Cinema Spec: Tales of Hollywood and Fantasy edited by Karen A. Romanko (Raven Electrick Ink) includes the flash fiction piece “Oracle in Chains” by Rodello Santos. Santos is based in America.
 
Magazines
 Locally, the magazines dedicated to fiction aren’t faring so well. Both Story Philippines and The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories have only released one issue in 2009, whereas the former is supposed to be a quarterly while the latter’s release, The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories: Special Horror Issue was originally slated for 2008. A new eBook publisher, Rocket Kapre, has released a web-only fiction magazine entitled Usok. The first issue had five stories, three of which are original while the other two are reprints.
 
Mainstream magazines, from Uno to Rogue, have occasionally been publishing fiction pieces in their pages, which happens to include texts that could be categorized as speculative fiction. The weekly periodicals The Philippines Free Press and Philippines Graphic also churned out several speculative fiction stories over the course of the year.
 
Online genre magazines such as Fantasy and Expanded Horizons have also published Filipino authors such as Rochita Loenen-Ruiz and Eliza Victoria.
 
Collections
 While not specifically labeled as speculative fiction, there are two noteworthy collections released this year.
 
Waking the Dead and Other Horror Stories by Yvette Tan (Anvil Publishing) includes ten stories from the author, most of which are reprints. Unfortunately, the book lacks a proper bibliography. Author Paul G. Tremblay describes the book as: “Many of the stories revolve around legendary spirits/beasts and read somewhat dreamlike, Jamesian in a way, while there are others that are in voice, style, and plot very much a modern horror story.”
 
The Lost Language: Stories by Marianne Villanueva (Anvil Publishing) is not exclusively speculative fiction but those that fall under this category are well-written. This is a mix of eight reprints and six original stories, the former being published in both abroad and local venues.
 
Awards and Recognitions
 While not necessarily awards in of themselves, three stories published in 2008 made it in the Honorable Mentions longlist of Best Horror of the Year: Volume One edited by Ellen Datlow (Night Shade Books). These are “Thirty-Two” by Elyss Punsalan from Story Philippines, “Psychic Family” by Apol Lejano-Massebieau from Philippine Genre Stories 4, and “Seek Ye Whore” by Yvette Tan from Rogue Magazine.
 
Netherlands-based writer Rochita Loenen-Ruiz was this year’s Octavia E. Butler Scholar. She is the first Filipino to have attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

In the annual Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards, Luis Katigbak’s science fiction piece, “Dear Distance” won third place in the English short story category.

Charles Tan‘s fiction has appeared in publications such as The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories and Philippine Speculative Fiction. He has contributed nonfiction to websites such as The Nebula Awards, The Shirley Jackson Awards, The World SF News Blog, and SF Signal. In 2009, he won the Last Drink Bird Head Award for International Activism which is described as “In recognition of those who work to bring writers from other literary traditions and countries to the attention of readers in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia…” You can visit his blog, Bibliophile Stalker, or the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler.

Andrew Drilon was first published at age 14 in The Philippine Daily Inquirer for an illustrated children’s story about a dead bovine called “Moo Moo the Ghostly Cow”. This depiction of a postmortem ruminant was lauded as heartwarming and earned him praise from his teachers, though his name was misspelled as “Andrew Drillon”. Despite this oversight, he was not discouraged from making stories and continues to do so to this day via comics, illustration and prose. His most recent works have been featured in The Philippine Star, Top Shelf 2.0, The Virtuous Medlar Circle and the Bamboo band’s music video, “Muli”.

April 2008
After graduation, he found himself back at the beach: the old cottage, to the cliffs and the sea and the cove. The memory of a dragon’s eye moon, photographs burned in a cleansing fire, was still seared in his memory. He clambered down the rocky outcropping and walked the length of the shore, the sand between his toes an intricate, transient lacework. He made his way carefully, alone, towards the cave.

He found the creature just before the sun set across the horizon, casting brilliant rays of light across the flowing surface of the ocean. Remembering the stories of their old caretaker, he looked on with a mixture of wonder and revulsion as the last red-orange flickers of light licked the obsidian dragon scales, the folds of translucent emerald wings that grew from the back of the prostrate mound of flesh in front of him. As the last of the sunlight faded, the figure in front of him began to fade – become smaller, slipping into a form that was both achingly beautiful and strangely familiar. The entire cave smelled like a forest, newly washed by rain. Her hair was spread over the dark surface of the rock, melding perfectly with the shadows.

April 2005
The first time they made love, he traced the sinuous shape of her tattoo with careful fingers, cresting the curve of her spine. It wound from her back to her stomach, winding around her waist like the proverbial serpent, tempting him to taste a forbidden fruit. She moaned and bucked underneath him as his lips and tongue and fingers made slow, languorous love to her, playing her finely as one would an exquisite instrument. The thin sheen of sweat on their skin glistened dimly in the lamplight.

She was older than Sam, though by how many years he was never quite sure. He had seen Lydia enter the dormitory across his, and saw her jog around the university quad quite regularly, just before the bell tower chimed seven o’clock. She was a student, that much was certain, but from which college and what course, he was never able to ascertain. It was only in his summer photography class that he had gotten to know her, classmates that never quite spoke, but passed small, folded notes to each other while Professor Alcantara talked about capturing the chiaroscuro, about looking at the world through light and shadow.

Are you doing anything Friday night? she wrote once in her careful, looping handwriting.

Sam glanced briefly in her direction as he received the folded piece of paper. They were sitting at the back of the classroom, half-hidden in the darkening afternoon. It looked like it was about to rain. He couldn’t read the notes on the blackboard. No, I’m not. Why? he asked, hurridily scribbling underneath her sentence.

Do you want to have dinner?

A clap of thunder punctuated the droning voice of the teacher. Half the girls in the class screamed in surprise. Lightning sliced through the sky, cutting across the ominous clouds. Thunder boomed again. Rain spilled across the horizon, filling the spaces between the tree and the roof, windows and glass. Circles of water formed patterns on the maroon-tiled floor of the classroom. Shutters were hurridly closed. Students folded their arms over their chests, makeshift warmth of skin against skin. Professor Alcantara’s voice refused to rise over the crescendo of the storm.

Sure.

Later that afternoon, he brought her back to his dormitory, his umbrella heavy with water. The sleeve of her blouse, where the curved edges of the umbrella dripped rainwater, was soaked. He gave her an old sweater to wear while he set about drying her blouse in front of the electric fan, painfully aware of the fact that a woman he considered beautiful was in his room, in his bathroom changing her clothes. He rushed around the small room, setting his books in order, his sheets quickly folded, and his stack of porn videos stashed in their secret place underneath the bed. Aaron, Sam’s roommate of two years, was out of town for the week on fieldwork, for which he was profoundly grateful.

Lydia came out of the tiny bathroom, her hair tousled and her eyes twinkling in amusement. “So this is what a boy’s bedroom looks like.” Then she stepped forward, and before Sam could say another word, had traveled the space between them. A kiss, hot as dragon’s fire, brushed his lips.

Outside, the storm refused to abate.

June 2005

“She’s been missing for over a week now,” Mitchie told Sam frantically. He was coming from the dormitory cafeteria and was crossing the lobby when he saw the slight figure of Lydia’s best friend rushing towards her.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he yelled furiously, his voice rising over the noise of the television. The group of freshmen boys watching the basketball replay quietly turned it off and slunk back to their rooms.

Mitchie burst into tears. “I was scared,” she sobbed. “I didn’t know what to do. She told me, the last time I saw her, that she wanted to escape.”

“Escape from what?” he asked, a sinking feeling in his stomach.

Mitchie couldn’t answer him, couldn’t look him in the eye, couldn’t stop crying.

May 2005
The campus, newly watered with the summer rains, smelled like a universe newly born. Glistening with rainwater, leaves hung heavy from the acacia branches that lined the main thoroughfare of the university. They were walking down the sidewalk, careful with the cracks in the cement. She carried her books close to her chest. His hands were shoved inside his pockets. They were coming from class.

“So what made you want to take up photography in the first place?’ she asked Sam, smiling.

“Just wanted to fill up some units so I won’t be left behind,” he said nonchalantly. “It was the only class that still had slots when I went in to sign up. Still, it’s better than Math.” He shrugged. “And you?”

“I like the idea of looking at the world through a lens,” she said, looking down, watching her step. She was conscious of the puddles, the damp slippery moss. “That you can create borders around what you see, the focusing and capturing of a moment that will never happen again.” She grinned, her face lighting up. “My mother said that I’m a watcher, not a doer. Maybe it’s because I never do anything around the house – I just watch her do the chores.”

Sam laughed. “My mom says the same thing about me.”

She slipped an arm around his. The mere whisper of her skin against the cloth of his shirt sleeve was overpowering.

May 2005
They were partners in class on the final project, model and photographer, their roles silently agreed upon without any discussion. Sam was getting used to reading her mind, anticipating Lydia’s actions by her inactions. She wanted to be seen, to become a mirror for his ideas, a reflection of what he saw. He wanted to use her fascination for mythical creatures as an anchor to the images. Black and white, stark skin and shadows, the dragon tattoo framed by the lines of her body. He loved to capture the curve of her back, the shallow plains of her bones giving shape to flesh, the length and flow of her legs. She agreed to pose nude.

They scheduled it over a weekend at a deserted strip of beach in Batangas called Ines Santita, staying at a small rest house owned by Sam’s family. The house overlooked a patch of white sand, built on a stone shelf sheered by rock. Shallow caves dotted the cove, just by the shore. During peak season, Sam told her during the drive, they rented to cottage out to other members of the family or to friends who wanted to get away. Right now, nobody was staying there: summer was almost over, and enrollment was only a couple of weeks away. The rains were heavier now, threatening to swallow the inland cove. It was dangerous to swim at night.

“It’s a beautiful place,” she said once they reached it, lying spread-eagled on the bed. “I wish I could live here forever.”

The cottage itself had only one bedroom, with one bed. They quietly made the bed, tucking the covers underneath the mattress, plumping pillows. He offered to sleep on the couch in the living room. She shook her head. On the first night, Lydia watched him sleep curled up beside her, his body avoiding a narrow strip of moonlight that slipped beneath the edge of the bedroom curtain.

March 2006
It was the first time he entered her room at the dormitory. She slept alone, one of the privileged few who were given single rooms. The landlady still kept it the way after her disappearance at the request of her parents. He wondered why he never used the key before – Mitchie gave him the spare a week after her disappearance. But then again, Sam reasoned, it wasn’t as if they were together anyway, right? She was just a friend, a fuck, a memory. So why did he feel as though there were claws around his heart, sharp dragon-nails digging around the fluttering muscle, thumping faster and faster.

The room smelled of Glade and old potpourri. Her bed was made, pale peach sheets patterned with scarlet tulips. Her blanket was folded at the foot of her mattress. Her laundry was folded and piled neatly at the middle of the bed. Lydia’s desk was neat as well – notebooks stacked together, ballpens and other colorful markers inside a ceramic mug. Books were lined up like toy soldiers according to height against the wall: a dictionary and thesaurus, books on Celtic mythology, Joseph Campbell, a dragonology sourcebook. Her camera was perched on top of the cabinet, lens facing forward, an all-seeing eye.

But the walls – Sam marveled at the walls of Lydia’s room. A mosaic of photographs, developed by her own hand, judging by smudges on several of the prints. They were all in black and white, stark images taped on the wall, fluttering like a thousand butterfly wings in the almost-imperceptible breeze. The prints covered two of the four walls, and it looked like she was beginning on the third when she disappeared. The photographs were mounted neatly, row after row of glossy prints, arranged almost like fish armor, or dragon scales.

Sam stepped closer to the walls, studying the photographs, searching for something – a clue, a lead, an arrow pointing to the next step. Her disappearance, the explanation for it all, was an itch he wanted so desperately to scratch. She loved doing close-ups, capturing the detail of an eye, a shoe, the scattering of clothes across a surface. Everything seemed familiar, somehow, a world he knew but was distorted by some kaleidoscope vision he failed to understand completely.

May 2005
“Let me develop the pictures,” she said on the way back from Batangas. Sam felt a twinge of possessive of Lydia’s body. He didn’t want anyone else to see it, particularly the one who owned it. He felt like a paradox, an undefined word. She was driving, he was in the front passenger seat, and they were driving along a deserted strip of side road, which Sam remembered was a short cut, or so his father had said before they left Manila. Cogon and tall grass surrounded them on both sides of the road. The car lurched forward, the path unpaved and rocky. An occasional stubby tree punctuated the otherwise lonely landscape.

Sam stared straight ahead, clutching his camera to his lap. “No. I’ll do it.”

“I want to see it too.”

“I’ll give you prints.”

“I want to see the ones you discard as well.”

He didn’t answer. Darkness began to close around them. Stars carefully uncovered themselves in the twilight. Lydia flicked on the headlights, illuminating the ground in front of them.

“It’s our project,” she said finally, “and I just want to see how you took pictures of – ”

“NO!”

Lydia slammed on the brakes hard, so hard that they both careened forward and flopped in their seats, held back only by seatbelts. Sam brushed his hair out of his eyes and turned to face her. She was clutching the wheel tightly, her knuckles pale in the gathering night, delicate veins tracing patterns across her skin. She seemed tinged slightly green in the weird light. They sat in silence for some time before he spoke again. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Asshole,” she muttered, staring straight ahead. She flicked off the headlights. They sat in the car, the airconditioning humming in their ears, their only source of illumination the slanted half-moon, the distant stars.

“I’m sorry.”

She looked up. “It’s waning right now,” she whispered. “Sometimes it’s called the dragon’s eye moon. They say that a woman’s magic is strongest during this lunar phase.”

“Why?”

She cast him a sideways glance. “Take a wild guess.”

Sam leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. She turned her head, wide-eyed, her hair a dark waterfall framing her too-pale face. “Why,” she whispered.

He leaned in and kissed her again, on the mouth, his lips prying hers open, his tongue tasting her sweet, cold flavor.

April 2005
“Was it painful?” he asked once, sitting beside her on the dormitory steps, watching the liquid sun set over the watery horizon. Pale strands of light dripped from the damp trees, rippling across the buildings and the sidewalks, the streets and passing cars.

She thought for a moment, sipping her iced tea carefully. “It was…like nothing I’ve ever felt before. It was painful, yes, but it was also cleansing, if that makes sense to you.” She looked at him. He noticed that her eyes were flecked with gold, and wondered if it was just a mere trick of the light.

“I don’t think I can explain,” she continued. “It’s like, you have to transcend the pain, I guess – because it really does consume you, for the moment, and then you just want to make it stop, but you can’t, and so you find a way to go beyond the pain, and then you realize it’s just momentary, that everything passes, and so all you have to do is wait for it to end. And it did.”

March 2006
It took a few seconds before he realized that all of the photographs on her wall were of him. Grainy and off-focus, but still recognizable, the way a puddle reflects and distorts one’s features. Pictures of Sam walking down the sidewalk with his basketball teammates, hair slick with sweat. Sam waiting for a jeepney at the shed. Sam walking beneath the trees during twilight. Sam leaning against the classroom wall, his hair in his eyes, texting. Sam’s eye, peering from the print, larger than life. Sam hunched in a library carrel, studying. Sam’s mud-encrusted rubber shoes, leaning crookedly against the wall.

He whirled around, momentarily dizzy. All of this – all of him – she was taking them – taking him –

He gripped the edge of her bed, frightened. Questions spun inside his head, a whirlwind of half-formed sentences, phrases all jumbled together, spliced with question marks, tremors of fears and partly-justified assumptions. He wanted to get out, stumble out into the street and inhale the cloyingly sweet smell of the rain-soaked loam. The photographs shivered, as if a cold wind had blown inside the room.

May 2005
Lydia was sleeping at the back of the car, curled across the backseat, covered by his jacket. Her hair scattered across the upholstery, a dark penumbra around her head. He was in the driver’s seat, speeding down the highway. The scent of sex coated the inside of the small vehicle. Sam could still taste her on his fingers.

She had made small, whimpering sounds of pleasure as he entered her, her body shuddering as she moved to the age-old rhythm heard by countless other lovers before them. The dragon on her body curved and undulated in its own silent dance across her skin. Sam held her until she came, finally, their sweat mingling, her skin flushed pink. Lydia curled up in the back seat, naked, afterwards, her eyes closed and a small smile of desire playing on her lips. The dragon curled around her possessively, its small inked eyes staring at Sam as if in challenge, guarding its treasure with its own sinuous form.

He had stared at her for some time, lost in thought, the countryside wind sweeping through the open windows of the car, drying his skin. He dressed quickly and arranged his jacket around her slumbering body, a concession to modesty. It was only when his fingers closed around her bare body that he noted the green tinge of her skin, the slight row of shallow bumps across her back, past the tattoo, woman-flesh that seemed to transform into the sleek surface of a dragon.

June 2005
“I feel trapped,” Lydia said the last time they saw each other. They were having dinner at a rundown Thai canteen just off-campus. Sam wanted something to warm his bones. “I feel like I’m growing out of my skin.”

Sam swallowed a spoonful of hot spicy soup. “Maybe it’s because summer is ending.”

Lydia gestured to the rainshower outside, painting the scene outside the window gray. “Never felt like summer in the first place.”

“True.”

“I don’t know.” She propped her elbows on the table and cocked her head. “I feel like I need to do something, get out of here, find something else to do.”

“Sounds like you want to run away.”

“Something like that.” She took a long drink of her Diet Coke.

“The question,” said Sam thoughtfully, “is why.”

Lydia paused for a moment, watching Sam wolf down the last of his meal. After he had cleaned his plate, she said, “I think…I think it’s because I don’t really belong here.” She spread her hands out on the table and stared at them dejectedly. “I don’t know. I’m just babbling.”

She looked so desperate, so alone, that Sam wanted to put his arms around her and pull her to him, tell her that she was important, that she was doing something for him, to him. But he just kept his hands to himself and busied himself with looking at the rainwashed street and the damp, waterlogged sky.

June 2006
The rainy season began with a spectacular downpour at the beginning of the schoolyear. Buildings smelled like mildew and damp. Trees dripped verdant leaves down unsuspecting pedestrians. Everyone carried an umbrella expectantly. Dark clouds obscured the merest ray of watery sunlight.

Sam moved out of the dormitory and into an off-campus apartment. He returned the key to Lydia’s room. One night, he burned all the photographs he took of her. The white paper seared and crackled, disappearing into the depths of pale, pale fire.

Epilogue
The three prints that Same took of Lydia that were part of the final exhibit of Sam’s photography class were the ones that received the highest mark for that summer semester. The serpentine shadows that Sam skillfully played with as they slithered across the bare skin of his model was lauded by Professor Alcantara, before shaking his head in regret at the disappearance of Sam’s partner.

In the first photograph, Lydia was seated at an angle on a flat rock inside a cave, her head draped with a sheet of white lace. Sunlight pierced through the gloom of the interior, the shadows of rocks. Her eyes were closed, lashes curling demurely on her cheeks. A hint of a smile danced on her lips. Her tattoo danced across her belly, the head of the dragon just above her pubic mound, the flickering tongue pointing downward.

In the second photograph, Lydia was still inside the cave, standing on the flat rock. Her lace headdress trailed at her feet, an abandoned heirloom. She was facing the camera, her tattooed dragon visibly encircling her torso. In her cupped hands, an offering, she held an apple.

In the third photograph, Lydia was curled up on the flat rock, her back turned towards the camera. Her arms were wrapped around herself, her fingers peeking from where she was gripping her shoulders. A knife seemed to be embedded on her side, and a dark liquid trickled from her prone form onto the sand. The tail of the dragon curled around her lower back, the top half disappearing as it seemingly climbed over the curve of her waist. Her hair was spread over the dark surface of the rock, melding perfectly with the shadows.

Born in 1984 in Manila, Philippines, Gabriela Lee earned her degree at the University of the Philippines and completed her master’s at the National University of Singapore under an ASEAN scholarship. She was a Fellow for Poetry in English at the Dumaguete Writers’ Workshop, the longest-running creative writing workshop in Southeast Asia. Her stories and poems have appeared in literary magazines such as The Sunday Inquirer Magazine and the Philippine Free Press, and anthologies such as Philippine Speculative Fiction, Vol. 1, Crowns & Oranges: New Philippine Poetry, and A Different Voice: Fiction by Young Filipino Writers. She currently works with teenagers in an online virtual environment in Singapore.

That was not truly the first time he saw her, of course. There were other days—other hot, humid days—when he had seen her, tending to the rice beds under an unforgiving sun. Why, just that morning he most probably had seen her, bending, gathering, shifting (bending, gathering, shifting) in the tedium of harvest, along with all the other dark-skinned women of the barrio.

But for reasons known only to the gods and destiny and love—oh, most certainly, love! —it was only on that day, at that hour, at that very minute, that Pedro really, truly saw her. And with the prophetic certainty that few men were blessed with (although which, mysteriously, seemed to be a common enough trait in Pedro’s family), Pedro knew his heart was no longer his.

Pedro was in love.

A period of courting ensued. As was the norm, the village elders kept a vigilant watch as Pedro submitted himself to the rigors of courtship. No one ever suspected that there would be anything less than a positive outcome for the efforts Pedro expended. It had long been the tradition that men wooed the women with the completion of various mundane tasks, the accumulation of which was considered a wondrous feat worthy of their intended’s lifelong affection. It was the way things were done in the barrio and no one, in the village’s remembered history, had found reason to challenge the convention.

But though Pedro had persevered for sixty long days—bringing water from the well every morning, chopping wood in the afternoon, singing old kundimans by her window at night—the maiden refused to accept his suit. It was not that the maiden was being coy, although this certainly was what everybody concluded, even her own embarrassed family. The truth of the matter was that the maiden herself did not know whether she did want to spend the rest of her life with Pedro. Unlike him, who, prior to one pivotal moment, had only seen her in conjunction with the rest of the scenery, she, on the other hand, had always seen him—singing to his carabao, ploughing the fields, muttering to the sun—and found him, simply put, unremarkable. But she knew what was expected of her, and, being practical in nature, compromised: she would wait it out, hoping against hope that either he did something marvelous, or he would grow tired with the over-extended courtship.

Another thirty days followed as Pedro attempted to find his way to the maiden’s heart through wood, and water, and saccharine love songs. By the ninety-first day, Pedro’s family voiced their own doubts about Pedro’s time-consuming quest. But Pedro refused to be dissuaded. His heart, once lost, could not be redeemed. It was the way of some men. Pedro had no space, no matter how small, to nurture affections for another woman. It was only a matter of time, he said, a matter of seconds, compounded into minutes, compounded into days, compounded into months, but still, just a matter of time before the maiden conceded her heart.

And so another thirty days passed, and then another, and another. From well to forest to window (well to forest to window), Pedro pursued the maiden with steadfast determination. Only on cold, stormy nights, when no one could hear him nor witness his tears, would he allow himself the privilege of venting out his frustrations. On those nights he would weep and shout and scream to the cold winds. Why, he would ask, why? And the gods would howl with him, as if they too regretted that he was destined to fall in love with such an impossible woman.

Eventually, the storms would end and Pedro would remember the challenge in her eyes, the cadence of her voice, the scent of sweat and earth and sampaguita that was uniquely hers. Then, tired and spent but still oh so in love, Pedro would return home, the frustrated, impatient, and almost overwhelmingly despondent beast within him once again calmed by the memories of his obsession. He’d wait forever, if he needed to, he would promise himself over and over again. Then, satisfied with his declaration of loyalty and love, Pedro would fall into a deep sleep, chasing a certain dark-skinned woman in his dreams.

Forever turned out to be one year.

By all accounts, the three hundred and sixty-sixth day was just like any ordinary day. The men went about their business with their carabaos, the women with the harvesting of palay. But similar to the seemingly ordinary day when Pedro’s entire life changed when his eyes settled upon one unsuspecting maiden, the three hundred and sixty-sixth day would also prove to be a defining moment for Pedro. And it all began when Pedro was overcome with a dangerous kind of delirium.

It was a delirium brought about by obsession, by a year of continuous servitude, and of course passion; an explosive, unbridled, savage passion that had been stoked with every glance, every sound, every movement the maiden had made, and had been pushed back again and again and again by the need of to retain a veneer of propriety. But who defined propriety? Pedro asked himself. Who? Did he not deserve recompense for all the effort he had exerted? Had he not been the perfect gentleman, the perfect suitor, this entire time? Was he not entitled to some reward for his devotion, unmatched in the barrio’s relatively long history?

The treacherous questions plagued Pedro as he led his carabao through the mud from one end of the field to another. Perhaps it was the scorching sun, or the hypnotic movement of man and beast against the mud, or perhaps there was no reason at all other than that Pedro had finally lost his patience. But a plan was formulated in Pedro’s mind. It was a crazy plan, a plan that would never even have occurred to Pedro just a year before. It was also a simple plan, so simple that it couldn’t possibly work. Or could it? And if it did—oh, if it did! Pedro shivered underneath the glaring heat.

With delicious possibilities roiling in his head, Pedro continued on with his day. Just as the sun was about to set, he made his way to the maiden’s house, carrying the wood he had chopped for her family. After the usual chitchat, Pedro set about to serenading his beloved. But this time, instead of singing to her about lovers and beauty and eternity, he began to hum an old song, so old that it had lost all its words to time.

It was part of Pedro’s inheritance from his grandfather. Ancient by the time Pedro came along, the then-patriarch of Pedro’s family had doted on his only grandson. From a young age, Pedro was taught the way of fields, of animals, and of ageless strings of notes and harmonies that held the power of the barrio’s secret history. Pedro never quite believed his grandfather’s claims of the ancient melodies’ magical properties, but he had conceded that the songs had, at various times, proven useful in calling rains when there were droughts, warding off locusts, and finding errant chickens.

The particular song that Pedro hummed that evening was a haunting melody he had often used to calm animals during bouts of illness. As he sang, Pedro thought of the first time he had seen her, the first time he had heard her voice, the first time she had spoken his name; and everything that he felt began to drip and trickle and ooze until finally, the dam broke, and the entirety of all his repressed emotions flooded into a crescendo that was pure, and feral, and truthful.

The entire barrio succumbed to sleep.

Trembling, Pedro walked into the maiden’s house, up the stairs, into her room, and ever so tenderly picked his beloved up from her bed. In complete silence—for not even the crickets were awake to witness the abduction—Pedro took the maiden out of the barrio, up the mountains, and into a forgotten cave.

Then, bathed in the light of a single candle, Pedro waited.

The actual plan that Pedro had dreamed of earlier that afternoon involved a little more than just watching the maiden in her slumber. But the weight of propriety kept Pedro from indulging in even the least wicked of his fantasies. Never mind, of course, that he had held her far longer than was necessary before putting her down. Never mind that earlier that afternoon he had challenged the very definition of propriety. And never mind as well the fact that by abducting the maiden and taking her way from the barrio’s prying and protective eyes, he had made a travesty of what was considered proper between two young, unmarried individuals. The gods had not granted Pedro sufficient mental acuity to analyze introspective contradictions. And even if it did occur to him, he was too close to her, too distracted by a flood of inappropriate thoughts to question his own irrationality. All he knew was that it was wrong, somewhat indecent (but not horribly so) for him to do anything but look.

Oh, but how he looked!

Pedro drank in the sight of her: the way her hair cascaded to her ears, to her shoulders, to the tips of her breasts; the way she breathed, evenly like soft rainfall; the way she would moisten her lips with her tongue, the contrast of her dark lashes against her cheeks, the elegance of her bare toes curled up against the soles of her feet. It seemed that every inch of her was made to tantalize him. And with every breath, every moment that passed that he was in her presence, a sliver of his control slipped.

He was shuddering when the maiden awoke a few short hours after her abduction.

The maiden did not know exactly what had occurred. But the maiden was known for her intelligence and in the few moments it took for her to sit up and brush the hair from her face with her hands, she was able to safely conclude three things: 1) she was no longer in her home; 2) she was in a cold cave; 3) she had most probably been taken there by Pedro.

After getting a good look at Pedro, she dismissed the possibility that she had been rescued by him from some form of beast or monster. He was her abductor, of that she was fairly certain. But though it did surprise her to find that he had it in him to take her from her home, she was still confident that he would not do anything that would harm her. She also felt (correctly, as she would soon find out), that though it seemed she was in a precarious position, being obviously less physically capable then her captor, that she nevertheless held some sort of power that, should she decide to wield it, could bring Pedro to his knees.

And so it was that she, calmly and without a hint of fear or trepidation, asked Pedro to bring her back home.

“No!” Pedro’s eyes glazed as he begged. “Please, please, let me try.”

The maiden knew, even perhaps better than Pedro, what he was really asking for with his plea. She even knew how he intended to convince her to concede her affections, having put two and two together with the abduction and the intensity of his expression (though it must be said that Pedro, after having conveniently forgotten how he had indulged himself with thoughts of her in his imagination, was not entirely certain how he could accomplish the seemingly impossible feat of having the maiden concede anything, much less her affections). In truth, she had always been curious about the act of lovemaking. It was the subject of many a conversation between her and her more experienced sisters, and she had it on their authority that it was worth all the words, and more, that they had devoted to describing it.

“Please, let me try,” Pedro repeated, as he reached out a hand to her, his entire being teetering on the brink of desolation, and yet—and yet, and yet—even he could sense that there was a glimmer of hope; a glimmer of hope that grew brighter with each passing moment that the maiden hesitated.

“Let me try,” Pedro said one last time, as he finally gave in to the temptation and let his hand fall on top of her knee. “Please.”

Perhaps it was the allure of the shadows; or perhaps it was the lingering influence of Pedro’s compelling song; or perhaps it was something as mundane as the maiden’s own curiosity. Pedro was not about to question whatever mercy the gods granted him. All he knew was that no dream, or fantasy, or delusion could compare to the ferocity of emotion he felt when the maiden took the candle and blew out the light.

In the dark, they made love.

It was tentative, slow, and excruciatingly gentle. Within the universe of their embrace, Pedro and the maiden explored an old language of heated flesh and surrendered moans. It was a language that countenanced no shame embedded by the realities of convention. Instead, it created small spaces and secret places where the vagaries of promise, curiosity, friendship, devotion, fervor (for love, for experience, for something undefined yet precious) could converge, thrive, and entangle into a rhapsody of intimate, unspoken words. And, in one beautiful moment, the language broke the barriers of the heavens, so that the stars collided, the gods wept, and the fates were awed into silence in the euphoric aftermath.

Afterwards, Pedro did not sleep. Instead, he indulged himself in what was proving to be a favorite pastime of his: watching the maiden. And when she awoke, he found himself smiling at her tenderly.

“Love me,” Pedro said as he brushed an errant strand of hair from her face.

But the maiden simply looked away.

“Love me,” Pedro said more urgently, a hint of despair creeping into his voice.

The maiden did not answer.

“Love me,” Pedro whispered, no longer smiling.

And in the ensuing silence, Pedro was graced with crystal-like clarity: the maiden could never love him. He could spend an eternity carrying water, chopping wood, singing songs and still, she would never love him. It was a painful and unchangeable truth. The realization made Pedro’s eyes water, as an unbearable sadness began to settle on him like an encroaching darkness.

The maiden herself could not look at Pedro. It was an undeniable fact that she had never felt such ecstasy as she had that evening. But just as some men were granted the certainty of prophets, some women were granted irrefutable epiphanies. And it was this epiphany that she had been graced with at the peak of passionate rapture: that though her body and her mind had surrendered, her obstinate, impossible heart would not.

Oh, how the maiden wished she had the words to soften the blow of an unfair truth. But she had none and all she could do was turn away.

But this tale does not end with such sadness, for in the end, Pedro proved himself a better man by taking the truth and her silence and his battered heart without complaint. And then, as a reward from the fates that had cruelly destined him to such insurmountable love for a woman who could not return it, he was bestowed a song.

It was a song unlike any that his grandfather had taught him—a wordless melody that survivors of lost battles would have found achingly familiar. It was his song, and their song, but more importantly, it was the maiden’s song; a melody that encompassed all that could not be said, all that was too painful to be spoken and the sad acceptance of all that could not be changed.

Pedro continued to sing as he led the maiden out of the cave, down the mountains, and into the barrio, his voice once again entrancing the denizens of forest and village into a deep melancholic slumber. He was still singing when he finally returned the maiden to her house, the first rays of the sun peeking out over the horizon.

“I’m sorry,” the maiden said, not knowing what else she could say.

Pedro smiled, sadly but sincerely.

“I know,” Pedro said.

And as she turned away from him, Pedro felt himself crumble slowly, then fade, underneath the soft gaze of dawn.

Kate Aton-Osias is an auditor who believes that love, hope, and good chocolate can save the world. She has earned a Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature and a citation in the international Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her stories have been published in Serendipity, Philippine Speculative Fiction, The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, and soon, Bewildering Stories and A Time for Dragons. She’s a proud founding member of the LitCritters writing and literary discussion group, and is happily swimming in the structured chaos of being wife to fellow writer Alex Osias and mother to their newborn son Hector.

Two lovers were squatting at the edge of dusk. The halfling female spat a sullen look at her beautiful god and wrapped her wings around herself as he spoke.

“Why care for the taung-araw? This rite is your tradition.”

“Because they are my people.” Her eyes were bloodshot, hungry for the silkiness of human tongue and the lazy way it stewed in her mouth after it was severed. Sixty years as a huntress for the nanay-gali, yet the singularity of it all still consumed her. She was, after all, what the townsfolk called a manananggal, which literally means ‘one who removes,’ and she reveled in the tumultuous delectability of the hunt. Never mind the thrill of strangulation, or the gargling chromaticism of the screams. It was the feel of the meat against her teeth – bittersweet betel nut and yam pudding. But those were comparisons to a lost existence, and he made no hesitation to remind her.

“Your people? You speak of a stolen life, not of this one.”

Her earliest memories were of infancy, unlike most others who remembered nothing before they were three. Warm hands slid under the fullness of her belly, pulling her into the light of a wet evening. Then there was the gentle swaying – her first dance with the moon. The delicious rhythm drove her quite mad, and she thrashed about only to find the aching nipple on her lips as she passed out into the darkness.

She learned to walk in the summer that followed, but preferred to pass the time sitting in her room. Her stout stocky limbs dangled off the side of her little mattress, each squiggly toe moving about as if her feet were playing a sonata in the dim light. She had grown the most beautiful head of hair – the kind the manangs called the color of fish fat and squid ink – and she twirled it about in languid fashion as she stared out of her bedroom window. Even then the evening had seemed so taunting. The shadows of leaves paced hungrily under the macopa and the durian. Brown shapeless figures groped the grass blades as they raced to and fro around the tree trunks. She shut her lids tightly and breathed in the thin damp breeze. The dark was her heaven, and she could sit there entranced by the tender courting sounds for hours at a time.

At the age of five, she was headstrong and given to wandering. After her lessons, she would steal past the lansones to sit in a clearing where a veil of stars could pick out her gleaming eyes. It pleased her when the birds came in swooping low over the shifting canopy in idle, wide circles. They waddled on the branches for a bit, their aching wings clipped tightly to their sides before disappearing quietly behind the mangoes. She often thought about them, wondering whether the sun seared the wings off their shoulders, or if their young flew off never wanting to be found.

“Marta!” The scream would come piercing through her solitude, and then she knew it was time to head back. Her mother was furious when she ran up to the villa doors. “Did I not tell you how dangerous it is for a little girl to run alone past those trees at night? You deserve a good whip with your father’s tsinelas. Now, come inside for prayers.”

“Yes, Inay.” Her reply was strained but polite, and she sauntered in reluctantly, taking her place at the altar. The Black Virgin towered over her with arms outstretched in the hazy conflagration of shifting candlelight, and the chanting began. She gazed up into its marble eyes and prayed against hope that it would be over before her tiny knees turned purple.

“They fear us more than their statues, you know.” The moon god interrupted her reverie. “They flounder in the promise of darkness like bala fish thrown into a bangka. Why should you be sacrificed for their sake?”

“You cannot hope to understand, Bulan.” His words were a firmament that kept the waters from flooding the earth, and gave the winged serpents dominion over the rain, but now they scattered her thoughts, and her mind spiraled away. “I do this for no one.”

“Then what principle does this serve? You speak of your losses, my child. Who is to speak of mine?” Bulan was insistent, and he pressed down hard on the ground, snapping roots where they lay in their graves. The earth groaned with the weight, but her figure remained unmoving, and he recalled the night they had first met.

It was a few hours before daybreak when he caught her, a vision gaunt and lithe pressing steadily through the mist. Had she not been turned as a child, her beauty would have been hailed as ‘preciosa’ by the townspeople. Yet the sight of her now, a winged torso whose lower half seemed mercilessly torn off below the navel, easily threw the bravest of the farmers into a fit of panic as she flew over the rice fields. Her face was satiated – acute with the smear of fresh blood on her throat; and yet her chest seemed to pound with a strangeness that he not seen in her kind. It sat over her like an elusive, smoldering hollowness that, for all his power, he could not understand.

The creatures that were her predecessors were mindless predators, ripping flesh off those who strayed into the barren fields and carrying it back to the waters of the ilog where her mistresses waited in congregation. At the sight of their meal, the nanay-gali would open their jaws wide, snapping like grotesque hatchlings in a nest as the bleeding manna dropped steadily from the heavens. The halfling then flew off to her lair, squealing with the rapture of the kill on her palate. Her kind never stole further into the night, especially not in the way this one did – lost to the processes of what seemed to be a conscience.

He had shown himself to her the following evening in a form that seemed almost human. A warm brilliance pulsed from his skin as he moved towards her amidst pockets of dead grass and makahiya that bowed in his presence. In the distance, the santelmo filtered lightly over the tips of the mountains in muted synergy with his radiance. She paused in mid-air as he approached, studying his glowing figure with eyes that showed neither concern nor trepidation, but a sense of wondrous disbelief – the consequence of which was his surprise.

“You stare as if you know me,” he said.

“But I do,” she replied, for she realized that she always had. “You are the moon.”

In time, their meetings turned to ritual. Each evening, she looked up as the great orb changed its face slowly from full circle to darkness, and then she knew he had cloaked himself to descend to the earth. At times he would assume the form of a great eagle as they flew over the jagged shoulders of the Apo, or a fine young lobo as they grazed the desiccated palayan fields. The night he took her to the graveyard, however, he looked like a man.

She found him sitting on a panchon then, whistling in the place where the people of the barrios buried their dead. The half-light was unruly, and it bit through the indifferent chill as the moon god rose like a specter in the dim.

Bulan eyed her as she approached, allowing the silence to fondle her before he motioned to the ground. “Look here,” he said.

A dirty stone protruded at an odd angle out of the caking mud as if it had been knocked out of place by a large animal. A naked infant with wings was carved onto its surface. She recognized the figure from her childhood prayer books as one of the anghelitas that hovered over the Black Virgin as the holy mother ascended into the heavens. It knelt with its hands clasped tightly to its chest and its head cocked to the side, and it stared unwaveringly at something that had been chiseled into the rock:

The halfling turned away. She wanted to scream. The fissures on her lips began to drip thick, turbid spit, and the rows of vaults, tombs, and stony images yielded to arousal. Marble eyes turned opaque stares in her direction; crosses shifted in the twilight.

“Do you not recognize it?”

She brushed him off. “How did you find this?” Her hysteria was escalating, rising to the sound of a thousand questions that drove her to deafness. Then there was silence, and a lingering nothingness that shrieked and screeched in her ear.

“You had a name.” He floated tenuously over the dirty gravestone as he moved beside her. She had called him by name the first day they met, but till this moment had kept hers from him. “Why have you never chosen to tell me?”

No answer hung there to meet the moon god’s question – only an empty space where her thoughts seemed to jostle with each other – a sanctuary where he could not reach her.

But the times when the moon god might have stretched out to bridge the beyond had well passed. Now he was sitting beside her in the place that was theirs, and no matter how hard he fought, the void continued to edge insidiously between them, engorged with the anguish of memories he was denied. It seemed to captivate her, holding her reverent despite the slew of dizzy anguish creeping through her entrails; and yet the hour of the ritual was drawing dangerously close. Bulan hurried to address her.

“You are a fool to do this, child.”

His words roused her. “I am no child!” How could he have thought so little of her all this time? She was his companion. Had he not come to think so as well?

“You and the taung-araw. You are no different from the impregnable jackfruit. You grow ripe with each thrust of the immodest winds, distending with a mass you cannot hope to carry.” He drummed his annoyance on his chin. “But the crippled god Lupa pulls on you, and one day you find yourself plummeting towards the filth, racing towards an inevitable splat with your own shadow.”

“These words change nothing. I am to leave this world tonight.”

“Yet yours will not be the only death on your hands. Without you, your mistresses will not survive.” The halfling was a scavenger for the nanay-gali, and he knew that the old women would starve in her absence. But his words only seemed to strengthen her resolve.

“Do they not deserve to die for what they have done?”

“I speak of this because I fear…”

“You fear my loss!” She had cut him off, and a lull fell upon the night.

Mist began to swirl in the moon god’s eyes. The brittle twines of the Kapalaran, the spinners of fate, had led him to this one moment, and he found himself helpless and without a reply. Clouds edged by at a funeral’s pace, leaving meadows of grey cotton wisps in the turtle-colored sky.

“We are a cursed people, Bulan! Cursed by forces beyond our control. Have you forgotten this as well?” The halfling remembered his story with unparalleled clarity…

She prodded him often in the past, asking what sort of fabric he made the moonshine out of, or how the great mountains came to exist. In turn, he acquainted her with the tales of the land he had known: of how the Higante dominated the plains before the early god Bathala threw them into the steaming furnaces of the Mayon, the remainder of them taking to the forests as the pipe-smoking Kapre giants. He told her of the Tikbalang, the first race of men-horses, and how they trudged to their deaths in the boiling mud springs of the north. He bragged of his relationship with the maiden, Makiling, and how, after she partook of the forbidden fruit, he preserved her naked figure in living rock where he would lay next to her at the end of his days.

They liked to wander through the kawayan as they talked, bending the green as they roused the lizards with their banter; and although he refused to show it, her questions amused him thoroughly. In fact, their conversations had gone on for so long that he had learned to anticipate when she would next begin to press him.

That one evening she had asked about the nanay-gali, however, had taken him by surprise. He stood without answering at first, his thoughts welling up like a smoky haze as they spread over the vastness that was his. Then, he drew himself together, collecting the fragments into a tiny pool at the center of his soul as he began to speak:

“The nanay-gali were born in the days before this land was broken into pieces. The old women lived in privilege for centuries by the river where the waters offered up fish to their baskets and carried their dead off into the sea. They were, however, like all who belong to the taung-araw, a discontent people.”

The halfling grew pale. His words awakened a deep, vicarious hurt inside of her. She wanted to open her mouth, but resisted the urge instead.

“Much like you once were,” he said, as if he understood what she meant to ask. “They sat in the daytime watching the manaul or the adarna soar into the clouds, wondering why they could not be one with the gods the way these creatures were. In time, their seamstresses took to fashioning wings out of the nipa, yet the fabrications only took them several feet off the ground despite the most potent of levitation spells.”

“One day, the youngest of them discovered something huge caught in the fish traps at the deep end of the river. The creature was incredibly long and stout. Its body was covered by large velvet scales that danced all the way from its forelegs to its back where they crept onto an enormous set of leathery wings. The serpent lashed about, attempting to shake itself from a tangle of weeds and catgut that had snagged the antlers on its moldy skull. The find intrigued the young virgin, and she ran proudly back into the village to tell her elders.”

“News of the discovery spread quickly, and the women ran to the banks barefoot, stepping through carabao dung and shouting at the prospect of having caught a water dragon in the river. They grabbed hastily at the net and heaved the beast out onto the moist loam. The creature was young, and could barely have been a century old, but they took to it with bolos, splashing its purple blood onto the riverbank as they butchered the beast in an attempt to sever its wings.”

“They cackled when they had finished, dumping the remains into the water and hoisting the tent-like appendages over their shoulders as they scampered back into their houses. There the seamstresses gathered, spreading the young girl who had found the dragon on her back. They lit red candles and crouched low as they began to sew the wings onto her flesh, holding down the screaming girl as they did. When they were done, they pushed her into the sunlight, hissing for her to fly.”

Bulan shifted his weight and clasped his hands tightly. He wanted desperately to stop, as if the silence would somehow offer a means of rescuing her, but her eyes betrayed her insistence, and he continued on. “The girl obeyed, flapping her wings even as the blood trickled down her spine, but the wings only took her as high as the apex of the guava before she fell back onto the nearest hut. Furious at their failure, the women dragged the girl out into the swine pens, cussing at her for being so fat.”

“Then they took their bolos again, this time to dismember her lower half so that she would be light enough to rise even higher. When finally she did, the women cried out in triumph, wailing at the chance to take like gods into the skies.”

His tone grew strained, and he hesitated, for he knew what followed would be a death song. “I had come of age in that time. The god Bathala took favor on me and fastened my light against the night sky. I was tasked to watch over his darkness, and I gazed over the world with the judgment of my youth.”

“It was through such power that I had observed the carnage of the nanay-gali. I looked down on the butchery with angry eyes, for the winged serpents were loyal creatures that served me and my brothers. We rallied together, Arauw and Lupa at my side, and upturned the river in our rage. The waters dashed the women against each other, throwing their skirts over their faces and splashing mud between their heavy thighs.”

“We cursed them that night.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “For the thievery of flight, they were transformed into thieves of the flesh – condemned to prey off the taung-araw for their sustenance for the rest of what became inhuman lives.”

The halfling grew limp, her body surrendering to violent shivers in the cold air.

“The virgin herself could not be saved, even as the stolen dragon wings remained beating on her back. She was, after all, a spawn of the nanay-gali, and she stayed bound to the women by a force even the gods could not break, scavenging flesh for the old women until her own body gave way, at which point she transferred the beast’s essence to a new vessel. The cycle remains unbroken to this day.” His words trailed off into an abrupt grumbling as a monsoon crept determinedly above them; but the moon god’s story had already driven the halfling to delirium, and she took off in flight, leaving him in the charged clatter of the tempest.

She was climbing just below the clouds in a matter of seconds. Bulan’s words echoing in her head…a force even the gods could not break. Rain began to fall on her face in large corpulent drops as the downpour swathed her bare breasts. The great mountain, Apo, stretched out dangerously before her. Its broad cliffs fell gracefully to its sides in dangerously clever, wide curves. Large deciduous growths projected from its torso like tiny bristles quivering in the storm, threatening to skewer her should she veer close. She told herself she was free – free as the incessant flapping that drove her past the perilous slopes. If she thought long and hard enough, she might have convinced herself it was true. But all that remained in her head was a compulsion – a compulsion steadily nursed from the day of her turning.

She was to enroll in a proper school the day after they took her. Her afternoons with the venerably toothless town prayle and his monotonous account of The Annunciation, and Maria, the Birhen, were mercifully over, and she was down on her knees playing with ants in the yard. The red insects were tiny but ravenous, and they tore at each other like horned war beetles on the broken twigs she held up in the air. She imagined thick poison dripping from their prickly legs as they played out the silent duel. Dusk was swaggering around her figure by the time her mother found her.

“It is getting dark, anak. You must come inside. Must I remind you everyday? The enkantos will have you for dinner, aba! There is a full moon tonight.”

But the full moon was something she could not quite resist. Should she obey, she would submit to her father’s scolding, a bowl of mongo leaves, and the tireless novenas that snaked at the pace of the kohol through her mothers’ hands. Prayers rose up from the villa doors like warnings on the fog, and at that moment, she decided she would remain a child no longer.

“Leave me alone, Inay!” Tears streamed down her soiled features in stout, gem-like globs. She pulled up her skirt and began to run, bounding away as fast as her precocious little grown-up feet could take her, even as Inay’s pleading voice faded into the rustling of leaves. When her breath finally gave way, she realized she was exhausted, and she curled down on the cogon and fell asleep.

When she awoke, she was in the air, drifting swiftly past the stars with a desperation exceeded only by her fear. At first, she thought she was dreaming, the way she dreamt of the tall payasos of the town fiestas, or of swimming in basins of dark green sago; but then she looked up to find herself in the shadow of a mangled body, and horrible black wings, and she screamed. The creature seemed almost human, but frightfully cut in half. Black locks swept past squalid features – a crooked nose stump cradled squarely between intense black eyes, and thin dusky lips that arched down in a violent pout. Brutish arms held her sternly against the rushing breeze, and no matter how she squirmed, she could not wrench herself.

The banks of the river crept slowly toward them, growing larger and larger until she found herself shoved into its raging waters by her captor. The surge was indomitable, and her hair caught hastily in the murky current as she gagged on the froth. Through the tangle she stared up at the halfing holding her little head under the water’s surface in fierce baptism.

All around them sat the old women, singing and wailing with an anticipation just as fierce, waiting for the ritual to reach its conclusion – the death of a matron and the birth of a new savior. She could hear the chanting from beneath the surface like a dull and gentle caress. The cacophony numbed her, stroking her veins even as the silt poured steadily into her chest.

Then she felt it, much like an enormous roar that erupted within her womb. The beast wrenched itself from the halfling above the water, the draconic concentrate filtering downward toward her until it punctured her navel. It climbed into her loins at first, severing her lower torso as it did. The amputation fell lifelessly toward the river bottom, and she stared wide-eyed at her legs as the fish swarmed around them, nipping at the frayed flesh.

The essence then squirmed upward, clawing frantically toward her arching back, raking decidedly at her skin till she felt a bursting from her spine – two grotesque wings twisting to the rhythm of the moonlight like beans sprouting ferociously in the midday sun. They fought against the torrent, pushing, straining, and finally tenting into enormous new appendages. Do not worry. It was whispering in her ear. The old vessel must pass away, but I have taken you as my own. You are reborn, little one. You are blessed. The winged animal grew calm as it settled in the curve of her flesh, and she woke to the perching of a new duality. Half woman. Half creature. She thrashed about as the water boiled up around her, and her life rippled away in dark muddy circles.

The memory of the pain tugged at the halfling’s senses, and soon the horror of her visions began to fade. She was back on the hill now. Back with the moon god. Back where she realized she could no longer keep the beast at bay. The brute was relentless, its dragon limbs extending large expansive outlines that loomed over her in the twilight, goading out her own shadow until what marked the ground was all fury and all menace. The creature wailed in her bosom, pleading for the new vessel she would provide it with. This is your birthright. Find a child, it begged. Her innocence shall replenish you, and you shall conceive, immaculate. Its thirst was a ravenous gluttony that stretched out over generations without deceleration; the winged serpent – a voracious, living vigor that would not be quenched. She gave the moon god her last look as her sorrow sank into her breasts. “My mind cannot be changed, Bulan.” The words poured out like a requiem. “It is time.”

Bulan rose up, struggling hard against the sudden breaking in his throat. His luminescence was virile, and it bathed her with the color of maize as he took her features in. In his lifetime he had seen young kapitans sold off to war, barrios razed to the ground, and women traded into slavery. He had taken the niños in their sleep and watched their fathers mourn in the moonlight. There would be no bargains. “Do as you wish,” he said. He was alone now, as he realized he had always been, and the night recaptured him in its embrace.

Already the old women were gathering at the river, their long toenails tilling furrows through the angry mud. Trees lashed at them, slapping long processes of bramble against their backs and shins. Even the winds huffed at their dirty hair and threw mire into their faces. The entire forest seemed to rise up in a great bawling, spitting out skeletons and the empty nests of the kalapati. But the nanay-gali trudged forward, their voices rising up in an unassailable reverberation against the holocaust.

She could hear them, beckoning for her to come as they always did. Their voices ebbed through her in ruddy waves, calling her forth to anoint their savior, stirring the creature within her as it rocked in its amnion.

The great orb itself was molten and high in the heavens, soaking her purple and green in the escalating breeze. It climbed higher as she watched, gaining a distance that wiped away all understanding and all familiarity. She steeled herself and bore down on her being as she realized what she had to do.

She called on the beast, and it took her into the air.

The old women looked up in alarm. She was coming, speeding towards them with an alacrity that tainted the winds. They understood. The halfling’s betrayal loitered over them like a fetid stench, and they snorted loudly, throwing their heads back as they stomped on the earth. They began to guffaw in unison, lifting up a sordid protest for the child she was not carrying.

The beast itself grew perturbed, and the creature grunted wildly. It laced her bile with putrid urine and blew smoke into her windpipe. Unseen talons punctured innards. Veiled nares sprouted daggers of fire. The halfling choked in the icy darkness, but hurried against the winds despite these tortures. She was close now, and her entire body began to vibrate, as if in resonance to the orchestrated malady. The river sped towards her in a frightening blur as her senses gave way, and she caught herself mumbling strange utterances.

To you do we send up our sighs… O banished children of Eve…

The words were foreign, and she stammered them out in the swirling confusion. The creature fought within her like a demented child, but she cursed it, and it drove her forward. Night pressed inward in colors of crimson and lurching teal, and soon she found herself at the banks of the ilog.

Weeping in this valley of tears…

She paused at first, gazing on her mistresses as they tottered forward, hemming her in with their shrieks. Proptosed eyes burned through her with a mangled ogling. They were squealing for her sins, squealing as the incessant throbbing barked through her temples.

And after this our exile…

She looked down at the torrent, and plunged into its waters.

The fluid was cold and familiar as it surged into her gaping mouth. It engaged her as she gagged, and for a moment, she forgot she was not drinking blood. She was drunk, intoxicated by the waxing of her approaching death. Below the surface, she could hear the old women offering up their incantations in a mad, driving tempo. The churning of the current grew to a great fullness in her ear and yet she could still hear herself, a tinctured sanctity above the deluge.

That we may be made worthy of the promises…

Her spirit escaped in a shimmering sliver that streamed outward from the tips of her eyelids, and the beast snarled horribly in the distillation. Its velvet dragon wings crumpled against their weight as the tumorous scaffolding capitulated. But the ceremony held no audience. The halfling was absent, unreachable, attending to a new voice the flavor of bittersweet betel nut and yam pudding in her ear…

“Marta, what do you have there?”

“It’s just drawings, mama!” She covered them in haste, sweeping her long black hair quickly over the pages. Her tiny head landed with a plop on the floor.

Looking down, she could see that same head, pale and lifeless as it swayed under the water. Her limp carcass bobbed to a steady ictus as the huge wings that adorned it caught broken in the current.

“Please, anak, mama just wants to see. Now move over and have some suman.” Marta propped herself up on her elbows, and with a clumsy flip she turned herself over on her back.

“There you go!” Her mother could see Marta’s scribblings – bright silver and brown crayon wax of what looked like a little figure gliding through a sea of dark circular strokes.

She was back in the air, soaring upward against the chaos. The nanay-gali wailed in the moonlight. They crouched low over the water, eyes dripping films of fat salty tears onto the surface. The serpent itself seemed to flail about in a garish spectacle as it returned to the seminal undertow. It cried out in the black, bleeding burble as it reared its head and receded into the foam.

“You know what she is, Inay.” Marta teased.

“I know,” her mother said with a warm smile as she looked down at the small piece of paper. “Why is she flying in the dark?”

“So no one can see her.” Marta paused, as if what she was going to say was an enormity she could not give up. “She likes to hide.”

She found herself ascending quickly into the heavens, climbing just below the clouds as she always did. The barrio loomed steadily into view beyond the forest. Hints of activity emerged from the dark. Farmers yawned in the moonlight. Vendors collected their trays of roasted beans.

“But who is she hiding from?”

Marta’s lips curled up in a smile. “You, Inay!” She fell down on the cold narra in fits of laughter. Her mother snorted mischievously as she grabbed Marta’s sides. “Stop tickling, mama, please! Stop!”

Their laughter fell apart as Inay drew Marta into her arms. She began to hum. It was a slow sad song of warning – of bamboo breaking, and children falling from coco trees.

The lullaby echoed in her ears as she took to the air pristine. She was flying faster now, faster than wings, or thoughts, or forgotten beasts could carry her. Her memories flayed away like coconut husks as she sped amidst circles as black as fish fat and squid ink, straight into the outstretched arms of the moon.

Sjene is a poor, conservative fishing village at the northeastern tip of Kuz. Many patrims live in the flatlands and find their survival in the sea, sending boats of their catch three times a week to the markets in the Kuz mainland in the far south. But my patrim lived on the hills of Yamera, where the orinu breed in the wildwaters. The people of Yamera dove into the wildwaters and caught the orinu for their hides. The orinu have been in Sjene before any of our race; it was the bodies of these reptiles that carved out the three hundred underground channels of the Sjene wildwater complex, the source of our wells. A diver who can wrestle with the orinu and stab its heart without losing his or her life is held in high regard.

Few patrims live in Yamera and there are no schools in Sjene. Itinerant scholars from the mainland used to come to Sjene to watch the orinu and the divers, and in return they taught the children how to read and write in Kuzan. Then the scholars stopped coming some years before I was born. The last scholar to come, I was told, had put forth the opinion that we should find means of livelihood other than the orinu trade because of the dangers it posed on anyone who handled the reptiles.

In my younger years, the children of Yamera learned the orinu trade from the members of our patrim who brought the orinu home to slit its belly and remove the skin from the carcass. The cured hide was sent to the tanning houses in the mainland, while the liver, which produces its own deadly toxin, was carved away and the flesh cleaned of any trace of the poison before being sold in the mainland as meat. Steam was carefully passed through the liver, turning the toxin into a harmless gas, before the liver was thrown into the wastes piled in front of every hut.

I call the patrims plying the orinu trade “they,” though I come from one of them. The people of Sjene, especially of Yamera, are stubborn in their traditions. They are barnacled to their old ways and trust only in the catching of sea life, refusing to farm them because they find it unnatural. The people of Yamera do not have the luxury nor the minds to find other means of livelihood; my father, my mother, and my elder brother faced the orinu everyday. But I was set aside because my father had greater hopes for me. He wanted to me to leave Sjene, to leave Kuz, and to eventually find myself surrounded by the wealth of Otuja. Although everyone in Sjene knew that the only way to out of the island was an education, only my father dared to want it for his son.

My patrim worked their lives for me; my elder brother Yeherou’s generous spirit prevented him from becoming jealous. I watched with other children how our elders scraped the flesh off from the inner side of the skin of the orinu with their hands, soaked the skin in brine, and let it hang in thick smoke. But when the elders called the children to try skinning, my father took me into the house and gave me old books left behind by the wandering scholars of his childhood. He vowed that I would never have to touch wildwater nor blood.

Contrary to what others may think is the rationale behind my present situation, I was never ill-treated by my peers for not knowing how to use my gills. I was never ridiculed during my adolescence for my incapability to wrestle even with a young orinu. The adults naturally disapproved of my upbringing, but what they might have said to their children seemed to have been countered by the children’s own quiet acceptance of me, which I suspect came from the elders’ own talk of the scholars. While the villagers condemned the liberalities that the scholars had brought, there was still a tone of reverence that was always preserved for the mainland.

It is difficult to say what I myself thought of the arrangement at that time. I did not crave matches with the orinu. Without this desire, I could not have compared with a life I had never lived. Years passed and I became a young man with unused gills. One day my father gave me every coin he had kept aside for me, as well as the name of a tanner at the docks in the Kuz mainland who received imports from Sjene everyday. I can easily bring to recollection the boat ride I had with the Sjene fisherfolk on their way to the mainland, a journey that took a day over rough sea. I had been deathly afraid of drowning.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Court, I write this confession to you in fluent, standard Otujan. When I arrived at the Kuz docks eleven years ago, I could only speak the Sjene dialect and broken Kuzan. I found the tanner, and out of the greatness of his heart, he pointed out to me a small academy and a cheap inn. I was accepted into the academy because of its interest in my gills. The irony, ladies and gentlemen of the Court! For what other good could come out of Sjene? When the other students wanted to see me breathe underwater, I sank my head into the lake and held my breath. I didn’t dare open my gills; I was afraid that I would be overwhelmed by the flow of water through passages never used and that the shock might kill me. Sjenese lungs made me able to hold breath for more than ten minutes, and for them this was already proof of breathing. I studied linguistics in the academy and made Otujan my primary language. I worked as an errand-boy at the docks at night and chance made it that I never had to descend underwater.

When I finished my schooling, it was my gills again that brought me here to Otuja to study law in the scholarium. The scholarium wanted me to compete in the annual water-sport festival of Otuja under its banner. When I tore open the letter in my apartment in Kuz, I thought of how other Sjenese would have wanted such an opportunity and would have deserved it! I broke into laughter that was not far from crying. But who was to say that any other Sjenese who had not sacrificed his gills and whose patrim had not sacrificed themselves could have come this far? A week later, I boarded my first ship to the nation of Otuja.

By night I taught myself how to swim and by day I attended the scholarium’s swimming matches. I never used my gills; doing otherwise would have been death for me. Ten minutes under water was more than enough in Otuja and I wiggled my gills for their satisfaction. I studied with all my might and became a Master. When I left the scholarium, I had my gills stitched closed. I found work in a guild and met a pleasant Otujan girl. I told her I was from the Kuz mainland and that the scars around my neck came from a childhood accident; she asked no more questions and married me. By civil law, I was made a citizen of Otuja, the final reward for my patrim’s labor.

So should it come as a surprise that I would want to return to Sjene for a visit? Is it not right that I would return to my home as the first Sjenese scholar? I left for Kuz and found a small boat to Sjene. When the villagers saw what I had done to my gills, they shrieked and wailed, tearing off my clothes. I escaped to the hills of Yamera. Those I had once looked upon as elders flung clods at me. My peers, with families of their own, herded their children away from my sight.

The people were hollow-cheeked and their faces gray. I learned from those kind enough to whisper to me that the orinu trade had been outlawed in Kuz in fear of its toxins and that the skins and the meat of the reptile had been banned from all marketplaces. The Yamera patrims had been moving to the flatlands to become fisherfolk but now there were disputes over ancestral territories at the beaches. My patrim had refused to move down. My mother had died a year ago; my father had not been far behind and had passed away two days before my return.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Court! How shall I describe my brother Yeherou when I found him? How shall I put misery into words for those who are born too fortunate to understand? Yeherou had tended my parents and cradled them till their last breaths. My brother was a sturdy man with strong wrists. In secret he dove into the wildwaters and killed orinu to sell their skin and meat to pirates. Yeherou had performed the Orinu Dance after our mother’s death.

Why do I insist on writing the Sjenese patrim instead of the Otujan family? Because there is no word in Otujan that can convey the depth of patrim, its connotation of sacrifice until death. The Orinu Dance is a ritual performed by the son of a deceased parent, in which he wrestles with an orinu underwater and kills it with only his bare hands. The presentation of the dead orinu during the burial shows how the extent of the son’s grief gives him strength capable of such violence.

Yeherou would dance again for our father. But the sight of the villagers of Sjene had moved me, and I wanted to proclaim my own grief at the death of my father, the one who had made me a scholar. I remembered how I had been valued for my unused gills in the Kuz mainland and in Otuja. Here were young men and women worthy of being saved from starvation in the same way! They had to go to the mainland, all of them. And then they could come to Otuja.

But I, the prodigal, had to first win their hearts. They would only be barnacled to the old ways of Sjene, the only ways of Sjene. I would have to perform the Orinu Dance to show sincerity and traditional valor; I would risk death for my patrim’s name and my people. Yeherou called me a fool. How could I kill an orinu with my bare hands with my gills and my inexperience with the wildwater? Day and night, I persisted in telling him that such an extraordinary feat would stir the hearts of the Sjenese, until he recognized my father’s resolve in me and yielded. He broke open the stitches on my gills and held my hand as I bled. He brought me to the wildwaters so I could learn to wrestle. When we first went underwater I could not open my gills; I held my breath. It was the first time I was in the wildwaters and I could not control my trembling. The currents pulled me in all directions and I could only clutch on a rock in response. The waters swirled and eddied. Through the clear water I saw my brother treading the currents, walking on them as if on air, his gills opening and closing, his arms gesticulating at me to follow his example. I felt resentful at my incompetence and the sudden emotion freed my gills. The first rush of water through my brittle passages choked me and I turned cold and fainted.

Yeherou revived me on land. We tried again but I could not get through the first breath. Yeherou threw up his arms and sat by the banks as I nursed my gills. I was not to argue with him. He would perform the Orinu Dance and I was to return to my family in Otuja alone.

I realized then that my brother had only been humoring me in his own primitive way, knowing I could never use my gills. Ladies and gentlemen of the Court, do not mistake this as malicious jealousy on his part. As I had said before, my brother was the most generous man in the world. He was not at fault for being ignorant. I agreed with him and made plans together for our father’s burial.

I now come to the part in which the ladies and gentlemen of the Court would have the most interest. When Yeherou left to wrestle the orinu, I went to the cellar where he was steaming the livers of the orinu he had killed. I took three livers and threw them into the wildwater nearest our home. Putting everyone to sleep was the only method I could think of that would allow me to save at least a few youths from the village and bring them to the Kuz mainland in secret. The rest is known to all.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Court, three days after this writing, I will be standing before you, my own lawyer, to plead for my case. I am responsible for the deaths in Sjene. But as everyone had witnessed, I returned to Otuja by my own free will and gave myself to your custody. I did this to prevent foreigners who know nothing of us from bringing shame to Sjene by spreading lies across the world. I have written this honest confession not without reason. I believe in the evolved sensibilities of the people of Otuja, as much as I believe in the backwardness of Sjene and had wished to rescue my people from it. I have written the story of my life, the causes which had prompted this tragedy, and have placed my trust in your judgment. Yes, I refer to it as a tragedy because of the good that was thwarted. Death had never been my intention. It is of underestimating the lethality of the orinu, and of the love I have for my home, that I am most guilty.

But if your instincts were to move you in a way different from that which I hope, then may I ask leave to make two small requests? I am a man of the law; I am aware of the sentence that may fall upon me. I would like to ask that my wife, Eandl Imh, be given a copy of this confession. I also ask that my remains be sent back to Sjene and buried in the Yamera hills, next to the graves of my parents and my brother. Ask the people of the hills; they would know the house of Imh.

Until then, I remain

Faithfully Yours,

Huuri Imh

Crystal Koo holds a BA in English literature from the Philippines, an MA in creative writing from Sydney, and is now working in a university in Hong Kong. Her work has been published in the Philippines, most recently in The Farthest Shore, Usok, and Ruin and Resolve, as well as in various international venues such as unsweetened Literary Journal, RUBRIC: Creative Writing Journal of the University of New South Wales, Short Stories at East of the Web, and Salu-Salo: An Anthology of Philippine-Australian Writings. In 2007, she received a Palanca Award for her short story “Benito Salazar’s Last Creation”, and in 2009, her play The Foundling was performed in the Fringe Theatre in Hong Kong. She has forthcoming publications from North America in DAW Books’ The Dragon and the Stars anthology and in the Ink-filled Page Literary and Arts Journal. She is currently working on a screenplay for a short film to be produced in Hong Kong in 2010. She maintains a blog at http://swordskill.wordpress.com.

Before I could answer him or choose between nodding or shaking my head, I felt the unrelenting push of his callused hands on the small of my back and slipped off the stern. The rough, almost splintery wood that served as my seat vanished beneath me, becoming a fraction of a second of airy suspension–a brief moment for me to catch whatever breath I could. The sea met me with a hard slap; the sounds and sights of the surface disappeared. Through the glass of my facemask the world transformed into an intense and velvety shade of royal blue. The shocking coldness of the water invigorated me. Immersed, I spent my first moments floating motionless some feet below the surface, savoring the sensations: the weightlessness, the saltiness, the hollow echo and gurgle of the depths, the tickle of rising bubbles on my legs, arms, and cheeks. In time my lungs protested and I propelled myself upward. I broke through and gulped the humid air.

“Cara!” My father again. He leaned over the side of the boat. “How’s the water?”

“Delicious!” I gasped, beaming.

He returned my smile and signaled a thumbs-up. He turned to direct a question aft. “Are you sure the schools will pass through here?”

“I think so.” From somewhere onboard, the boatman’s tinny voice carried over the blowing breeze. “It’s their season.”

Whether the dolphins passed through or not, the pleasure of my first jump just beyond the shallows could not be broken. I floated on my back and shut my eyes to the sunlight, savoring the mixed sensation of the sun’s prickly warmth with the water’s chill as I was held aloft on the light bobbing of the divergent tidal eddies.

“We’re near enough to the reef’s edge, so even if they don’t come, you can still do some snorkeling,” Dad said. “We can move to deeper water later, to try and chase the school, if you want.”

“That’s fine,” I answered. I drifted languidly like a slack string of seaweed for a few moments longer before gripping my snorkel’s mouthpiece with my teeth and twisting my body around to float on my chest. The world turned royal blue once more. Blue, and then some.

It is darker under the water but awash in color, filtered as the light is through the prism of the ever-moving current; there are hues on the seafloor that can’t be replicated elsewhere. The coral beneath my floating form unfurled and shone in an accumulation of varying shades matched only by the cascade of exploding reef shapes–round and balanced domes, wavy-lined and bulbous oblongs, spiky balls and blocks, long columns with branching tendrils–all made vibrant and vivid by the shifting latticework of light that blanketed the sea-bottom in a luminous mesh, rippling white crochet.

A flight of silverfish shimmered by, each of them a wavy mirror. Pointed darts of black-lined yellow guppies shot in and out of the coral’s crevices, unheeded by angled, slow-moving angelfish, the brides of the reefs, whose long fins trailed behind them in tapered, stylish trains. In a bed of swaying seagrass, a collection of spiny seahorses–ignoring and in turn ignored by a hovering, speckled puffer–clung to apple-green blades with their tails lest they be borne away by the drift. The seahorses’ cousin, a leafy sea dragon, smoothly slid along the ragged edges between the vegetation and a mound of wave-worn rocks. A family of orange clownfish circled beside the half-open maw of a pebbly giant clam, and just below them, on a patch of white sand, I delighted in piercing through the chromatophore camouflage of a small octopus passing by on rolling tentacles. A leatherback turtle, its mottled carapace the length and breadth of the coffee table back home, entered the scene, gliding through on flippers as elegant underwater as they are clumsy and plodding on land. It was a shame that my shadow, and the larger one that belonged to the boat, intruded into the patterns of light, color, movement, life.

We were anchored to a buoy just off the continental shelf, where the reef wall ended and the seafloor dropped steeply in a severe cliff, down into the fathoms below, where royal blue transforms into a heavy cobalt the deeper one dives until, when even the strongest sunlight cannot reach that far anymore, all turns black. This was my first time to see the real depths, to swim so near to them.

Muffled as his voice was through the water, I heard my father call my name; I raised my head.

“Cara! Here they come!” He gestured wildly to me off the starboard quarter with one hand and pointed to an area of open sea with the other. I turned to look.

The coruscating light on the ocean’s surface could not blind me from seeing the lustrous bodies of the dolphins as they jumped over the water. I had seen this before, but only on my father’s old, grainy home videos. To see this for real, right before my eyes, sent a shiver up my spine. My heart skipped with fresh excitement. For the moment, the dolphins were still a bit distant and small, but their forms were clearly defined; they approached quickly, looming larger with each leap. I traced their path and calculated just how near they would pass.

“Swim there! Swim there!” Dad pointed some fifteen feet farther into deep water. “They’ll pass near that spot! But don’t go too far! Just stop there!”

I shook my head and chuckled. My father was more excited for me than I was for myself, which was plenty enough as it is. I stretched my body out and swam to where he directed.

In mid-stroke I rose with the crest of a sudden swell, felt myself carried up, then under, by a massive breaker. The sea was calm, but Dad had warned me that this happens sometimes; with all that goes on in the waters there could be many reasons for the way the currents behave. Like he taught me, I recognized what was happening and kept my head, grabbing a lungful of air before being taken beneath. I tried as best as I could to keep from resisting the vortex’s pull, to conserve my energy by keeping my body streamlined, flowing with the force of it until it died and I could make my way back up.

But the rogue swell pushed me far deeper than I expected, and when I felt the tug of the unexpected riptide dragging me farther away from the shelf, so powerful as to wrench my mask and snorkel from my face, I knew–with all my dad had taught me of ocean currents, with the pain of the water’s pressure rising in my ears, with the hull of the boat swiftly disappearing from sight–that all in this brief instant, I was done for.
Struggling was useless, but I struggled nonetheless. “The greatest danger in the water is not the shark or the barracuda,” Dad had lectured me once. “They’ll leave you alone most of the time. The greatest danger is the diver himself. Stay calm. Don’t ever panic or it’ll be the worse for you.” I remembered his words but could not make myself follow them. I scrambled madly against the undertow as it bore me away, and in disbelief at what was happening I released my last bit of breath in a flurry of bubbles. With a muted, underwater scream I called for my father like I was eight and not eighteen, right before I plunged from the blue to the black. The world was removed from me.

I fell into unconsciousness and, perhaps into worse; I can’t be sure. In the impenetrable gloom where I found myself suspended I felt no pain, even when I knew I was no longer drawing breath. I became aware only of a steady, rhythmic thumping, a regular beat that I surmised could not be my heart if only because it rose in volume and strength, instead of diminishing and dying, taking my life with it.

Something nudged me, brought back my self-awareness. I turned to look but I still could see nothing. The nudging turned insistent, pushing me in a certain direction. I tried to ignore it, to go back to black, but it wouldn’t leave me be, so I gave in and forced my limbs to move where it urged me. Blue increased around me once more by increments, the light returned, the water ended, and I burst through to the expanse of sky on high. With great heaves I refilled my body with the sweet breath of life that I had believed I would never taste of again.

I found myself being circled by the school of dolphins. We were in unfamiliar waters. The boat and my father were nowhere to be seen. No land was in sight, which my mind told me was impossible; no undertow, no matter how strong, could’ve delivered me far enough away from the island. I turned my face upward but even the sun and the clouds overhead looked alien; they seemed younger, just like the air I was breathing smelled cleaner and unsullied. Everything around me appeared brighter with a different, newer light. The sun’s position at the sky’s apex told me that it was noon, but a quick look at my wrist presented an impossibility: my diver’s watch read that it was only mid-morning. I realized too that I had not fallen into fits of coughing or choking, as my water-filled lungs should have reacted if I had truly drowned and been revived.

The dolphins clacked and chirped their greetings, intermittently puffing spray from their blowholes. I could not accept that I was where I was, swimming among them; I needed to reach out and touch them to dispel my doubts. Only when I stroked the rubbery hardness of their fins, handled the smoothness of their skin, both clammy and warm at the same time as they passed beneath my palm, could I admit to myself that I was breathing and alive.

The dolphins were patient and waited respectfully until I had gathered my wits and equilibrium. When they sensed that I was ready they broke their circle and proceeded to form a line in preparation for moving off. I hesitated, but one of them swam next to me: a clear offer to hold on. I took his dorsal in my hands and with a flip of his flukes we sped off, trailing white spume, slicing through the water faster than I had ever done before.

One would think only the birds know the meaning of true flight, but the open ocean is as much the sky to its own denizens. In moments I understood what it meant to soar.

We skimmed over the whitecaps. Some of the other dolphins occasionally broke through to playfully jump the foam. The crisp, bracing wind, the sprinkles and spatter in my face, refreshed me, drawing honest laughter from my lips. In pure joy I shouted at the top of my voice to the heavens. The heady sensation of cutting through the sea felt wonderful, as did riding in the wake of the trails of the other dolphins ahead; it was their strength and their energy that carried and filled me, that brought me forward. The waters became the universe and our playground, limited only by the infinity of the horizon’s line. We swam this way for what felt like minutes, hours, the span of days, the length of years.

I could not imagine being happier.

When our time was done the leader leaped into the air and struck a pose against the sky before plunging down; he did not resurface. The rest followed, including the one I held onto. Unprepared, panic filled me once more, and after a couple dozen feet of descent, with the blackness below approaching, I could not restrain myself and let go. My instinct told me to swim back above as fast as I could, but after covering less than half the distance I discovered, inconceivably, that I felt no pain, experienced no exertion, and did not run short of breath. I stopped.

In gentle angles, countless beams of sunlight pierced the water like expanding rapier blades that dissipated into placidly dancing motes. I floated there among the shafts of light, suspended among them, between the azure half-light and its gradual vanishing into the depths. The water glowed, luminous, so broad and so wide, to my left, my right, and below me. Surrounded by the eternal, I imagined all that vast murkiness, all the possibilities it could contain, and felt so very small.

I took a gamble and, against intuition, drew breath, prepared to drown. Nothing happened. The water tasted as sweet as the air, if still salty, and coursed through me as my own blood. The ebb and flow of it through my mouth and nostrils, regular as the tides, cooled my body and soothed my nerves. I couldn’t help but smile at my discovery, a child learning wonder in her first steps.

Upon inhalation, upon taking the waters of that mysterious ocean into me, the beats I had heard earlier returned, much stronger than before, not fast or slow, just even. I twisted this way and that but the source lay neither below nor above; it was all around, and when I closed my eyes, I could hear it within me. The water itself pulsed with the sound. No longer relying on my eyes but on the traveling vibrations, I appreciated that it is not just what we can see but also what we can hear and feel that is richer under the sea.

A gentle prod to my thigh disturbed my reverie. My eyes met that of the dolphin that had been pulling me, its protruding beak upturned in that perpetual friendly smile all dolphins owned. “What? You didn’t know?” it seemed to be saying and laughing at the same time. I couldn’t help giggling back, and the fizz tingled as bubbles escaped my nose and throat. It circled me once then drifted close to offer its fin again. I took it.

My dolphin did not head directly down–perhaps it sensed the remaining vestiges of my fear–but instead descended at a gentler angle and at a slower pace. It pivoted off its initial line and advanced to a shallower stretch of sea, not quite the shoals but not the deep either, where it took me on a journey through a montage of captivating visions, each of them settling into their permanent places in my memory.

As we approached, a blurred mass of shapeless green transformed into a flotilla of billowing, leafy kelp, taller than the tallest man, which we blended into so neatly it felt as if the stalks’ shoots and branches parted for us as a courtesy; the foliage’s tips caressed my bare arms and legs as we swam through. When the kelp forest ended we entered and drifted over a space where a large cast of crabs skittered sideways across the sea bed, tracking thin furrows in the sand, a veritable multi-clawed army on the move to parts unknown. We evaded a fluther of translucent jellyfish that stagnated in one spot, eerily motionless, sharply pink against the blue, and slid into the cavities between a cluster of rock formations, arrayed in uniform rows, the width and height of cathedral pillars, astounding in their size and their strange symmetry.

We turned aside at the end of the bed when we came up against a sheer, craggy embankment that rose from some vastness below, passing so close to it that I could see into its many shallow recesses, where smaller marine life–too many and too various in appearance for me to give them any names–capered and dashed on thin legs that recalled silver and gold fibrils. Various kinds of sea anemones–round, wide, and flat like the severed heads of sunflowers, fan-shaped and flapping like elephants’ ears, or solidly trunked like petite, fibrous ferns–dotted the rock in their purples, tangerines, ambers, and mauves, their tentacles endlessly curling and whirling to the flux. The embankment’s face was encrusted in many places with armor-plated barnacles, and enshrouded in others with extended tracts of algae, innumerable air globules the size of ball-bearings caught in the hair-like fuzz so as to resemble dew on the morning grass. I brushed my fingertips across the algae and the globules escaped into wriggly flight, crystals in miniature on the ascent.

My dolphin and I retreated from that great wall, and while doing so a wide shadow cast on us made me look up. A manta ray, easily the length of a car from nose-tip to tail-end, coasted by on wings extended like those of a giant bat’s. Some weak sunlight still slanted down, enough for me to spy a thin, bony remora hiding in the protection of the manta’s ventral side. A bit lower and advancing in the opposite direction was a bulgy-eyed goliath grouper, longer than a man is tall; we were close enough to it for me to count the brown and white splotches on its skin and the spiny tips of its fins. But even at some distance farther off, we were all dwarfed–me, my dolphin, even the ray and the grouper–by the hulking aspect of a gentle whale shark, waving its tail fin as it propelled itself slowly forward and away.

When the distance between the wall and the two of us was enough, I turned to see that it was no wall, but the jagged, upper end of an undersea mountain, the peak of which towered high overhead; our coming near to it was just the barest brush across a fragment of one of its outcroppings. I discovered that my dolphin had taken me that much into deeper water, up against a mass so large, and I hadn’t noticed the change till now.

We veered off and made our way into a gully that, after a swim through a narrow corridor, grew into a wide canyon, the sheerness of its sides expanding before us in emergent grandeur. Here, there were many schools of different types of fish, each of them spurting away as we neared. As we proceeded, ledges and overhanging underwater flora served as a canopy over our heads, blocking the thinning light and darkening the surroundings further.

But I was no longer afraid. My fear had vanished, replaced by all the wonder that I had been shown and my complete trust in my dolphin. It turned its head to look sideways at me, nodding its head in assurance; I understood and tightened my grip.

My dolphin banked sharply and plummeted into a fissure in the gorge, leaving the light behind us until, once more, blindness. With my eyes useless, my ears thrilled to the water’s throbbing beats, which grew in volume the deeper we went.
Just when I was prepared to revel in this bliss forever, it ended, all too abruptly. Pain erupted in my chest as if a hammer swung in full force had struck me there. I released my dolphin as unpleasant, staccato flashes assailed my brain. My body crumpled into itself; I could not endure the intensity. I surrendered, and gave myself up for lost.

Later, when I was back on board, my father said that I had disappeared for a good fifteen minutes. The freak wave had lifted the boat up almost thirty feet, startling both him and the boatman into losing their legs. When the sea leveled and they looked over the edge, I was nowhere in sight. They scoured the area but couldn’t find me.

“Then the dolphins came back,” Dad said. He clutched my hands tightly as he spoke.

“I think they had also been taken when the wave hit. We couldn’t find any sign of them either until the boatman heard their chirping and splashing some thirty feet away from where we were anchored. You were on your back, and they were pushing you toward us. We hauled you in. You were so pale, and you weren’t breathing. I thought you were dead. I squeezed your stomach until you coughed up a bucket’s worth of seawater. We helped you force it all out. I never thought I’d see the day where I’d be happy to hear you choking. Lucky, lucky, lucky. For someone who was under as long as you were, you’re none the worse for wear. Still, let’s ask a doctor on the island to look you over, just to be sure.

“I made a mistake, Cara. I don’t care how strong a swimmer you are. Next time, life vests. No arguments, okay?”
He told me all this over the roar of the diesel engine as the boat straddled the island’s coastline and headed back to the resort. I listened quietly to his voice from where I rested near the prow, a towel draped over my shoulders, hugging myself and gazing out over the water. A smile broke out and spread across my face when I caught sight of the dolphins racing alongside our vessel, matching our speed, a sleek escort of glistening silver shapes. My father embraced me from behind and we watched them together. I’d like to think they were making sure I reached land safely before they made their goodbyes.

To be honest, I can’t remember any of what my dad recounted to me, not even of how I got back on the boat. But I do recall the exact moment when I realized where I was, and what brought me back to him completely.

After the last of the seawater had been expunged from my system and my dry panting diminished into normal breaths, Dad pulled me to his chest and enclosed me in his arms, calling me, murmuring my name over and over: Cara, Cara. His heartbeat, thudding rapidly in my ears, startled me into full wakefulness. With the beats beneath the waves still clear in my mind, both sets of sounds reverberated so differently in so many ways–the first, fast, where the second was steady; the former, light and high-toned where the latter resonated full and rich–yet were also so very much alike where it counts the most.

Kenneth Yu is the publisher/editor of The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, or PGS. Locally, his fiction has been published in Philippine Speculative Fiction IV, The Philippine Graphic, and The Philippines Free Press; online, on AlienSkin, The Town Drunk, and Usok. He also won Fantasy Magazine’s 2009 Halloween flash fiction contest. He has two horror stories forthcoming, one in the print anthology D.O.A. published by Blood Bound Books, and another at Innsmouth Free Press.

At an annual adulterous assembly – as Aaron, Azalea, and Ada achieved animalistic apogee – Adrian – amidst Aaron’s, Azalea’s, and Ada’s Aahs and Awoos – arrived alone at an awkward anticlimax.

Ada – arms abuzz and akimbo – ambled across as Adrian – ashamed, affected – apologised: “Accident.”

“Again?” Aaron announced as Azalea’s ascending-descending amber ass amazingly accelerated atop Aaron, arms across Azalea’s alps, abdomen all aglow. “Already?” Azalea added amusedly.

Adrian allowed Aaron’s and Azalea’s annoyances air-out anonymously. Ada, always amiable, accepted Adrian’s apology. “Alright?” Ada asked, and Adrian absentmindedly answered “agreeable” after an antsy awkwardness.

Anticipating Adrian’s antisocial answer, Ada animated an arm across Adrian’s abdomen. Adrian acquiesced as Ada acrobatically applied appropriate actions around Adrian’s abdominal area. Ada asked Adrian again and Ada’s anticipated angsty answer about-faced as Adrian acknowledged an ache arousing.

Across, Aaron’s and Azalea’s adrenal acrobatics achieved additional acoustic acuity as Azalea adagioed all activities, acuminating Aaron’s adversarial adventurism at Adrian’s avowed: “Aah! Aah! Aah!”

Ada – as Adrian agazed at Aaron and Azalea – affirmed Adrian’s aggravate agent, and – also agogged at Adrian’s aggrievement – actualised an agape.

Astride above, Ada allowed Adrian all-out aft access. Ada’s ankles anchored at Adrian’s armpits, Adrian’s arms around Ada’s asscheeks, Adrian abluted Ada almost absurdly: “Aye! Aye! Aye!”

Adrian’s avid adoration appealed at Ada’s appreciative acumen, as Aaron – Ada’s avowed – affects all affairs an antagonistic angle, an attitude Ada and Aaron always argue about, although answers are always absent.

Ada – aflutter, achingly admiring, already addicted – allowed an Aah attain altostratic altitude as an azimuth acceleratingly approached: “Alas! Alas! Alas!”

Ada adored Adrian’s aesculapian affection, an alternative away Aaron’s acerbic abrasiveness.

Amenable at anything Adrian asks, Ada agilely all-foured afore Adrian, awaiting ambush.

Across, Azalea – albeit agnostic – allah-akbared as another azimuth’s arrival approached. Aaron – amused at Azalea’s auditory appreciation – ascertained an award as appropriate, ante’d-up agility-wise, and afterwards also approached an arrival: “Awoo! Awoo! Awoo!”

Adrian, animus awake, advanced at Ada and – at Ada’s astonishment – alighted atop, adobe-like accessory acock above Ada’s abyss.

Ada acknowledged Adrian as an Adonis awakened, an Adam anew, an aggressor allured and alluring.

Ada – agonizingly, aggressively, affectionately – accepted Adrian’s animal again and again and again and again: “Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!”

Afterwards – as aethereal Aahs and Awoos again abounded – Aaron, Azalea, Ada, and Adrian altogether allowed another annual adulterous assembly achieve absolute adjournment.

Before She Rises
Before she rises she lets the stirring cock crow, just tossing the end of our story’s progress to “five I’ll snooze some more, but four I’ll go: which is it, then?”, the simplest, most honest query, but then destiny decides to introduce complexity through the cock crowing three then returns to sleeping: she frowns,

               exclaims quietly “what?” while just beside her, awake, humbled queerly by sex that lasted all of the sixth of the hour just passed, I mumble-grumble, gusts of fake breath tossed for emphasis, after which she asks “are you okay?” to which I reply “very”, afterwards I zip-lip,

               intent on a personal (read: “bitter”) monopoly of joy in the dark, which she then notices after a while, so kindly attempts at a blasé conversation about, of all topics, politics, that I attempt to zone out of but really her every word is a tune in my head that I quell in vain with hums as I flex and stretch in bed

               and knowing fully how this would hurt, I, amidst talking, just nod out and yawn and plop on down again on soft warm cushions and so mouth stops talking, brows start furrowing, and with cock still snoozing my victim quits and slips out without a “boo”, and no fixing this

               issue, I, jackass, continue to pretend to doze in bed, one eye open to this fox by my feet, watch her pick up stuff and refit armour and brush hair and teeth, each and every action a feather in air and as she finishes she stands upright and shoes in both hands, without shake or wave, tiptoes out of this book’s chapter, shutting door, spiriting body out farther than before, as I remain peeping from behind cushions once warm now turning frigid by the quiet morning wind, and right outside, the cock, now awake, just for her, crows four.

Bafflegab Bedlam
beastly bodiceripper
Briefly before breakfast began, Beverly – babushka’d bachelorette badly beset by Babinsky’s – braved beastly Boulevard backgammon boys and bastinadoed back-bent beggars as Beverly’s bastardy baby boy Billy audiolingually affirmed bountiful bellyaches as beyond bearable.

Beverly, barely abating Billy’s bellyaches by bread-eating – bread being an already bemoaningly affluent acquisition as an adult bedlamite, and an all-the-more anxious business as a baby-burdened adolescent – bungled as an answer a balancing act between banausic banality and baneful bankruptcy: after acquiring “Bellflower” as an alias, Beverly became a buxom bomba actress, a bare bold buffer, a billabong bimbo, a beurre blanc bottom, a bed-and-breakfast bedmate, a big-mouthed bilabial blandish benefactress – all-in-all a big-budget business around and about Aurora Boulevard.

After bidding “bye-bye” at belly-aching baby, Beverly bikes across Aurora and alights by Act and between building and alleyway advertises body bit by bit: barely a brastrap, an actual buttcheek, an ankle black-and-blueing, and alabaster belly boiling and bubbling, alluding to a bodacious balut-appetite.

As Beverly argues against aching belly, a black BMW brakes beside Beverly’s blue BMX and behind blue-bottle bifocals a businessman barely beyond boyhood – an absolute boychick – attempts at a barter between an amorous businesswoman’s allegedly adept appendages and a boychick businessman’s bonafide big bucks, and after a brief and altogether amateurish bidding argument, boychick businessman agrees at businesswoman’s asked-about amount.

Beverly boards automobile and broadcasts at boychick businessman an ancient alleyway beside AliMall. “Atmospheric,” boychick businessman acknowledges as BMW brakes at alley’s bend. Behind, at backseat, Beverly alludes at a barely appropriate act, an act all balk at but all actually adore. Boychick businessman appreciates Beverly’s almost boyish brashness but belays all advances as another barely appropriate act amasses at brain: boychick businessman anxiously asks about Beverly’s appendages’ alleged abilities and allowed an affectation appear by bawdily baritoning about a bicuspid bourguignonne blowjob.

“A bicuspid bourguignonne blowjob?” asks Beverly, baring barely-blossomed breasts, acting all astonished but betraying an attitude bordering at boredom. “A bicuspid bourguignonne blowjob!” boychick businessman affirms arrogantly, and at backseat allows Beverly access at belly and boxers and all bits beneath.

Beverly, atop boychick businessman, administers adequate beating, beginning at ball-bottom and arriving at blood-filled bulb, accelerating as Beverly’s biceps attain brief buffery, affirming all allusions about alleged adept appendages, at boychick businessman’s boundless astonishment. “Alright?” Beverly asks boychick businessman, all breathless, blushing, and bare-assed. “Ah, baby,” answers boychick businessman, briefly amnesiac.

Beverly applies adept bilabial abilities at boychick businessman’s bare bottom and balls, awakening – angering – boychick businessman’s amorous animal, albeit barely achieving an Asian average. But Beverly, always agreeable, attempts at blushing boychick businessman about brandishing bigger breadth above all boys before and after. Boychick businessman agrees at Beverly’s assessment, blushes, and begs Beverly again about a bicuspid bourguignonne blowjob, and blushes again after asking. As answer, Beverly bares believable admiration at boychick businessman’s arguably baby-like boyhood, and brings attention at balls again, and also at actualizing begged-about blowjob.

“Brace all appendages!” Beverly asks boychick businessman amiably as Beverly attempts at achieving appropriate big-mouthedness. As asked, boychick businessman – all aflutter – braces all appendages at BMW’s backseat accessories, anticipating any and all, acknowledging Beverly’s A+ abilities.

Beverly, at achieving absolute big-mouthedness and also an above-average bigness at boychick businessman’s adult apparatus, allows boychick businessman’s anticipation boil beyond bedazzlement.

“Bitch!” boychick businessman belts annoyingly, briefly blue-balled by Beverly’s activities. Boychick businessman attempts at beginning an argument as Beverly, bowing by boychick businessman’s ankles, begins – brazenly, belligerently, and above all, beautifully – blowing boychick businessman’s big boy bulk.

Beverly blows and blows, bouncing and bobbing again and again, bit by bit and afterwards allows all-in, balls-deep, accentuates by biting, big-licks and big-lip beating, but amidst best blowing boychick businessman bartered about and bought before and after, Beverly’s brain bemoans big budgetary anxieties: bedroom and board, Biogesic, breakfast; bills and acne.

“Balls and all, baby; balls and all,” boychick businessman announces beneath breath and Beverly, being an accommodating babe, attempts bringing back attention at boychick businessman’s balls and all, achieving bigger big-mouthedness and better breathing arpeggio, actions boychick businessman acknowledges by arching back bodybuilt arms and bludgeoning Beverly between brows, across bridge, again and again. Beverly attempts at breaking-off but boychick businessman anticipates and blocks all anti-blowjob activities by Beverly, afterwards adapts a beatific attitude as boychick businessman blows bazooka and Beverly binges – against all anger – at boychick businessman’s bitter bouillabaisse, afterwards baptizes Beverly between blood-splattered barely-blossomed breasts. “Bon appetit,” boychick businessman asides.

As Beverly brushes and burps bellyache away, boychick businessman adds a bit at agreed-about amount. “A bonus,” boychick businessman announces, acknowledging Beverly’s brand-new bruises and big blackeye.

Boychick businessman brings Beverly back beside Act and bids “arrivederci” before accelerating BMW across Aurora Boulevard and beyond. Back between building and alleyway, Beverly assesses amount by amateur arithmetic and believes all barely addresses bedroom and bills.

Black-and-blue and bleedy-nosed, Beverly ambles across Aurora by bike, at a baranggay bakery and buys bread and butter, Biogesic, and bathroom-cleaning acid. Beverly arrives at abode and before anything attends at bellyaching baby’s bleeding-gum bawlings, affectionately addressing “Billy, Billy,” becalming baby, afterwards attempts at arranging baby’s big bottle breakfast as burrowing beastie beneath Beverly’s blood-splattered barely-blossomed belaboured breast bellows, bucks, beats.

I
I’m thinking shitty things, ill-fitting shrill things, things I think I’ll dismiss if I insist in thinking “This isn’t right!”, still I think “Kill him, kill him, his shirt is insipid! Slit his thighs, his wrists, his lips, his lids! Slit him ‘til his spirit is piss!”, I fight this dirty, glib ill will, still, I’m thinking “Will I slip? If I slip, will I kill smiling, grinning, liking it slightly?”

Concerning Charnelhouse
Charlie’s Chef-d’oeuvre
comedic cacoethes
Charnelhouse Charlie – camisoled celibate culinary caliph – cubes carrots, chops cabbage, carves cheese, chills champagne, chars chapatti carefully, ceases, crosses CR’s cul-de-sac ‘cross chateau’s cockroachy carpet-floor, crouches, concentrates cutting cherublike corpse’s cured cankered campaniliform cock clockwise, carefully considering cellulite, capillaries, ceaselessly chatting: “Charnelhouse Charlie, consider caution: catching clueless carefree chattels – children – can conclude careers, cause criminal cases, cemetery check-ins!!!

“Can Charnelhouse Charlie, creating convincing catchpenny charades – cleaning chores, clothing calamities, clumsy calculus – cajole, confuse, catch?!?

“Can Charnelhouse Charlie chloroform caterwaulers, casually carry carpeted comatose customers ‘cross crowded crossroads, crooked corners?!?

“Can Charnelhouse Charlie cleanly cut carmine crosses ‘cross calves, carefully chop cheek chunks, convincingly cook chili con carne con calavera, cadaver caldereta?!?

“Can Charnelhouse Charlie confidently circumvent clumsy cop-collarings, crude civil crusades, cruel Christian conscience?!? ‘Course, Charnelhouse Charlie can!!! Charnelhouse Charlie’s crimson career’s complimented ‘cross cities country-wide, captivating cavorting canaille, capricious concubines, cheap cads, casual colleagues, cloying cops!!! Charming criminal, Charnelhouse Charlie!!! Cause celebre!!!”

Charnelhouse Charlie cheerfully cackles canorously, cubing croutons, chopping chili, carving cucumber, charring corn cobs, captivatedly cooking cut cured cankered campaniliform cock, charcoal’s candescence crisping crust.

Charnelhouse Charlie concludes concocting culinary cock-a-hoop, clears clutter, cha-chas, commences chowing cilantro-chiffonaded chowder-coated chapatti. Contentedly chewing chowder’s cock chunks, Charnelhouse Charlie, ceaselessly chic, chuckles “Chickeny!!!”, chugging chilled champagne, climaxes, cheering-on Charnelhouse Charlie’s criminality’s considerable calculating chichi cleverness.

A Sad Deed
As ADD eases, Ed’s dad Asa de Sades Ed’s ass, eases seed – adds, adds – deads Ed’s sass as Ed sees Asa as a sad dad.

Uno Memento Motto

Mom, on note to teen:

“No men on moon, no tenet to tote, no note to tune. Neon nun-totem on mount? Mute monument to no-one.”

A Sweet Mess
Sweet Tess met Tom, seems sweet to Tess, “stout esteem, most zest, must mow!” Tess swoons, now on to two moons on Tom’s nest Tess sees Tom’s tons o’ zoo-smut: mooses mount sows; mutts, tots. “Wow!” Tess wets, oozes, sweetness now moot, now mess on toes.

Torture Theater No. Ten
Arthur – a threat, a thorn – ate a teen heart to no hoot nor roar, no rant nor rave, author one neat note (a taunt, a revue):

“Ave, Rhona, ave, ave: rear too tan to not rut, throat too hot to not tear, her teat too rare an art to not have; ate her to honour her, teat ‘n heart, throat to rear, to return her to ever ‘n ever.”

On A Queer Zone
Zoë (nee Anne, nee Evan) – queer queen anon on a queue none vue, on a venue none even van on – a no-noun, a no-one on a neon eve o’ an uneven era.

In A Raging Kia
Ador, a dim, dour drunk (on gin and rum) goading God and King on a dark road, ran on a roaming dog, a Rod (dinging Kia), an oar and a ring, and a grinning man dining on a gourd.

Delicate Domestic Delicacy
didactic dramaturgy
Dramatis: Deaf-dumb Dolores – doddering dwarfy dame – dozes dribbling, droning decibelfully, deeply descends down daedal dirty dreamscape, down disturbingly diseased decades-old debutante days.

Dramatisation: Dirty dream drives Dolores conscious. Dolores checks crib, checks ceaselessly-dozing decades-old dermoid child’s diaper chastefully, determines distinct dahl-like dampness, changes diaper delicately. Despite delicate chasteness, Dolores disturbs child’s dozing, causing child’s crying. Child’s cries don’t descend down deaf-eared Dolores’ cranium, continues changing child’s diaper. Determined child’s cries climb ‘cross decibels, doppler downwind, disturbing dozen duplexes, catching Dolores’ distracted consciousness. Distressed, Dolores draws dusty diaphanous draperies, drops damp damask duster, decidedly comforts child. Clasping droopy double-Ds, Dolores draws child close, closer, close, closer.

Diptych: Child digs down Dolores’ doughy deflatedness, cross-eyedly drinks dairy draught deep, drams deliciously, drams delightfully, catching dainty delectable drops dribbling down cheeks, dripping down double-chin, deglutitiating child chuckling, chewing, ceaselessly drying down Dolores.

Child’s drinking concluded, Dolores dries chaffed double-Ds, couches derriere, denudedly drifts down daedal dirty dreamscape, down disturbingly diseased decades-old debutante days, during Dolores’ crazily determined drifter dad’s daily dozen crystal-methamphetamine-caused crime: despicable double-drinking chewing-down chugging Dolores’ debuting chests’ dairy daiquiri, doggy-style deepdicking devirginisation deftly dealt directly Dolores’ delicate dianthic dahlia – “Definitely Daddy’s child. Definitely Daddy’s child,” drawled Dolores’ dad – causing (Dolores’ doctors determined) decades-long depression, chronic cardiological disturbances, dwarfism, degeneracy, child-bearing: daunting darkly devolutionary descents down Darwinist dead-ends.

Dramatics: Dirty dream drives Dolores conscious. Dolores checks crib, checks ceaselessly-dozing decades-old dermoid child, currently droning, dozing comfortably, dreaming decades-old dreams, chuckling. Dolores cradles doughy chapping droopy double-Ds, curd dripping. Definitely Daddy’s child. Definitely Daddy’s child.

Denoument: Dolores checks child’s damp clumpy diaper, draws corner, coaxes dozing child’s darky dangle. Dolores dampens, determines deepest desire, determines dirtiest dream, decides definite depraved deontic destiny, defers, devotes degenerate dental demonstrations. Deaf-dumb Dolores – doddering dwarfy dame – descends, drops, dreams, delights.

A Boa O’ Abba-Baobab
Bob, bub a cob: “Ooo, aaa! O, cocoa-caca o’ Bab!”

A Startoss’d Troll
Olan Sta Ana – a loon – slots lotsa tots door to door, nasal to anal, rants “Don’t start! Don’t start!” and all tots as “Rats!” and “Tools o’ Satan!” to Santa tattoo on ass.

A Vain Saint
One nite, Gertie goes to oven, turns it on, ‘n sits – sore on tears, snot stains on vest – starin’ out to no-one, attention to none save a vague sour taste on tongue.

A Slave’s Hard Sale
A broad’s bare ass – raw over VD – draws blood as a dude lords over her, shaves her, lashes her red as he blows a wad over her shoulder.

On A Fine Noon
On a fee of nine-five, a vue of one buff banana bonin’ a nun, cooin’ “Ooo, aaa!”.

A Gaga Gag
Papa glad legal gal Lulu gulped – lapped up, “glug-glug” – pee-puddle a la agua.

Endangering Eloquent Edacity
egregious epitaphs
Erroneously eating earlywood echeveria, Eddie – easygoing eccentric edentate elementary Economics educator – endured exotic epidermal ensanguine explosions escalating exponentially everyday, eventually engulfing Eddie’s entire exterior, evolving echinococci, creeping down esophagus, effusing effluvia, emaciates, evokes eclampsia. Eddie expires, eight ephemeric earnest etchings – euphuistically efforting emending embourgeoisement – Eddie’s étagère’s center exhibit, definitively encapsulating Eddie’s effeminate effervesence, Eddie’s existence’s extant evidence:

“Every excellent endeavour eventually ends exemplary.”
“Education: every Eve’s Eden.”
“Égalité equals Emancipation.”
“Evening ends everynight, dawn comes eventually.”
“Elegies: every esprit’s elysian evensong.”
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

A Need Denied
Adan and Dave invaded Ben, divided bun, beaded, beaned, and denuded, and Ben bein’ bad in bed, Dave and Adan, undivided, bade Ben de nada, and a vain adieu.

An Alley Vue
Allan, eye uneven, lay lean Ella – all eleven – ‘n Ella yell “Nay!” ‘n Allan yell “Aye!” ‘n Ella yell ‘n yell, ‘n all lull ‘n Allan yell “Yay!” ‘n leave venue ‘n Ella lay level, eye all null.

A Small Seamless Gem
All gals slam Sam as Sam’s eel seems small ‘n smells as smegma smells.

A Fan
Nate – a fat, unneat teen – vue Vanna feet a tan teat at TV ‘n Nate vent tent, ‘n eat.

Dead Ease
Dessa sees Ade seed dead Ada’s ass.

Wahahahaha!
I gag a gay hag!

Flagrantly Flagitious Fetishes
faggy fabulations
Flaky flaneur Felix, following Fredo – fetchingly fabulous feminised fraternal freres – fussily film fulsome fornications for fogey freewheeling foreigners’ fees, featuring forceful felchings, fast-paced facials, ferrets, fistings, feral face-fartings, funnellings, fingerings, forced fecal-feedings, furballings, fluids-flickings, furrowings, fibrilatings, flimsy flapjackings, funnybonings, flippings, forehead fondlings, floppings, fork-flinchings, fishy fish-feastings, facecloth face-offs, facetious falling-outs, facile falafel-fryings, fascist fastballings, fast-talkings, featherings, fatigued feedbacks, far-flung feints, felicitous frenchings, feisty Fabregeings, Ferris-wheelings, felonious fermentings, furious Fibonacciings, foreplayings, fistula-fillings, flagellum-flexings, fleshy flagwavings, fletchings, ferocious fore-and-aftings, foghornings – for Fredo, few fantasies feel failures; for Felix, few filmbuffs feel filched.

II
First finding I’m living with HIV, it’s silly, thinking “I’m dying! I, victim!” Sickly, dizzy, high in pills ‘til, inspiringly, I inflict HIV willingly in dining grill I stint in nightly, rightly victimizing girls, mixing chill piss in spicy chili, shit bits in sizzling sisig, thick spit in icy drinks ‘til midnight, ‘til, tiring, I sit in high spirits, ticklishly giggling, priding in illicit thrills, in kicking, in fighting HIV, in living!

Gladsome Glass-Jawed Gogo-Girl
gonzo go-around
Gorgeous Glenda – glib g-stringed gimmicky glamour-puss – goes gaga-gooey grogshop guy-glaring, gleefully gloats golden globes, generously gives guys gash-glimpses, guiltlessly guffaws, gasps, ‘fore going for grandest gigantically generous guy. Guy – fantasising goose-stepping galoot – gladly follows Glenda going for grimy girlsroom, furiously grabs Glenda’s glistening gam. Glenda gasps. Guy grabs Glenda’s golden globes, gropes Glenda’s gluteus, forces finger forward, farther, farther. Glenda grimaces, grabs guy’s growing girth, frees giant from garter, gamely grinds glans, geniculates, generates generous friction. Guy gasps, growls, gibbers foolishly. Glenda, go-getting glutton for getable genitals, grins gap-toothedly, goes for guy’s gigot, glowingly glissandos further, further, goads guy’s glob, gargles. Guy goes “Goddamn, girl!” Glenda giggles, goes further, further. Guy, glutton for getable gash, growls “Giddyap!” forces Glenda forward, ghoulishly grabs g-string, garter failing, falls. Guy greedily gropes gash formerly glimpsed, finally finding Glenda’s gigantic gynaecological grotesquerie, Glenda’s genuinely freakish fact: “Glenda’s” formerly “Glenn,” ‘fore genitals-gibbing, ‘fore gender-forgery. Guy, freaked-out, goes “Goddamn, gay!!!” grabs “Glenda” furiously, grudgingly gropes face, forces fingers forward, grittingly gouges “Glenda’s” gaze, ‘fore fisting “Glenda’s” gap-toothed grin. Guy gruffly goes, ghastly gesticulating grossness. “Glenda” – gank, gibbous, glazed glamour-puss – giggles, gingerly grins gap-toothedly, grisly gargles gore, gleaming, grateful, gratified.

Slender Knives Kept Sharp
Slender knives kept sharp for emergency surgery: “so, what now?” and you flinch at their cool efficiency at ripping you to shreds, the damage done with just three words, from crotch through gizzard through liver through breasts, twist of wrist and quietly exquisitely the sheets are soiled

               quick with blood, truly yours and yours truly, “not a bad mix” or so you say, opinions may vary: “I’m still not sold to the thought”, it sits in my brain folding and turning but it’s just too big so wrought I, a lout, pop it out (a zit of words), “so, what now?” and you cry it out

               beside me in bed, the hot spot, the origin of everything from months before, better times in better climes, the little we didn’t do would fill six cups or more, so now we’re here with our sour milk, our bitter coffee: we gulp them down to seem not worried but our fingers shiver so we spill our drinks but not mop up, letting coffee – milk mix it up, “it’s how we work” you like to blurt out often just to hurt, expert to the strength of words, first their weight then their size when uttered correctly, so three more from you, quietly quick you self-surgerize from behind cry-sore eyes: “now, we go” so now, we go.

Heinous Half-Life Hankering Hoaxy Heftiness
hagiographic hokum
Heartily heroin-high, hammocked Henry – happy-go-lucky hurly-burly harelipped hippie – happily hums hollow hosannas, hiccupps hoarse hallelujahs, hee-haws hazy hi-hellos, heebie-jeebies, his heartbeat helter-skelter, his hands herky-jerky, his half-digestions halfway-up, his head

hemorrhaging

hundred halibut

hallucinations.

Adam David lives in Cubao, Quezon City. He has been a zinester and a bookmaker by trade since 1999. He writes criticism for the Philippine Online Chronicles, a Pinoy culture webzine. He regularly maintains a weblog called Oblique Strategies, which can be monitored every now and then on http://wasaaak.blogspot.com

She is called The*whoa* Sorceress and is on her way to see whom the Real Kingdom reverently referred to as The Wizard of the Wonder Web. She enters the Wizard’s Office whenever she pleases but her presence is still announced with a squeak by his unexcitable secretary, Jeeves, even when the Sorceress always pleasantly smiles at him.

“Yo baby!” the Sorceress thunders to him after she slams the door shut. “I’m so tired of being the scary freak only you and my thralls adore!”

The Wizard of the Wonder Web drops his cool omniscience away from the matrices of dimensions in the Web to look at her.

The Sorceress grins, “Not that I’m really complaining. I do get what I want, after all.”

The Wizard of the Wonder Web sits back, smiles, and loosens the knot of his tie, “Okay, love, what is it now?”

The Sorceress grumbles, “Just that, my job.”

The Wizard of the Wonder Web sighs, “There’s a dimension out there with a Giant Mongoose worried that it would die first from going deaf and which I believe is still strangling that Babbling Anaconda, among other glitches in need of necessary endings from your powers.”

The Sorceress sits on his lap and plays with his long black hair, “Boring and that and those can wait. Something else.”

The Wizard of the Wonder Web asks, wary, “What else?”

The Sorceress smiles again, “I was thinking that maybe I should check out Fairy Tale Reality. Meet my kind of creatures. Take a break.”

The Wizard of the Wonder Web groans, “The Mistress of Pragmatism actually wants to go there?”

The Sorceress laughs, “Oh, shut up! I promise not to turn the Real Kingdom or that reality!”

“Which dimension?”

The Sorceress frowns, “And have me under your Technocrati surveillance in YouTube?”

The Wizard of the Wonder Web laughs, “You can’t blame me. You keep on ditching your bodyguards. Remember them? Mr. Google and Agent Yahoo? And where are they anyway…”

“Ask Jeeves. Tell them I said hi when they finally get here,” and the Sorceress reaches for the console on his desk, fingers tapping too-fast-codes for even the Wizard of the Wonder Web to follow.

The Wizard of the Wonder Web mumbles, “Whoa…that’s hot…”

The Sorceress giggles, “…and rand=2/0×0?1y… Catch me later, baby!”

And the Sorceress kisses him and vanishes—

—landing hard on a chair

—looking sedated in a flowing black kaftan and her head with flowing black hair

—feeling wooong…woong…wong in an air-conditioned classroom

—interrupting a Dwarf from his tirade.

“Ah, welcome to the Fairy Tale!” the Fat Godmother Cat who was the moderator chortled. “What shall we call you, sweetie?”

The Sorceress gritted (damn slipstream) out, “Not sweetie. I’m called The *whoa* Sorceress.”

“Right. But for the sake of expediency, we shall drop the clutter and just call you Sorceress, yes? Unless you want to be called Sorsee? Or Sor, like a nun?”

The Sorceress muttered, “Fatty is catty-Zafra-funny. Let me—” and she began to move her fingers but was stopped by a wing.

“Can’t do that. Rules,” the Fairy beside her whispered as it daintily moved its wing back and covered her mouth with a handkerchief, and the Pixie near them bobbed her head.

The Dwarf resumed his scathing rant about the latest psychotic upload in “that freak’s mySAP.com” and therefore downloaded “not a Fairy Tale” while the Elf seated across him was nodding in camaraderie and then added more highfalutin to the Dwarf’s jargon.

“Oh yeah, that weird-wired-son-of-an-avatar is such a freak,” the Fat Godmother Cat affirmed to the Elf, chortled once more, and with that concluded the forum.

The Fairy Tale Cast immediately exited and the Sorceress was left asking— what rules? growling— I’m supposed to be on a break thinking— the Dwarf is an arrogant prick, that snooty Elf and the Fat Cat must be friends, and in Fairy Tale Reality everyone apparently doesn’t know that they’re all freaks.

The Sorceress began looking around for the nearest Elixir-to-Cirrhosis-Stop to contemplate on whether to piss off or piss away or stay to piss on Fairy Tale Reality (especially since she wasn’t digging her non-smoking assigned look).

The Sorceress decided to stay to figure out the program and then on had come to eventually understand that nobody configured with anybody (except the Elf and the Fat Godmother Cat because they were Fellows in Magic-Cards-and-Harry-Potter-Addiction). And that they were all required to decode their own Fairy Tales through encoding their individual mySAP.coms.

@

http://*Sorceress*mySAP.com.ph

*An Existential Dialogue With Invisible Man *Refereeing Barbarians At The Gates: Hannibal vs. Conan *Stopping The Magic Dragon And The Big Bad Wolf From Puffing Nemo *Turning Little Into Bloody Red Riding Hoodlum *Waking Briarwood From The Sleeping Pill *Convincing Rapunzel To Cease Waiting For Godot To Cut Her Hair *Teaching Wily Coyote Smarts Is Hard To Do *Friday the 13th: Cousin It Going Bald *Shutting Up A Celebrity Death Match: Lolit Jeckle & Joey Heckle vs. Cristy Donkey & Jobert Binks *How To Exterminate Zombies In Less Than 28 Days *A Lecture On The Dating Game Given To Dr. Ripper, Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Lecter *Preventing 2012 (Rainbow Brite On Acid, Care Bears Gone Wild, Gollum Proposing Marriage With The Ring, Britney Spears Turning Goth…) *“Retrieved” From Mulder’s X-Files: Stan Lee, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling… *Guiding Bill and Steve’s Excellent Journey To The Center Of Yodaism *Spreading Manga To The World: Get REAL, Be FREAKS…

The Fairy Tale Cast gaped at what the Sorceress uploaded, “Whoa!”

The Sorceress just thought, And I rest that *whoa*case.

And because the rule was ¬Bash-Emo/Don’t-Gush (and being a Sorceress she was then expected to be like Fairuza Balk in The Craft) during mySAP.com sharing, the Sorceress would only smile sweetly and was sympathetic and helpful to everyone.

Then one afternoon, the Fat Godmother Cat demanded from all of them who were surprisingly nice (and really just wonky from all my.SAP.coms), “What’s the matter with all of you! Are you all high?!”

The Sorceress, the Fairy, the Dwarf, the Pixie, the Elf and the rest of the Fairy Tale Cast all started laughing and talking like Chewbacca. The Fat Godmother Cat threw her paws up with an “Argh!” and dismissed them. After that, the five trooped to chug Seagal and Tarantino’s Found-Gold-From-The-Philippines and started configuring their individual mySAP.com webs together as they swigged their way through more Elixir-To-Clarity-Via-Cirrhosis.

The Sorceress asked the Elf who was seated beside her, “I thought elves didn’t drink?”

The Elf downed a shot and answered without looking at her, “I don’t.”

The Sorceress shrugged and asked the Fairy, “And in Reality, what are you?”

The Fairy answered, “I’m a lady.”?

The Dwarf muttered, Yeah a ladybug, “What? The lady is a dude!”

The Fairy smiled, “I bet you’re a frog,” and moved to kiss the Dwarf.

The Dwarf blanched, making the Fairy laugh and the Sorceress laughed out to him, “Are you really?”

The Dwarf drawled, “I’m a gamer who ain’t got game with them bitches and I want a revolution for free beer.” Then he turned to the Pixie, winked, “Come on, put out,” and blew come-hither-bubbles.

The Pixie giggled the bubbles back to the Dwarf, “And you’re sooooo not my Prince Charming!”

The Elf mumbled as he downed another shot, Damn, you got me.

The Sorceress arched her eyebrow at him, “Excuse me?”

The Elf shook his head, looked at her, and said, “Even I couldn’t object to the disgustingly saccharine comments you made about myownSAP.com because they made sense only realizing hours later how insulting you were.”

The Sorceress laughed, “Is that a rhetorical question?”

The Elf then arched his own eyebrow at her, “Ah, what is a rhetorical question?”

The Dwarf (who had unzipped his fly towards the orchids) turned and declared to them while peeing, “The task! The task is to make the ultimate mySap.com=fairytale!” And then forgot to zip his fly as he walked back to them. The rest all quickly said Good-(Gawd!)-Bye, not wanting a sty to grow on their eyes.

Later on, the Sorceress reluctantly messaged the all-knowing Elf for Fairy-Tale-Tricks, “It’s these damn rules! I can’t seem to make my Fairy Tale operate! MydamnSAP.com refuses to be spelled into my ultimate Fairy Tale!”

The Elf advised, “Have you tried the Walk-Alone-Into-Epiphany?”

The Sorceress sighed, “I’m constantly bugged in the Path”

“The Drink-To-Revelation-In-Oblivion?”

“Oblivion cannot be reached.”

“The Toke-To-Decode-The-Cosmic-Joke?”

“I got the Void’s Please try again later.”

“How about the Simulated-Misery?”

“And be a bad bard just begging to be killed?”

“Sex-To-Infinite-Success?”

The Sorceress laughed, “You use that? My, my, aren’t you kinky.”

The Elf choked out, “No!” then coughed, “Well, I’m out of treats.”

The Sorceress asked, “I thought elves knew everything. Just how old are you?”

The Elf intoned, “I’m an elf: it’s all about MDAS.”

The Sorceress almost shrieked her frustration, instead groused, “I need a damn hug.”

The Elf quietly said, “Now that I can give you. Happily but after.”

The Sorceress scoffed, “You? Hug? Yeah, sure, whatever.”

After,

@

http://*Fairy*mySAP=Fairytale.com.ph

I Just Want To Be A Woman

http://*Pixie*mySAP=Fairytale.com.ph

Finding Prince Charming In Neverland

http://*Dwarf*mySAP=Fairytale.com.ph

Legend: I Am Awesome!

http://*Elf*mySAP=Fairytale.com.ph

The Meaning of Life Is, Well, Um, Something Ineffable
Like What A Buddhist Sartre Said

http://*Sorceress*mySAP=Fairytale.com.ph

Spelling Normal

The Fat Godmother Cat was happy over their myFairySAP.coms and threw a Piss-The-Elixir-In-The-Pool-Party. The Dwarf and the Elf drank Daddy-Whisky that was melting the paint from the Daddybucks cups they were using while checking out the frolicking bikinis (except when it was the Fairy’s). And rather than piss where everyone was swimming, the Sorceress hikcused herself with, “I’m going to the Jamie.”

“Jamie?” the Pixie asked.

“Ex-John-then-James-now-Jamie,” explained the Fairy.

“Nature. Even a sorceress pees, you know,” the Sorceress mocked.

The Dwarf sang, “Jamie’s got a gun…” and laughed, “Ye freaks!” then leered at the Sorceress, “Want me to walk you?”

They all said “No!” and the Fat Godmother Cat commanded, “Gentle Elf! Escort her!”

The Elf silently walked the Sorceress to the Jamie while holding her hand like a granny. After the Sorceress pissed the Elixir back to Nature and came out, the Elf said, “I know you don’t even look at me—”

The Sorceress stopped walking—sobered— and looked straight at the flushed Elf, “Are you drunk?”

“—and that you dislike me—“

The Sorceress nodded, “Yeah… But you’re not so bad.”

The Elf sighed, “—time for that hug.”?

He hugged her.

It felt just weird to the Sorceress being hugged by someone so thin (and actually being turned on by a hug from someone smaller).

Then the Elf kissed her.

The Sorceress could only sputter as he continued kissing her to his yellow light, found herself kissing him back to green light, and then both stopped to a red light with, whoa. She thought what the heck was that and that was that and almost ran away from the smiling Elf on their way back to the rest of the merry Fairy Tale Cast.

That night, the Elf continued to secretly woo her with his telepathic chatting like I can smell you from here while the Sorceress sat by the pool with the Fairy. The Sorceress almost fell into the pool in surprise as she laughed then smelled herself, From there? Do I stink?

The Elf sent, You smell good… Are you laughing at me?

The Sorceress looked at him, saw his anxious and frowning face, and mouthed No.

And the Elf smiled again.

The Sorceress found herself blushing and liking making him smile.

And whenever the Sorceress was asked to sit with the Fairy Tale Cast, she would feel the Elf’s hand stroking her hand and he would dazzle her with his nerdy talk. The Elf and the Sorceress were in a sticky-mushy-haze and continued to sneak kisses ever after.

The Sorceress was reduced between blushing, giggling, and sometimes almost tapping her fingers to be away from the confusing turning of Fairy Tale Reality. She was not supposed to seek the Advice-About-Secret-Affairs from the Fat Godmother Cat but she found herself blurting out, “I actually feel something for that freaking Elf! I don’t know what to do with him… You’re his friend, right? What do I do?”

The Fat Godmother Cat clapped a rolling laugh, “I knew it! So that’s why he’s been mooning—you do know that he has a Real Girlfriend, yes?”

“Yeah, he told me. And he doesn’t know that I do have a Real someone, too.”

The Fat Godmother Cat rubbed her paws, “And the Tale tangles. Here’s what you do— you actually do?! Who?”

The Sorceress mumbled, “The Wizard of the Wonder Web.”

“Oh… Wow… Wait, YOU ARE that Heartless Mistress et cetera Sorceress?!”

The Sorceress winced, “Yep.”

“Whoa,” the Fat Godmother Cat said, holding her paws up. “Not in my level of operation,” and vanished.

After that, the Elf began snubbing the calls of the Sorceress and she didn’t understand why until one night he finally answered her hi’s and why’s.

The Elf said in all contempt, “I know who you are.”

The Sorceress felt like fainting, “How did you find out? I can explain—”

“You enthralled me.”

The Sorceress reeled, “Enthralled you?! That’s not true!”

The Elf whispered, “I felt… What I felt was real.” Then he clipped in disgust, “Never mind. I hope you got what you wanted. You’re really a freak.” And he retreated into his Cave-In-Mars again before the Sorceress could even explain the beginning of the eternity of that damn *whoa*.

The Sorceress called on the Fat Godmother Cat in all her disturbing The Sorceress*whoa-you’re-going-to-be-deleted*glory, “HOW DARE YOU MEDDLE.”

The Fat Godmother Cat implored, “I had to tell him because you’re you… And you can’t possibly be… No way! A sorceress doesn’t fall in love, much more with an elf in Fairy Tale Reality!”

The Sorceress let go of the *whoa*, “Duh? We’re in Fairy Tale Reality! And do you even have any idea what ripples and tears in dimensions your interference will bring? And why did you tell him that I was just toying with him? I wasn’t. And now he’s so hurt and he thinks that I don’t feel anything for him, too. And I can’t convince him because he doesn’t even want to talk to me…And damn, it hurts.”

And there and then the Sorceress who never cried began crying.

Thankfully it was Fairy Tale Reality so The*whoa* Sorceress could cry and cause just a storm and not a storm to rival a pissed off Storm. After all, just crying was normal for all creatures there, even a Sorceress.

The Sorceress told the drenched and shivering Fairy, Pixie and Dwarf what happened and asked through her tears, “…So what do I do? Can’t leave this bad juju virus going around, you know. And this damn crying has to stop!”

They enthusiastically agreed: the Pixie said that the Sorceress should send flowers to the Elf while the Fairy said to write a sorry: friendship: peace letter. (That stopped the storm.) And she did just those because that’s what creatures did in Fairy Tales, especially since the Delivery Brownie was reliable and said that flowers and letters always worked.

But the Delivery Brownie suddenly found himself wanting to munch magic brownies after the Sorceress left smiling at him and so had ended up giving them to his crush, T.S. Elliot’s Girlfriend. (Who said Flowers for me? Sweet! and upon reading the letter Woops, not for me… Whoa… THE Sorceress fell for the… Elf?!)

The Sorceress covered her face when she found out and was pulling her curling hair in dismay.

The Dwarf said as he looked at her head, “You know, you should just look for the Elf and talk to him before you pull all your hair out. And, uh, it’s all turning into dreadlocks.”

So the Sorceress would go to the Elf’s geeky haunts and whenever the Sorceress was near enough the Elf, he would actually scurry away eeping from her and declare to bystanders, “Dreadlocks is stalking me!”

The Sorceress wouldn’t use her *whoa* powers on him and spell him into staying put so the bad juju spread and disturbed all in Fairy Tale Reality. The Pixie (who began dating Smurf, the Elf’s Best Friend) told the Sorceress, Fairy and Dwarf that the Elf was finally threatened by his Real-Einstein-Girlfriend with When I come home, we’ll talk…

The Dwarf shuddered, “Talk. That ain’t good.”

And that the Sorceress was vicariously threatened with …and I will find that bitch and slap her.

The Dwarf shook his head, “That ain’t right.”

The Fairy bristled, “If I had Einstein’s brain I would slap and leash her boyfriend.”

The Pixie said, “Does she even have any idea that she wants to slap the Queen of Bitch-Slapping?” and to the upset Sorceress, “That’s a sincere compliment, by the way.”

The Fairy said to the Sorceress, “Don’t you worry, girl. She has to go through some Fairy-Slapping first. And her boyfriend, too.”

The Sorceress was finally exasperated, “I’m not even worried! It’s just that the way that damn chicken-legged Elf’s acting is making me feel like a damned rhinoceros vampire stalking a tiny virgin. I ought to curse him with that I-Love-You-Virus or hex him into my loving zombie! And here I just want to talk and clear things up and say sorry.”

The Pixie sighed, “He’s really called Heathcliff, you know.”

And the Dwarf shrugged, “What can you do?”

Remembering her promise, spell-slapping anyone would surely turn and end realms. And before The Wizard of the Wonder Web sensed her disturbance in the Web’s Force—

—finds out

—loses his cool

—obliterates that dimension to its last 1 and 0

—which she was almost tempted to allow, the Sorceress tapped her fingers and disappeared from Fairy Tale Reality

—and lands back onto The Wizard of the Wonder Web’s lap.

The Wizard of the Wonder Web catches her before she tumbles off to the floor, “The Web was on its way to going haywire and I heard Jeeves shrieking outside. Love, what did you do this time?”

The Sorceress gulps nausea, “The damn slipstream really needs to be fixed!”

The Wizard of the Wonder Web hugs her closer, “I missed you— did you find what you were looking for?”

The Sorceress sniffs, “Not my Fairy Tale.’”

The Wizard of the Wonder Web laughs.

And the Sorceress sighs, hugs The Wizard of the Wonder Web then straightens his tie, stands up, lights her flavored cigarette, and walks out of the Wizard’s Office smiling (to find that mongoose and snake and likely turn them into lovers) happily being The *whoa* Sorceress especially after.

Mia Tijam is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program of the University of the Philippines (Diliman) and a fellow for Creative Nonfiction in the 2007 National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete.