OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology Read online

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  “The Wordeaters” by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

  “Invisible Empire of Ascending Light” by Ken Scholes

  “The Photograph” by Veronica Montes

  “A Moment in Time” by Charie D. La Marr

  “A Gentlemen’s Agreement” by Susan S.Lara

  “X” by Karissa Chen

  “Cunning Syncronicity” by Berrien C. Henderson

  “Godsend” by Joel Pablo Salud

  “Ondoy” by Laura McPhee-Browne

  “Rescuing the Rain God” by Kate Osias

  “The Wish Head” by Jeffrey Ford

  “Flash Forward” by Jhoanna Lynn B. Cruz

  “Where Sky and Sea Meet” by Dan Campbell

  “Arrow” by Barry King

  “Finding Those Who Are Lost” by Celestine Trinidad

  “Synchronicity” by Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

  “We’re All Stories in the End” by Matthew J. Rogers

  “Silverio and the Eidolon” by Vincent Michael Simbulan

  “Tinkerers” by Jay Wilburn

  “Finding” by David B. Ramirez

  “Ikan Berbudi (Wise Fish)” by Jason Erik Lundberg

  “Pilar Escheverria” by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

  “Scraps” by Michael Haynes

  “Freeborn in the City of Fallacies” by Andrew Drilon

  “Storm Warning” by Lilian Csernica

  “The Nameless Ones” by Gabriela Lee

  “Whispers” by Grant J. McMaster

  “Highway Run” by Alexander Marcos Osias

  “Black Sun” by Todd Nelsen

  “Life at the Lake’s Shore” by Alex Shvartsman

  “Aliens” by Fiona Mae Villamor

  “Little Italy” by Isa Lorenzo

  “Discipline” by Rebecca McFarland Kyle

  “Unmaking” by Julie C. Day

  “Fresh Fruit” by Yvette Tan

  “The Sparrows of Climaco Avenue” by Kenneth Yu

  “Gellen’s Retirement Plan” by Tim Sullivan

  “When We Were Witches” by Nikki Alfar

  “All the Little Gods We Are” by John Grant

  “Tuba Knight” by Cesar Miguel G. Escaño

  About the Authors

  About the Editor

  Introduction

  On November 7, 2013, the super typhoon Yolanda (international codename: Haiyan) devastated Samar, Leyte, and other parts of the Visayas in the Philippines. The strongest storm recorded at landfall, Yolanda took over 6,000 lives and rendered homeless many thousands more as whole cities and towns were destroyed. Most of Tacloban City, the capital and seat of government of Eastern Visayas, was reduced to rubble by floods and storm surges.

  Within hours of the disaster, aid begun pouring in—not only from government and private sectors of the Philippines, but from many other sources from around the world. While the most pressing concerns (such as food, clothing, and shelter) have been met, the long process of rehabilitation for those areas affected by Yolanda continues.

  This anthology is made possible only by the compassion and generosity of its contributors. A few days after the storm, I issued a call on Facebook, asking writers to contribute stories for a charity anthology, with all proceeds going toward the Philippine Red Cross. It was one of the ways that I, as a writer and anthologist, thought people like myself could offer help. We writers live by the words we write. It was my hope that in some small way our words can help others live.

  I was deeply moved by the outpouring of support from writers not only in the Philippines but also around the world. The first submission came in less than minute after I posted my call. Many more would come, from friends and writers of speculative fiction that I looked up to and admired, to writers I didn’t know personally who wrote in different genres. My call for submissions was posted and reposted and my inbox was filled with stories and accompanying letters of support, prayers, and well-wishes.

  Here then is the final result, an anthology of different stories by authors you’d never expect to share a same table of contents. A number are by well-established writers, bristling with previous publications. A few are first publications. What these stories have in common, besides being well-written and engaging, is that they are all present because of the kindness of spirit of their authors. In the midst of catastrophe, I knew that my country did not stand alone.

  To every author who sent in a story for consideration, I offer my deepest thanks. I am also grateful to Flipside, our eBook publisher, for their full support.

  And most of all, I am thank to you, for purchasing this book and helping the people of the Philippines rise again.

  Dean Francis Alfar

  Manila 2014

  The Wordeaters

  by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz

  She began by chewing on the words he left out on the sofa at night. They were little words he’d written on a napkin, and they tasted of beer and peanuts and the salt of his sweat.

  He used to write poems that made her weep, odd little tales filled with laughter, stories peopled with vicarious images, pulsing with life. Nowadays, she watched him scramble for words.

  “They slip through my fingers,” he said.

  Jotting down words, he hissed through his teeth. His breath was harsh and labored. She listened to him groan, and her heart cracked under the weight of his sorrow. Walking through the streets, she linked her fingers through his and cuddled up to him, wanting to arouse him, desiring to shake him out of the forgetfulness that made him walk like a man in a trance.

  “Sorry.” He said when she complained about it. He looked at her in wonder, his curls shaking as he bounced his head to the rhythm of words she could not hear.

  “It’s the words,” he said. “They want to burst out, and here I am walking the boardwalk, desperate to go back home, to find a chair where I can sit, and paper on which I can write. All the while the words just keep on flowing...”

  She knew better than to tell him what she thought about his words. She’d told him before and she didn’t think she could endure another week of him languishing away beside the window, mourning the words that didn’t come as they used to.

  Nights, he came to bed late.

  Long ago she’d learned to take care of her needs. After the first blush of infatuation faded, she realized he was obsessed with only one thing. Still, she stayed, believing the time would come when he would wake up and recognize his need for her.

  “I’ll stay with him forever,” she’d promised. But she was weary of waiting and she was filled with longing for a baby.

  One night, the moon shining through her window was a bright sliver of silver fire. It fell across the covers of her bed and she saw them. They were little creatures with skin the color of nothingness; dark eyes like an iguana’s and thin sticks for extremities. They crept up to her, and peered into her eyes.

  At first, she was afraid, but they stroked her hair with their thin arms, and spoke words of assurance in her ear.

  “We’ll give you what you want,” they whispered. “A child, a boy filled with dreaming. We’ll give you back your husband, and love, and the life you always wanted.”

  “What price?” she asked.

  “It will be worth it,” they said.

  Wordeaters. That was what they called themselves. They did not have teeth or claws; they simply slipped down her esophagus like water.

  “Eat words for us,” was all they said.

  When he came up to bed, she lay still. She waited for the sound of his breathing, listened for his snores rising and falling in the quietness of the room.

&nbs
p; “Eat words,” they commanded.

  She sat up and dragged on her housecoat. Shivering in the dark, she made her way down the crooked stairs to the living room where he’d sat all night, drinking beer and chewing peanuts, cursing as he watched the telly.

  She found the words jotted down. Short abrupt lines on a white napkin folded up to a fourth of its size.

  In the morning, he walked through the house dressed in his bathrobe. His eyes were bleary and red, and she felt guilty thinking of the words she’d consumed the night before.

  “Can’t think straight,” he said. He headed for the fridge and pulled out a bottle of beer.

  She smelled the despair on his breath when he shuffled away from her.

  “I’ll be writing today.” His words bounced off the walls and she caught them on the edge of her tongue. They tasted like dried up gum, but she swallowed them nevertheless.

  #

  Days passed and she watched him sink deeper into despair. At night, she ate the words that tasted like burnt Brussels sprouts and sour milk.

  “Please.” She whispered to the darkness as she swallowed the words. “Please make him look beyond the words and see me.”

  One morning he looked at her and she knew what he wanted even before he spoke.

  He stopped writing and got a job at the local factory.

  And her belly began to grow.

  Inside her head, the Wordeaters grew more insistent. She developed a habit of going to the library. Wandering through the rows of books she became a connoisseur in identifying authors whose works were pleasing to the tongue.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez tasted like red wine and chocolate. Michael Moorcock was a feast of secret flavors with hints of exotic spices and expensive vodka. Virginia Woolf went down like a slice of paprika and lemon. Ernest Hemingway was tart, stinging her tongue like red chili pepper. Visions of luxurious banquets appeared before her eyes as she took in the words of ancient writers. Pliny and Plato, Aristotle and Dante. She wept as she savoured their words on the back of her tongue.

  She consumed a thousand literary works. Nobel Prize winners, the classics, current history, everything written with soul in it, she ate. They left behind a satisfying, nourishing taste that made the Wordeaters inside her head burp and sigh.

  And her belly kept on growing.

  #

  They painted the baby’s room blue with clouds floating on the ceiling and birds flying through the walls.

  “There are words on the wall,” she said.

  “Where?” he asked. His eyes searched the cloud-covered ceilings and the bird dotted walls.

  “There,” she said.

  But no matter how he looked, he could not see them.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “When the baby is born, you’ll stop seeing things.”

  He kissed her and walked out the door.

  She smiled as she danced around the bedroom. Inside her, the Wordeaters were singing.

  She opened her mouth and they floated out. They populated the walls, and filled the baby bassinet with their smell of warm earth, ripening rice, wild lilies, and giant tuberoses.

  “Time,” they said to her. “Time for the baby to be born.”

  She gazed into their dark eyes and felt no fear.

  #

  She called the baby Ariel.

  “A gift from the gods,” her husband said. “A miracle to fill our days.”

  He leaned in close and cradling them both in his arms, he sang a nonsensical lullaby with words that made her laugh.

  In Ariel’s bedroom, the Wordeaters were waiting. She smiled when she saw their stomachs distended with all the words she had swallowed for them. She stretched out her arms to them, offering them her child.

  “Feed him,” she whispered.

  They floated around the baby, their stick limbs touching his head, caressing him.

  “Pretty baby,” they purred.

  One by one they crooned words to her baby. They gathered him up in their arms and comforted his sobs with weird songs, and jibber-jabber words.

  “Beautiful child,” they sang.

  The walls reflected the colors of their songs. They sang into him blood-red sunsets, purple mountains, hazy green meadows, and the black of night.

  “Ariel,” they said. It was as if they tasted the sound of his name.

  They looked at her and smiled.

  “We’ll be going now,” they said.

  #

  She did not see the Wordeaters again, but sometimes when she looked at Ariel, she wondered if he had always had eyes the colour of rain-washed pebbles.

  Ariel grew fast. At three his vocabulary was extraordinary.

  “Constellations,” he would say. “Cosmos, curtail, constellations.”

  He smiled, rolling the words on his tongue as if tasting them before releasing them with a sigh.

  At four he was telling her amazing stories.

  “Listen,” he said. “There are stories on the wind.”

  She strained her ears, but all she heard was the sound of the nightingale singing and the tall grass blowing.

  At five he started to write, and even when he was at play, his words had the ability to move her to tears.

  “What did they do to you?” She wanted to ask him.

  “Write it down,” he said. “Write down my words.

  And he told her a story of dragons at sunset, of winds that brought news of secret wars. His words were filled with the dreams of a thousand warriors; they were heavy with the pathos of years, and dripping with the anguish of fallen nations.

  “Write faster,” he said. But her fingers were too slow and she lost some of his words and his stories when she read them were only a pale shadow of what he had said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, when she read them back to him.

  He smiled and looked at her with his eyes that were so dark she could barely see her reflection in them.

  “Tell me a story,” he said.

  And she told him the story of a woman who sat alone in her chair, waiting for the moon to come out. She told him of the silver sickle moon, of magical creatures called Wordeaters sliding down the moonbeam onto her bed, of the words she had eaten and the way they tasted.

  When she was done with telling, he was fast asleep.

  She rocked him in her arms and sang to him the songs that her own mother sang when she was a child. Above them, the moon rose, full and bright, and the wind carried away her song to where the waves of the sea rose and fell in harmony.

  “I wish I could hold you forever,” she whispered. And she wept because she knew wishes are only temporary things and there was no such thing as forever.

  #

  It was dark in the house when her husband came home. In the bedroom, sheets of paper lay scattered around the bed like fallen leaves.

  “Ariel,” he whispered.

  He ran his fingers over the words.

  A breathe of wind fluttered the pages in his hands, and he thought of the day he had taken Ariel down to the sea. They’d watched the sunset together, built sandcastles, and played among the waves. He thought of Ariel’s laughter, of Ariel’s eyes, and of how the stories he told seemed to come from some hidden well of magic. He stood there listening, lost in dreams and in the worlds his son’s words brought to life for him. When he turned his head, Ariel was gone, and there was only the sound of the waves and the lonely song of the seagulls.

  They’d searched all evening, but they never found him.

  Now, his hands trembled as he gathered up the papers. His fingers traced the writing on the page, his eyes followed the childlike drawings of dragons and knights, spheres and worlds, and strange creatures his son called Wordeaters.

  “Ariel,” he whispered.

  A breathe of wind blew in through the open window, and he watched as a flame of light illumined dragons rising up from the page. He watched them tumble in graceful flight. Green-gold fire licked at the pages, curling the edges, turning them to ash.

/>   Cities rose and crumbled; stars stumbled and collided, warriors clashed in battle, the world fell from its axis, and righted itself again.

  And Ariel was there, staring at him, his eyes piercing beyond the shell of skin to the pain beneath.

  “Now, you must give birth to life,”” Ariel said.

  Outside, the moon was a sliver of silver fire, and he saw the Wordeaters dancing on the pillows.

  “Don’t be afraid,” they said.

  He looked up at his son.

  And the Wordeaters were around him. They surrounded him with their smell of lilies and wild roses. They filled him with the scent of rich loam, the wild growing of trees and the harvesting of rice.

  Images burst to life on the back of his eyelids. Warriors sprouted wings and flew away like eagles, the earth split apart into a thousand miniature reflections of itself, and the stars floated down to earth to speak with the remnants of a lost generation.

  He lay there for a long time and when he opened his eyes he saw Ariel floating upward on beams of silver light.

  “No,” he cried. He stood up, and tried to catch hold of his son. “Stay,” he pleaded.

  And he wept because his arms lost their strength and he felt his son slipping away from his grasp until there was nothing left but a ray of moonlight across the cover of their bed.

  #

  “He was never ours to keep,” his wife said.

  In the darkened room, her pale skin shone like ivory, and her body was soft and yielding under the bedcovers.

  She turned her face away and he saw the glimmer of tears on her cheeks, and when he reached out his hand to touch her shoulder, he felt them shudder under the weight of her grief.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  And he thought of how he had shut her out of his grief, of the days turned into weeks and months of not speaking.

  He looked at her and saw how sorrow had hollowed out her cheeks, and etched lines upon her face, and for the first time in a long time, he reached out his arms to her.

  “I didn’t mean to shut you out,” he said. “He was so bright. He was our star, our gift, our miracle.”