos and Elizabeth Cecilia R. Santos, who were swept away during the storm surge of Typhoon Yolanda.
About the Authors
Nikki Alfar has earned a few Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, a couple of Bewildering Stories Mariner Awards, a Manila Critics’ Circle National Book Award, and selection as one of twelve ‘Filipina writers of note’ by the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings. Her fiction has been published and podcast in her native Philippines and abroad (there’s an updated bibliography on her Facebook timeline), including her single-author collection Now, Then, and Elsewhen (UST Publishing), and her children’s book Menggay’s Magical Chicken (Lampara Books). Her short story “Bearing Fruit” was named one of the best short fiction pieces of 2010, in Lois Tilton’s roundup for Locus magazine.
She’s a proud founding member of the LitCritters writing group, has been a fellow at the University of the Philippines National Writers’ Workshop as well as a judge for the Palanca and Philippines Free Press literary awards, and more often than not co-edits the critically-acclaimed annual anthology series Philippine Speculative Fiction. She’s also edited the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler (Flipside Publishing) and co-edited The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2005–2010 (UP Press).
The rest of the time, she folds origami compulsively, smokes like a chimney, attempts various forms of ballroom dancing, and tries to cook ever more imaginative suppers for her husband and their daughters Sage and Rowan.
“When We Were Witches” was first published in the Philippines Free Press on November 12, 2011.
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is the award-winning author of nine books, including When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, Magdalena, Vigan and Other Stories, Acapulco at Sunset and Other Stories, Philippine Woman in America, Woman With Horns and Other Stories, Cecilia’s Diary 1962–1968, Fundamentals of Creative Writing, and Out of Cebu: Essays and Personal Prose. She edited four books: Growing Up Filipino I and II, Fiction by Filipinos in America, Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America, and Magnificat: Mama Mary’s Pilgrim Sites. Cecilia co-edited six books, including Journey of 100 Years: Reflections on the Centennial of Philippine Independence; Behind the Walls: Life of Convent Girls Ala Carte: Food and Fiction, and Finding God: True Stories of Spiritual Encounters. She has also co-authored a novel titled Angelica’s Daughters, a Dugtungan Novel.
Her official website is over at www.ceciliabrainard.com. She has a blog at http://cbrainard.blogspot.com.
“Pilar Echeverria: Novel Excerpt” is Copyright 2013 by Cecilia M. Brainard.
Dan Campbell’s work has appeared in Kaleidotrope, Interfictions, Goblin Fruit, Niteblade, Bête Noire, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, and Daily Science Fiction. He edits poetry for Bull Spec magazine and ruminates on LJ at art-ungulate.livejournal.com.
“Where Sea and Sky Kiss” was originally published in Daily Science Fiction on October 4, 2011.
Karissa Chen is the author of the chapbook Of Birds and Lovers (Corgi Snorkel Press, 2013). Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Good Men Project, Necessary Fiction, and Eclectica Magazine, and will be anthologized in All About Skin: An Anthology of Short Fiction by Award-Winning Women Writers of Color (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). She is a VONA/Voices fellow and has received scholarships from The Napa Valley Writers Conference. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, she is currently the fiction and poetry editor at Hyphen magazine and a founding editor of Some Call It Ballin’.
“X” is original to this anthology.
Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz is a Palanca Award-winning author who teaches literature and creative writing at the University of the Philippines Mindanao. Her first book, Women Loving. Stories and a Play, was published by Anvil Publishing, Inc. and De La Salle University in 2010. She is the president of the Davao Writers Guild.
“Flash Forward” was first published in Dagmay Literary Folio, October 2011.
Lillian Csernica has published stories in DAW’s Year’s Best Horror Stories XXI, 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Insatiable, Sorcerous Signals, and Midnight Movie Creature Feature 2. She has also published an historical romance novel, Ship Of Dreams.
She has written nonfiction in the field of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. She has been a columnist for Speculations, writing “The Fright Factory” and “The Writer’s Spellbook.” Her controversial column of literary criticism and short fiction reviews, “The Penny Dreadful Reader,” ran in the print edition of Tangent, earning praise from such leading lights of the field as editor Ellen Datlow. She continues to review short horror fiction for Tangent Online.
OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Page 56