Philippine Speculative Fiction 9 Page 12

  Lucas smiled. “This is better enjoyed outside. Come on.”

  The shadows were already starting to lengthen when we left the house, which worried me because the darkness in the subdivision was absolute. The horizon glowed a sick orange. Lucas carried the brandy bottle in one hand, his other arm wrapped around my shoulders. We stumbled across the empty lots.

  “Lucas,” I said. “Stop walking.”

  “She went through my things in the backseat,” he said. “She saw the mint tin and took two pills without even asking me.”

  Want some?

  “She took them, or you offered them to her?” I asked.

  Lucas ran ahead. I ran after him. He darted from one lot to the next, disappearing and appearing through the grass.

  I doubled over when he stopped. “Damn it, Lucas!” I said.

  He was laughing. “I offered them to her,” he said. “Happy now? What difference does it make? She’s stupid enough to think they were mint, she got what she deserved.”

  “Jesus,” I said. With a shudder I realized we were standing on the edge of the Perezes’ lot.

  “No,” Lucas said, wagging a finger at me. The brandy sloshed in the bottle. “You don’t give me that.”

  “You killed a girl, Lucas!”

  “She was going to tell my father about us!” he said.

  I had asked myself if I would tell my own father about Lucas if I knew I would get a punch in return, and I had answered, over and over, I would. If only I could just stop caring for him. If only I could be content to be found here, among the things he hid from the world: marijuana, the party drugs, murder, this dead place, me.

  “So you killed her?” I said. I imagined Noelle running around this subdivision with Lucas on her heels, behind the wheel. I felt sick.

  “You don’t know my father, Tom,” Lucas said. “He will kill you, too.”

  “She’s sixteen!” I shouted.

  “I did it for you, Tom.”

  “Fuck you!” I said. “Fuck you, you don’t tell me that.”

  I walked away. I could only see the silhouettes of houses and trees. How did I end up here? Why did I allow myself to end up here?

  Lucas didn’t follow me. I looked back, but I could hardly see anything now. “Lucas?” I said. I walked back, calling his name. My head throbbed.

  I wouldn’t be able to find him, even if I tried. I needed flashlights. I needed to be sober.

  I needed to actually want to find him.

  So I went back to the house. The kitchen was the only room lit. It was blessedly warm. Noelle, wearing a plain red apron, had tied her hair in a ponytail and was stirring something in a pot.

  “I thought you didn’t cook,” I said, sitting at the kitchen table. There was meat thawing on a chopping board near the sink.

  “Well,” she said. “I decided to be un-lazy. Where’s Lucas?”

  “He’s outside,” I said, and laughed. The room was turning, slowly, gently, as if it were on the surface of an ocean. There were snakes in the grass. And stray dogs. Maybe Lucas would pass out and die on the Perezes’ empty lot. First the fields giveth, then the fields taketh away. Maybe he would come back. Maybe he would be returned to me, a better person.

  Oh my God.

  “Oh my God,” I said, willing the walls to stop moving. “Noelle, Lucas is outside. We need to find him.”

  Noelle didn’t seem to hear. She stood by the sink, her hand hovering over the knife rack, about to make a choice.

  Franz Johann Dela Merced

  Miracles under a Concrete Sky

  Franz Johann Dela Merced is a struggling comic book illustrator, wannabe philanthropist, and certified Australopithecus. He lives in rainy Vancouver, Canada, pining for his glory days at the Ateneo de Manila University. When he’s not busy doodling, playing video games, or reading up on Philippine history, he spends his time dangerously obsessing over tapsilog, gummi bears, and Up Dharma Down. He dedicates this short story to Armi Millare.

  YOU MIGHT BE wondering why I have a third eye growing in the middle of my forehead. It’s a funny story, really.

  Ever hear the one about the miracle of the water cross? I read about it in this old book by Ambeth Ocampo that I found floating the other day. Back in 1901, so the story goes, a fisherman in Manila Bay saw bubbles rising and forming a large cross on the ocean surface. Awed by the apparently divine event, the fisherman took a sip from the strange fountain, and was shocked to find that unlike the surrounding seawater, this stuff was fresh! Soon enough the entire town heard about it and, with the local priest’s blessing, headed off in boats to bottle up this “miracle” liquid. A couple of days later, BAM! Cholera epidemic. Turns out the water was squeaking out of a busted sewage pipe running under the bay. Yum.

  How about the one with the weeping statue? Enshrined in some obscure village in Olongapo was this porcelain image of the Virgin Mary, famed for its supposed ability to cry tears of blood. From what I recall, a couple of devotees from the village went up to the shrine to pray, where they allegedly witnessed said phenomenon. So of course the first thing they did was taste the so-called “blood” with their fingers, right? Soon after, they returned to the village in a delirious state, singing the Ave Maria in an “unknown tongue,” and everyone promptly declared it a miracle. Cut to a week later, and—you guessed it—the local clinic was up to their elbows with a lead poisoning outbreak. They found out later that the “miraculous” statue’s eyes were coated with a cheap lead-based paint that ran off in the summer heat, and, well… there you go. Mind you, I got this article off a sleazy old tabloid from 1995 that I fished out of a ditch six months ago (right next to the gossip column and a “bold” photo of Ynez Veneracion to boot), so who knows how much of that was legit to begin with?

  I could go on and on about this junk. You tend to run into a lot of weird stories in my line of work. Here’s a good one: “Enchong Laway, celebrated faith healer from Bulacan, known for curing diseases by making people drink his spit.” Yecch. Oh, and here’s one about some guy named Judiel who claimed to have “transubstantiated a communion wafer into the literal body and blood of Christ.” Crazy, crazy stuff! I didn’t even know the Rizal Library collected stories like this in their archives.

  If there’s anything I learned from all these little anecdotes about crying statues and Jesus Christ’s face showing up on various baked goods, it’s that obsessing over miracles is our national pastime. The fact that we just dredged up an entire university wing’s worth of scholarly research on the subject is proof enough. Is it a statement of faith, or a sign of desperation? I’ll leave that question for the philosophers. If nothing else, I also learned that we have a tendency to indiscriminately put things into our mouths. This is why we end up with situations like the Buttonquail Fiasco of 2009. You remember that one, right? But I digress.

  Now, you might also be wondering why a professional cameraman like myself is reduced to trawling floodwater in Katipunan for sunken documents. Well you know how it is, pare. Traditional journalist work isn’t exactly in high demand these days, thanks to this whole “street journalism” movement going on. Who needs a pro with a fancy camera when news programs can just take their footage from any kibitzing yahoo with a smartphone? To top it off, I still have twelve payments left on this Canon 2027 Hyper Mega HD+ (not to mention the additional 15k for the underwater lens and sonar), and I am not planning to go through yet another year on an all-ramen diet. Dredging may not be glamorous, but it pays the bills.

  Still, you never know what wealth of information you can scavenge underwater nowadays. All those old articles I showed you earlier were just the tip of the iceberg. Our team already managed to salvage half of the Rizal Library archives buried in the rubble, and the Jesuits were all too happy to pay us for recovering their collection of Liwayway magazines and rare first-edition Nick Joaquins. I got some great footage of the ruins, too. And here I thought I’d never get to use the camera I just blew a year’s salary on! I’m basically a glorified part-time
librarian with scuba gear right now, but at least I still get to play journalist on the side. It’s better than nothing, ‘di ba?

  It must be providence that you and Tintin moved to Canada when you did. God’s wrath really went all-out here, as in. Thanks to last year’s one-two combo of Super Typhoon Poltooters and the big Marikina quake, half of the roads in Metro Manila are completely wrecked, and the rest are submerged entirely under thirty-five feet of floodwater. The poor urban infrastructure isn’t helping matters either. Although now that I think about it, that’s not much different than how it was before you left, is it? It looks like all of the city’s urban planners already gave up and left the country long before you did.

  The traffic here is worse than ever, if you can believe it. Naturally, the government rolls out its usual catch-all solution—build EVEN MORE FLYOVERS! Surprising, I know. I swear to God you wouldn’t even be able to recognize EDSA anymore. Those ugly stretches of concrete obscure the sky like some sort of jungle canopy, covering everything below in permanent shadow. The flooding’s gotten so bad on the ground level that the only other way to travel around is by banca. I did hear that the Department of Tourism is planning to tout us as the new Venice, although I reckon the strong smell of sewage might give us an edgier appeal. We might have better luck attracting the so-called “slum tourism” crowd like they did with the favelas in Brazil, but I find that a little distasteful. No thanks.

  Now I know it sounds like Manila’s gone all Akira on you, and those broadcasts you see on TV probably aren’t helping. You’d think a catastrophe that caused fifty-two thousand casualties would cause the city to devolve into a society of cannibals and doomsday cults, right? It always looks worse from an outside perspective, doesn’t it? But you know how it is around here. In the life of Juan dela Cruz, this is just another bullet point in a long list of misadventures.

  Just a couple weeks after the disaster, people were already building makeshift houses out of random flotsam, using the top of fallen billboard ads as buoyant platforms. It wasn’t long before these floating shantytowns started popping up by the dozen all over the metro. In no time flat, people were already going about their lives as if nothing happened. Pedicab drivers now make their rounds as gondoliers, and street kids everywhere swim about in the murky waters like they always do during the rainy season. And the best part? In the midst of all the bickering, gossiping, backstabbing, and scapegoating, the masses have once again resorted to miracle-watching as the opiate of choice. Already, rumors about the next orally ingestible miracle are making their rounds, bringing hope to this bleak and Dennis Hopper-less version of Waterworld. It’s funny how people still look to the heavens for divine providence, even though their view is completely blocked out by those hideous concrete skyways. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

  Then again, who am I to talk? I’m the second-rate journalist who thought he could make it as the next Howie Severino. More importantly, I’m the guy who thought he had a chance with Irma. I still do. You remember her, right? The girl I’ve been in love with since grade school? Look at us now. She’s the lead vocalist of Up Greg Down, and I’m just a nobody with an overpriced camera. And yet, I still keep hoping against hope that we’ll eventually end up together. Now that would be a miracle, wouldn’t it. What were we saying about faith and desperation, again?

  Oh yeah. You wanted to know about my third eye, right? Well… I was about to get to that.

  So a few weeks ago, I decided to flex my journalistic muscles a bit and started interviewing people for a little documentary side project. I began by collecting sound bites from random bystanders, you know, just to get a general pulse on the current social climate. Anyway, I got the usual “God will provide” and “it’s the government’s fault” comments, until I ran across this interesting tidbit. “It was raining fish from the sky,” this wide-eyed old lady from Quiapo recounted, “strange fish of a like I’ve never seen before.” The omen supposedly manifested above the EDSA Shrine, where she and a bunch of other people were attending this underwater prayer rally being held by charismatic religious leader Brother Bello. How that could have happened with all those flyovers blocking the sky, no one could say. However, a dozen other people who showed up at the rally corroborated her claim. Some of them even claimed that the fish “glowed with a divine light” as they fell. Everyone was attributing the phenomenon to Our Lady of EDSA which, despite being almost entirely submerged and covered with rust, still loomed over the area like a silent guardian.

  At the time, I was probably starting to feel that the rest of my documentary was going nowhere, so I decided, why the hell not? I’ll check it out. This could be my big break, and if it turned out to be nothing, maybe I’d at least get a big laugh out of it. So off I went.

  It was last Friday when I decided to go. While it was hard to tell from under the imposing shadow of the flyovers, it was a bright and sunny day. I rented out a banca with my camera in tow, and headed straight for EDSA Shrine. The sunlight filtering through the gaps in the concrete cast reflections on the surface of the water where the crowd gathered. It was strangely beautiful, in a way. It was the middle of Brother Bello’s homily, and the people joined him in swaying as they bobbed up and down in the water. And then, it happened.

  Splish.

  Splash.

  One fish. Two fish. Three fish. Four. Soon, thousands of live fish started raining from the sky. At first I thought the sunlight was playing tricks with my eyes, but each fish was definitely surrounded with a warm radiance, almost like a halo. As soon as the creatures hit the water, the crowd immediately and frantically dispersed. Some came prepared with nets, but others just grabbed the slippery critters with their bare hands. Soon enough, all of the fish were gone, and the people happily swam back to their respective shanties floating nearby. It wasn’t long after that when the delicious smell of fried fish started permeating the air.

  I rowed towards a nearby shack with a billboard that said “Alvin’s Carinderia,” where a jolly, middle-aged fellow was grilling his catch of the day. When he saw my banca heading for his diner, he hollered out to me. “You want some, boss? Fifty pesos lang. I’ll even throw in a bowl of rice and some achara!” Taking him up on his offer, I docked my banca and plopped myself down on the wooden bench in front of his eatery. He immediately laid down a plate with a heap of freshly cooked rice, a spoonful of achara, a dollop of Mang Tomas sauce, and of course, one of the expertly grilled critters from before as the centerpiece. The fish still had an odd glow about it, and I hesitated at first. This is your big chance, I quickly reminded myself. If you can’t be Howie Severino, maybe you can be Anthony Bourdain instead.

  So, I steeled myself and took a bite. It wasn’t exactly the “divine” experience I was expecting, but it was… nice. The meat was flaky and the skin was delightfully crispy. It tasted kind of like tilapia, but with a strange sort of kick to it. I managed to finish the entire plate. Satisfied with the meal as well as the day’s events, I headed back to my apartment in Ortigas and took a nap.

  I woke up at 6:00 PM, right when TV Patrol was coming on. As I got up from my couch, I felt a weird lump on my forehead. Thinking it was an overgrown pimple, I went for my bathroom mirror to examine it. Imagine my surprise when I saw that my “zit” was growing eyelashes. And it blinked. Then, as if on cue, a news flash started blaring on TV. The footage showed a truck driver caught on camera illegally dumping contraband off the side of the decommissioned Ortigas-San Juan flyover. As in, the flyover that runs above the EDSA Shrine.

  I’m sure you can guess where this is going. The man was working for a local importer who wanted to get rid of a bad shipment they got off a seedy fishing operation from Taiwan. The contraband was revealed to be thousands of live, overgrown anchovies, highly mutated from long exposure to radioactive runoff from a sunken nuclear submarine off the coast of Vigan.

  Well, crap.

  As I stood there dumbfounded, the “Mga Kuwento ni Marc Logan” news segment came up on TV. Y
ou remember that guy who does all those funny stories about bodybuilding grandmas and cats singing “My Humps,” right? So there he was on TV doing a feature on the people who were stupid enough to eat giant radioactive anchovies, all in his patented singsong delivery. And who else could he be interviewing but Brother Bello himself, who appeared to be growing an extra arm on his torso. “The better to praise the Lord with,” he said. Well, I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. I always did say that a good journalist could use an extra eye or two.

  So, uh, there you have it. Life goes on, I have an extra eye growing on my forehead, and I’ve been hearing rumors that the pandesal from Oliver’s Panaderya in Mandaluyong were starting to look an awful lot like Jesus recently, so I’m gonna go check it out tomorrow. I have a good feeling about this one.

  Kate Osias

  The Unmaking of the Cuadro Amoroso

  Kate Osias has won three Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Gig Book Contest, Canvas Story Writing Contest and the 10th Romeo Forbes Children’s Sotrywriting Competition. She has earned a citation in the international Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror for her story “The Riverstone Heart of Maria dela Rosa” (Serendipity, 2007).

  Her latest works appear in LONTAR: Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction (edited by Jason Erik Lundberg), Philippine Speculative Fiction vol. 8 (edited by Dean Alfar and Nikki Alfar), and Horror: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults (Dean Alfar and Kenneth Yu). Her updated bibliography can be found on her Facebook timeline. She co-edited the sixth and seventh volumes of Philippine Speculative Fiction, the latter with Alex Osias. Kate is a proud founding member of the LitCritters, a writing and literary discussion group.

  Occasionally, she ventures out into the real world to shop for shoes.

  THE FOUR OF us found each other in the Facultad de Ciencias; four so very different people in our approach to scientific exploration, and yet the core of our passions so very much the same, that we bonded quickly and irrevocably.