“Right about what?”
“She really is the mother of his child.”
Everyone turned to my grandmother, with the usual solemn look on her face. She opened her mouth as if to speak but no words emerged. I peered into her cloudy eyes, drawn wide with disbelief as the harrowing truth sank in. The shock and sorrow of having to deal with an unmarried affair—plus scores and generations of bastard grandchildren and great-grandchildren, human status yet undetermined—had stabbed her straight through the heart and silenced her.
NO ONE HAD the heart to tell my grandmother when the news became official.
An autopsy ruled out any suspicion of foul play or suicide. The attending doctors mentioned some alien disease which crept like lightning, suffocating the heartbeat and snuffing out life in seconds. Some pioneering Spanish doctor named Pedro Brugada had meticulously mapped out its intricate technicalities, by wonder of research, but even his notable expertise—plus the numerous electrical shocks delivered beneath garish fluorescent lights—proved insufficient to save my Uncle from his own mortality.
That day, Inday was nowhere to be found, but no one was shocked. No one questioned her whereabouts, either, save for the glum-faced, guileless gardener who wanted to ask her permission to take home some of Uncle’s beloved bonsai, in his loving memory. Some thought the ghosts of the ancestors banished her to the portals of damnation for her insolence, while others believed that Uncle’s loss pushed her over the edge and finally made her lose her mind. A few malicious theories even abounded, comparing her to “a wily felon fleeing the crime scene, looking uncannily bewildered.” Whatever the case, most agreed that we were actually better off without her. For the first time since Inday’s inopportune arrival in my grandmother’s household, First Aunt looked especially relieved, and she could be heard jovially humming along to jukebox hits on the radio, no doubt comforted by the thought that she could finally eschew a month-long ritual of painstakingly chopping garlic and avoiding her own grisly reflection in mirrors, as though they might strangle her.
“I always thought she would leave anyway. Eventually, at least,” Mother commented while drafting an obituary for the local newspaper. “It’s just a matter of time.”
It was therefore to everyone’s astonishment when Inday showed up during the funeral, clad in a plain black dress and an antiquated lace veil that shrouded her misty eyes. Her luxuriant hair, not anymore tied in a bun, waved in the wind and fell freely to her shoulders. During the long march towards the cemetery, she walked on with her gaze fixed at the muddy ground, heavy feet bouncing off the earth freshly slaked with an afternoon drizzle, her diminutive figure occasionally obscured by the montage of pungent flowers and condolatory messages from kith and kin who wished they “could be present in these difficult times but couldn’t make it due to unforeseen circumstances.” The dull glimmer of funereal bulbs reflected our collective grief, a ghastly specter of bleary faces and swollen eyelids, gaunt and scruffy from refusing to sleep or swallow any more sorrow.
“What is she doing here?” First Aunt furiously hissed, albeit a little too loudly, even as she brushed off the angry tears that blotched the makeup on her rotund face.
My younger sister who trailed behind Inday, meanwhile, had an oddly strained look on her face, as if expecting her to grow fangs at any moment or sprout hideous bat-like wings then fly off into the distance with a full moon serving as backdrop. Now and then, she would teeter on tiptoe and survey the gloomy faces around her—slightly perplexed at how everyone seemed alive and well, with no signs of twin bites on their necks, or worse yet, their livers torn into unrecognizable morsels.
“You’ve been watching too many horror movies,” I rebuked her as the funeral dirge softened to a nadir, the mournful party arriving to a stop in front of the damp grave site.
From this point onwards, the series of events that took place have been described as both tumultuous and unreal. There were several contradictory elements in the testimonies of disputed witnesses, a missed detail here and there, but the format of their accounts contained a general consistency, with all of them agreeing that the chaos evoked an inexplicable, unflinching sense of dejà vu somewhere in their personal histories. As the coffin was lowered to the ground, there was a hue and a cry as horrified bystanders saw Inday dash forward, shove off some of the dazed pallbearers and hug the casket hysterically, crying, “My husband! My husband!” even as others attempted to pluck her off in vain. She flailed her arms dangerously, refusing to budge or let go.
“Don’t you dare! Don’t any of you dare! Do you know that I am his wife?”
One petrified onlooker described it as a scene yanked straight out from a Lino Brocka classic—“a youngish Nora Aunor at the brink of widowhood, driven mad with suffering—only there were no miracles.” Her more religious companion, however, claimed that it resembled more a vulgar pastiche of biblical times—“like a boorish, weepy Mary at Calvary,” even as she hastily made a sign of the cross, clutched her rosary close to her chest, and mumbled a quick prayer of forgiveness for using the Virgin’s name in vain. At that precise moment, lightning flashed and thunder clapped, and rain blasted down, hard and heartless, scattering the column of numbed mourners.
“What happened?” Mother asked one of the pallbearers as she scampered with the rest of my aunts towards the overhang of the nearest mausoleum for shelter, shivering and dripping wet.
“She ran off.”
“Disappeared? Just like that?”
“Yes. Vanished. Took the child with her.”
“I think she must have left for good.”
“Do you think she’ll return?”
“If you’d ask me, this might be the last time we’ll ever see of her.”
MEMORY HAS ITS way of spanning the unforgotten years, winding back to you in splinters. Each rusty fragment inhabits the peripheries of our existence, growing sallow with obscurity, the lonely slivers dwindling to our last vulnerable leavetakings.
At First Aunt’s behest, Uncle’s room was to be tidied and torn down. She said it harbored far too many memories—memories so painful “they could shatter her heart in two, like a dreadful earthquake.” The antique bed was to be stripped of its sheets and sold, the hardwood furniture to be repainted and upholstered, the velvet curtains to be taken out and washed. With the afternoon sun streaming in from the drab windows, I casually made my way into the room, tracing a film of dust that had settled on the shabby walls, wondering how much unanswered mysteries it contained.
And then I saw it.
I blinked once, and then twice, and swallowed hard. It couldn’t have been, I half-murmured to myself, feeling an unusual pounding in my ears. There, at the far right corner of the room, half-tucked beneath a moldy mattress and a pile of termite-eaten wooden planks, one beholds her, serene and spotless: a miniature statue of our Lady of Sorrows.
Mater Dolorosa.
I walked over and pulled out the figurine. Other than a chipped nose and peeling layers of paint in disparate places, she was perfect. She wore a haunting cloak of the finest brocade, her milky hands clasped in profound prayer, the virginal crown on her head a symbol of her immaculate glory. And yet her tender face brimmed of an unspoken agony: sad mouth tightened into a waxen furrow, supplicating eyes smudged by an inadvertent pool of wetness. Rooted to the spot, I felt a bitter, acrid taste sear my lips. It was the look of a woman who had borne an extraordinary cavalcade of pain in her lifetime, her heart bled and pierced and wounded only too many times by the imaginary dagger of sin, and yet remained perpetually gracious and compassionate to those who were foolish enough to shun her inhuman sacrifices.
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I thought I heard the wind rustle ever so slightly.
“Inday?”
I whipped around, but was met only by silence, and the windows, and the lifeless ruins of a room left behind by the ghosts of abandon. I gripped the Marian statuette tight in my hand and felt it bear down on my palm with the awful weight of all these years, as if
it were carved out of cold, unforgiving stone. Stepping out into the yard, I watched as the fiery radiance of the incandescent sun blazed down to its final rays, slanting across a grove of blossom-laden trees spread out with the perfect symmetry of nature. A heady fragrance wafted through the balmy twilight breeze, settling on a lush carpet of dew-soaked grass as the somber knell of nearby church bells tolled the hour of evening.
Hail Mary, full of grace, thy Lord is with thee.
Mother’s voice echoed from the kitchen, calling us to dinner. The flaming sun had retreated back to its nightly abode, and in its stead, a dazzling parade of stars. I smiled knowingly. Ever obedient to Mother’s words of wisdom, I had obliged dutifully. I never did call her Uncle’s wife.
Elyss G. Punsalan
Scissor Tongue
Elyss G. Punsalan is based in Manila and runs her own video production company. Some of her fiction can also be found in the anthologies Philippine Speculative Fiction (Volumes 3 and 6), Philippine Genre Stories, A Time for Dragons, Horror: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults, and the webzine Bewildering Stories. At one point in her life, she produced and hosted the monthly Filipino audio fiction site Pakinggan Pilipinas (http://pakingganpilipinas.blogspot.com). Elyss hopes to find true love one day.
SIMON WAS CAREFUL when he kissed his women. He kept his mouth closed and his eyes open. His hands were always busy. His fingers pressed the smalls of their backs, glided along the arc in their spines as if they were made of glass. His partners whimpered and moaned, opened their mouths to his, coaxed his tongue with theirs, but he answered them with church kisses on their cheeks, and that killed the mood entirely.
What’s wrong? they’d ask.
Nothing’s wrong, he’d say.
Everything’s wrong, he’d say to himself. I have a scissor tongue.
Not willing to expound on the matter, he would untangle himself from the knots of arms and legs and quietly, gently, get up from bed. At first he would contemplate on taking a cold shower, but the pull of a good drink would win him over, and down the stairs he would go, down to the unfinished cellar where the expensive wines were.
They would leave, asking no more questions. Their hair would be a mess but their lips radiated with some variation of Vamp Rouge. A few tried to tempt him with casual conversation on the way to the door, hoping for a breakthrough, a change of heart, followed by a return to magnificent sex. At the dating rituals he had always shown his wit, his ease, his love for dialogue, but Simon would only smile back as he held the liquor in his mouth. They would leave, they would think him a tease, and he would be sadder and more deflated than any of them.
He would sleep on the couch after smashing a wine bottle. In the morning, the sun would blaze through the curtains and Simon would be up and about, ready for his five-mile run. Upon his return, the apartment would be tidied up, swept clean of shards and memories of the night before.
When he was a child, he sucked on his mother’s blood by accident, after snipping the tit off his mother’s breast. It was a clean and swift cut, hardly felt by the mother. Breastfeeding was painful anyway, and a pair of baby blades was easily mistaken for an eager bite. Only when she looked down and saw his chin dribbling with blood did she pull him away.
His parents taught him early to drink from cups, as he had a tendency to shred plastic nipples to ribbons. Instead of rubber teethers, they gave him spoons. They were careful when they carried him, and tried not to excite him, unless they wanted to get their ears cut off.
Later on, he discovered words, and strangely, as he uttered them, the scissor tongue withdrew into its own fleshy sheath. The parents were relieved. Talking had made him normal. As he grew, he babbled more, and picking up on this, the parents fed his love for discourse by encouraging him to join debate teams and drama clubs. Crisis was averted.
Now and then, however, Simon fell quiet, and his parents would see the blades glinting as he yawned or stared slack jawed out the window, when he was thinking of girls and what lay beneath their uniforms.
Don’t do anything foolish, his dad told him, before Simon picked up his prom date.
Instead of reassuring him, he switched the subject and asked how his mom was responding to treatment.
I know what you’re doing, his father said. I was a boy once. Don’t.
Don’t what?
You know what I mean.
Will you tell Mom that I’ll come visit her tomorrow?
Simon left for the prom in a wrinkled suit and tie. The girl he was with liked him enough. She wore a backless lilac dress, something the nuns detested, and her hair was pinned up in a French do. She did not look fifteen. They danced to all the songs, from old school 80’s to the latest electronica-pop-rap-dance fusion.
They slow danced to the requisite “King and Queen of Hearts”. Simon held her and felt his insides pulsating like one giant heart. In the dark, his cheek rested on hers, and he was close, so close that he could feel air molecules traveling between them. Her lips were sticky from freshly put gloss, but he didn’t mind. He kissed them anyway. She kissed him back. Bolder now, he wanted more, he opened his mouth and lightly flicked his tongue.
The pink flesh peeled back to reveal a pair of thin blades. They stretched and snapped together, catching the tip of the girl’s tongue.
I’m sorry! he said. His hand flung to the side of the girl’s mouth to wipe away the trickling red, but the girl moved away. Her hands splayed in front of him. Don’t touch me, they warned.
What are you trying to do? The girl was nearly crying, but she was brave to hold it in. Crimson drops fell on her dress and blossomed into petite roses.
I just… The words deserted him.
The girl fled, and she ignored him the rest of the senior year. Simon tried to pass a note once, to tell her how sorry he was.
Could she spare some time after school so he could explain? the letter said.
The letter came back in shreds. He saw the irony in it. It was cut into very small pieces by a pair of shears.
Since then he kept talking, and stayed away from French kisses. He became good at this, eventually good enough to share a relationship with a woman who saw the novelty in him. She thought the scissor tongue story endearing. The blades rarely came out though. They always talked… No, he always talked. He would tell her about his day in the office, or how the investment market was shrinking. Sometimes it was about how exasperating that people overlooked the importance of Greek history.
The woman became more educated as she stayed with Simon; she learned more about the world than she could have on her own, but all those casual lectures began to bore her, and the special thing, which Simon took pains to reveal to her, had shrunk back and refused to appear. She decided that the story was a ruse, devised to get her to like him more. Then again, he had never lied to her, never for anything.
She stayed a few months more, but eventually she left. Not because he kissed poorly, or that he didn’t take the time to listen to her opinions about worldly matters. It wasn’t a question of whether or not they loved each other… (at one point they played around the idea of sharing the same surname). The woman had evolved, all because of Simon’s unintentional mentoring. A desire to study art history burned within her, followed by an obsession for ancient calligraphy. She was compelled to build an exciting new career as a curator.
I love you, Simon, but I have to do this for me.
Of course, of course. He said this as he handed her his tattered copy of Aristotle’s Poetics. His father read that book every year before finally giving it to him.
Poetics came back a year later in a parcel, with postage stamps from Australia. He counted the pages and found everything intact. She took nothing. There was no note.
The succeeding affairs were not a problem in the heart department. Simon kept his secret and he hooked up quite easily with girls he met in advertising. The fucks were good, as long as he talked dirty.
But he didn’t like himself after. He felt like a fraud using t
he sex vocab he picked up on internet porn. There’s nothing wrong with using language, just that the words were unimaginative and worn. He relished florid and nuanced phrases, but quoting the Twelfth Night as they tried to orgasm felt completely out of place.
And it was just exhausting to talk non-stop while having sex. You get sore throat for the wrong reasons.
Next time he just quit talking and kept his mouth closed. But that didn’t work either.
SIMON FINDS HIMSELF taking stock of his life in one of those flashy new bars that just opened right up on the bay. The beer is all right, but he knows too well not to order wine from this place. He dives back into his thoughts and wonders what Plato would have done, but then his scissor tongue splits open and taps gently on his teeth.
He needs to talk to someone, or else his mouth is going to be a bloody mess.
There’s a girl by the fire exit who doesn’t seem interested in him. She is wearing black tights and a gray shift dress with cotton sleeves made too long for this kind of muggy weather. The people in the bar are a mixed bag of couples, gay and animated with chatter, and she is sitting there, a gray island floating on a technicolor ocean. He sees her run a finger on her collar as if it were a leash.
I would buy you a drink, except you already have one, Simon says to her.
The girl knocks down her vodka and smarts as the liquid burns through her throat.
There, she says. Buy me a new one.
Simon comes back with vodkas in his hand, but the girl has disappeared.
He catches the bartender’s attention, and they talk a bit about the crowd.
The rest of them will start turning up just before midnight, the bartender says.
Simon is about to segue into the vicissitudes of his life (I partied hard when I was younger, now I just want a quiet place for a drink) when the bartender apologizes and tells him he has to mix some cosmos for the gaggle that’s just arrived.
Later on as Simon hails a cab, the girl in the gray dress catches the door handle and helps herself into the car.
Philippine Speculative Fiction Page 23