Philippine Speculative Fiction Read online

  Andrew: This one’s for Papa Ed, for all the stories.

  Charles: Dedicated to Ruby Katigbak, Isabel Yap, and Alyssa Wong.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Blood of Iron by Christian Renz Torres

  Panopticon by Victor Ocampo

  First Play for and by Tikbalang Triggers Uproar on Opening Night by Vida Cruz

  Only Dogs Piss Here by Michael Aaron Gomez

  Last Race by Jenny Ortuoste

  Oscar’s Marvelous Transformation by Kat Del Rosario

  Stations of the Apostate by Alexander M. Osias

  Sikat by William Robert Yasi

  Deliver Us by Eliza Victoria

  Miracles Under a Concrete Sky by Franz Johann Dela Merced

  The Unmaking of the Cuadro Amoroso by Kate Osias

  The Woodsman by Cedric Tan

  And These Were the Names of the Vanished by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

  Anthropomorpha by Crystal Koo

  Sofia by Marianne Villanueva

  Transcripts from the Investigation on the Life and Death of Alastor de Roja by Vincent Michael Simbulan

  TG2416 from Mars by Nikki Alfar

  Mater Dolorosa by Marc Gregory Yu

  Scissor Tongue by Elyss Punsalan

  Cogito by AJ Elicaño

  About the Editors

  Introduction

  I. Passing the Torch

  It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost a decade now. Back in 2005, the launch of Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 was celebrated in Manila by a humble group of writers, friends and family. Back then, Andrew Drilon was the youngest contributor, while Charles Tan did not even qualify. As a publishing venture, the book itself was a stab in the dark because the audience for these kinds of stories was unknown. “Speculative fiction” was an unfamiliar term in our schools and bookstores, where social realism was the dominant mode of Filipino literary fiction. The local pool of speculative fiction writers appeared small, and this anthology seemed to be the only venue for the “literature of the fantastic”.

  Philippine Speculative Fiction has evolved since then. As the torrent of submissions grew with each volume, a co-editor was added to help with the heavy lifting. The series shifted to a digital format, which allowed it to reach more readers here and abroad. A rotation of editorial duties was instituted to allow different perspectives to influence and expand on the voice of this anthology, which resulted in some of the most interesting and diverse volumes in the series. New writers were discovered, many of whom continue to impress with new stories today, not just in this series, but in various other publications, speculative-fiction-themed and otherwise.

  Nine years later, Philippine Speculative Fiction is still alive and stronger than ever.

  II. Publications & Recognitions

  2013 saw the welcome migration of three online speculative fiction anthologies to print publication: Disapora Ad Astra edited by Emil M. Flores and Joseph Frederic F. Nacino (The University of the Philippines Press), The Farthest Shore edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Joseph Frederic F. Nacino (The University of the Philippines Press), and Demons of the New Year edited by Karl R. De Mesa and Joseph Frederic F. Nacino (The University of the Philippines Press).

  New work published in 2013 include the excellent anthologies Horror: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults (The University of the Philippines Press) edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Kenneth Yu and The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2005 – 2010 edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Nikki Alfar (The University of the Philippines Press for print, Flipside Publishing for eBooks); the collection Now, Then, and Elsewhen by Nikki Alfar (UST Publishing House); the novel Project 17 by Eliza Victoria (Visprint, Inc.); the Filipino novels Di Lang Anghel by U.Z. Eliserio (Flipside Publishing), Epiko by U.Z. Eliserio, Takbo, Zombie, Takbo by U.Z. Eliserio (Flipside Publishing), and Bayaning Lamanlupa by U.Z. Eliserio (Flipside Publishing).

  The Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop accepted two students of Filipino descent in 2013: Alyssa Wong and Isabel Yap. 2014 will include Vida Cruz. In previous years, Filipino Clarion alumni include Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Ruby Katigbak.

  In 2013, “Song of the Body Cartographer” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Philippine Genre Stories) was a finalist under the short story category of the 2012 BSFA Awards, while Crystal Koo was the first place winner in the Adult Category of the Hong Kong Top Story Competition.

  It was announced in 2013 that two novels by Filipino authors would be published in the US: The Forever Watch by David Ramirez (Thomas Dunne Books) and The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco (Sourcebooks Fire). Both saw release this year.

  III. In this Volume

  For this ninth volume of Philippine Speculative Fiction, we decided to focus on the ‘Philippine’ aspect of the equation, challenging our contributors to ‘feature a strong Filipino element’ in their speculative stories, with the caveat that this preference could be overturned by exceptionally well-written pieces. This narrowing of parameters, rather than limiting the scope of stories, seems to have encouraged a plethora of spectacular submissions with greatly varying styles, tones and concerns. We’ve selected the best among them for this volume.

  What follows next are twenty stories, all but one of which are original to this anthology, with an even split of stories between male and female writers. We are happy to note that—while we have ten wonderful stories by returning authors—half the stories in this volume are by authors who are new to the Philippine Speculative Fiction series. Especially for those among them who are first-time authors, we hope that this is just the beginning, and look forward to reading their future works.

  In the meantime, we would like to thank everyone who answered our call for submissions (your stories were lovingly reviewed, hotly debated and deeply appreciated), our publishers for their immense and unwavering support of this series, and most of all you, dear reader, for keeping the flame of speculative fiction alive. Turn the page and watch it burn bright.

  Andrew Drilon & Charles Tan

  Manila, 2014

  Renz Christian Torres

  Blood of Iron

  Christian Renz Torres. Dumaguete native. Jack of all trades. If he couldn’t sell himself to the Underworld AKA the corporate world as his accounting course would suggest, he would rather learn how to write.

  UNDER THE SHADE of thick narra, I wait. It has been a listless morning. No game is in sight. I had lost my spear trying to fight a boar six days ago, and the boar had won that battle, taking with it as trophy my hand-carved spear.

  I squat in the bush, bow in hand, hungry.

  Sometimes being a hunter for the village has its easy days. Sometimes the gods would hand you a deer which strayed straight into your eye line ready for the taking. A hunter, however, has to train, and one skill a hunter must learn is to wait.

  So I wait. The day is hot. Beads of sweat trail down the muscles of my brow. I ignore the ravenous sound of my hunger, and the sensation of heat on my skin. The absence of mountain wind has made the day less bearable. As I let slack my loaded bowstring, I see a bird fly out from the canopies. I feel instinct take over, and I shoot the bird right out of the hands of Kaptan, king of the sky. The bird plummets like a fallen star into a nearby clearing. I creep up to it, waving away the unseen with my bow, swinging it here and there to scare what is hidden in the grass. I see the arrow standing out like a reed in the clearing. I walk to it, dagger in hand.

  What I find is not an animal I have been taught to skin and butcher. It has dark shadows for feathers—with a sheen like how the forest reflects light when the sun embraces it. It has a beak as dark as its wing, and a horn as tough as my arrowhead.

  I remove the a
rrow from one wing of the fallen bird, and I watch it move with what life it has left. I do not know whether to bring it back to Kaluwalhatian.

  I wonder if it is a spirit owned by the gods.

  The strange bird stays on the ground in wounded docility, breathing with some difficulty in the middle of tall, swaying cogon grass. It kicks now and then, and so I tie a coil of abaca rope to its left talon. It is then that I see, buried deep in its dark brown tail feathers, a small bamboo slate, etched and unpolished. I slide carefully my calloused thumb across the inscription, which reads:

  To whoever finds my message, please know that there is a village across the great river, and we are in need of your help. Cut out the pumping heart of a banana tree. Have the hornbill deliver it.

  I know this river. I have grown up by its furious banks. It is great and deep and wide, and seems to stretch with impossible endlessness to the horizon. Boats have been lost easily to its mysterious rages. Crocodiles drown in it. The gods seem to have abandoned it. To cross the great river would require bird wings, or the sturdy leaps of magical bearcats.

  I look at the bird on the ground, which seems frightened still. It darts its head around, as if driven by some peculiar need to see the high blue sky. I can see that the sky means salvation in the bird’s eyes.

  I hover my hands above its darting head—and the bird surges forward quickly, savagely, almost biting off a finger with its sharp beak. With some care, I untie the twine from the message and coil it with some firmness around the bird’s beak. I decide to bring the bird to the village mangkukulam, who must know a way to nurse it back.

  No way can it return to the village across the great river with a broken wing, I think.

  THE NEAREST BANANA corm is not too far off. I survey the edges of the forest in search for a stalk in bloom. Old bananas lose their fervor with age. The young ones, on the other hand, still have the vitality and passion necessary to produce a pumping heart.

  The banana plant I know with a full pumping heart is the tallest one in a nearby grove, the only one for great distances around. When I come to it, it towers over me like a challenge. With every inch I manage to scale on its spongy, slippery stalk, I imagine the anonymous faces of that unseen village across the great river. The need for a pumping banana heart—the tremendous whole of it—means only one thing: the people of that village are dying.

  I climb higher and higher, and then I see it: first, the taut green aorta of a pumping banana heart, and then, finally, its crimson body expanding and contracting with graceful power. I carefully fasten a rope around it. Then I unsheathe my bolo, and I begin to carefully hack away at the stalk, with rope coiled around my torso. But the heart, once detached from the slender body of the banana plant, begins to agitate in my hands with irregular beating, careening around incessantly, nearly bringing me to the ground. The sharp blade in my hand glistens with mortal knowledge.

  Then the heart squirms again, and then it slips away from my hand, quickly, leaving me scrambling. From the corner of my eyes, I see a familiar creature flash to action. It is sturdy and large—easily the length of a small man’s arm—and it billows through the air with charcoal-colored fur. It catches the falling heart with sharp claws teased with caution. I catch my breath. I feel my chest pounding like the hornbill. And then I see the banana heart lowered to safety below, on the stump of a fallen banana trunk. I close my eyes, and whisper a prayer of thanks to the gods. Makahagad—my binturong, my sacred bearcat—has saved the fragile blossom.

  Later, when I arrive at Kaluwalhatian with my bearcat, the banana heart, and the hornbill, I seek out the old mangkukulam.

  “What need do you have of me, Magpanabang?” the old crone eyes me with killing curiosity.

  I show her the wounded bird.

  “Can you heal it?” I ask. “She has a village to save.”

  She looks at it with a vacant look and then nods. Quickly, she leads the way—mysterious in its unfolding circuitousness—to her hut, which is hidden away in the unknown reaches of the village. Its walls look flimsy, and the steam from a large palayok is its only sign of life. Inside the hut, I follow her as she crosses a wall of purple vapor seeping out from everywhere, and then I gingerly pass through beaded curtains over a dark doorway. I recoil at the odor that greets me—a pungency that reeks of death and despair. The room it holds is shelved with haphazardly arranged pots—brass, earthen, and glass—all filled with the viscera of assorted fauna and flora, and the monstrous in-betweens with their feathered petals and their mossy eyes.

  The mangkukulam places the wounded hornbill on a wooden platform near a boiling pot at the back of the hut. The bird weeps from it, its cries strange and wounding. I follow the mangkukulam with my eyes as she darts around the room, her movements like a knife cutting through the room’s peculiar stench. Beside me, I see Makahagad slightly cowering in the thick of the strangeness that surrounds us. I look down, carefully gripping the banana blossom with a firmness that surprises even me. When I look up, I see straight into the mangkukulam’s eyes. I flinch in the sudden chill that has risen from the depths of my bones, and then I see her motioning for me to pass her my dagger. I unsheathe it slowly, and hand it to her.

  “I need the banana heart, too,” she rasps.

  I cannot fight the compelling rush I see glinting in her eyes. With some reluctance, I hand the blossom over to her bony fingers. She scurries away, and I see her cut a sliver off the base of the banana heart, putting the rest on the platform where the bird lies. The mangkukulam takes the piece of the banana heart carefully. She squeezes it tight over the bird’s injured wing—a mere drop of the banana’s juice straight into the hornbill’s wound.

  The bird—strapped at the beak and the body—instantly swung its legs into the air with such power, unsuccessfully clawing at its captors. It takes a few moments before its rage and its restlessness ebb away, and finally the hornbill ceases to struggle, though breathing heavily still, its eyes flitting from me to the mangkukulam and back again. The mangkukulam begins to untie the bonds that hold the hornbill, and as soon as the raspy twines loosen their hold, the bird shudders the rest off, flaps around with angry majesty, and with its talons around the still pumping banana heart, it bursts through the hut’s flimsy walls, and flies away into the sudden blue of sky.

  “Follow it,” I turn to Makahagad. “Follow it before it crashes in the forest. Be careful when you cross the great river.”

  The bearcat nods, its bristly head glistening in the sudden light from the puncture in the wall, and chases the feathered messenger steadily into the huddled canopies of the forest.

  NINE DAYS PASS before I receive word from the village across the great river. After the first message, I send a reply through Makahagad. The bearcat comes back after a few days, and soon after the hornbill arrives with another message. This exchange—of thanksgiving and felicitations—goes on for many days, and then, one rainy morning, I receive a missive carved in the now-familiar bamboo slate:

  Informant,

  We send eternal gratitude from the gods for your help and generosity. Our people have been healed by your selfless gift. In seven nights we will return the gesture. For this moment, please find a token of our appreciation. Attached to this bamboo is a necklace decorated with agate and carnelian. It is strung—spun and twisted—with the root of dried orchid that grows only once every five years at the mouth of a volcano.

  The end of the message is signed, Maayuput.

  The necklace mesmerizes me as it glistens in the silver daylight. I toss it around my neck, quickly fastening it. Later in the day, when I lean out of the window of my hut to see the dance of the sun across the sky, my eyes soon set in the direction of the village across the river.

  I think of that name, Maayuput.

  BY THE WITCHING hour of the seventh eve—a time the village mangkukulam takes to sort out and clean her pots and jars in the shadow of savage moonlight—a persistent flapping begins to echo in the dimness. The mangkukulam hears the soun
d and follows the scattering echo with torchlight taken from the communal bonfire. The flapping seems to come straight from a small low-lying cloud, chirping as it goes about its way in the night sky: it seems to carry a large object, shadowed from the mangkukulam’s eyes in the deep cloak of night. The mangkukulam follows it. The chirping cloud crosses the thicket of bananas, and soon slows down and drops what it has been carrying in the very middle. The mangkukulam does not see anything, but she sees the cloud vanishing quickly into the distance, across the great river.

  By morning light, in the haze of dew, the mangkukulam has brought the elders of the village to the middle of the banana thicket, where she had witnessed the strange vanishing the previous evening. When we come to the exact spot, we see instead a sturdy-looking banana plant standing tall with frightening majesty—curious and familiar at once. We see birds perched and hiding among the leaves of all the other banana plants, except for this one—and even to us, it seems to emit a peculiar kind of magic. It seems to grow even taller in our eyes. After some time, many people from the village begin to steal away time from their chores and the ordinary grind to see the banana plant in its unspeakable splendor. It seems to inch with patient increments to the reaches of sky.

  Soon, at the sight of the new moon, the banana plant begins to blossom, and from its shadows spring a pumping banana heart. That night, by the village bonfire, I temper the tip of one of my arrows, and with it I begin to write on a slate of fresh bamboo:

  Maayuput,

  We accept the gift of the new pumping banana heart. We wish all of you the bloom of health and the prosperity of harvests even until the moon ceases to shine. May you please also extend my sincerest compliments to your village jeweler. Attached to this missive is a modest clay pot filled with orchid seeds.