Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 Read online

  Cover art for the original print edition of the book.

  For Sage, who taught me wonder

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Jan’s Door

  Cyan Abad-Jugo

  The Doppler Effect

  Tyron Caliente

  Tendresse

  Andrew Drilon

  Lovelore

  Francezca C. Kwe

  EmberWild

  Nikki Alfar

  Walking Backwards

  Joseph Nacino

  New Wave Days

  Angelo R. Lacuesta

  L’Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)

  Dean Francis Alfar

  The Coward’s Quest

  Jay Steven Uy Anyong

  Room Three

  Pauline Orendain

  Instructions on How to Disappear

  Gabriela Lee

  The Pepe Report

  Ian Rosales Casocot

  In the Arms of Beishu

  Vincent Michael Simbulan

  An Introduction to the Luminescent

  J. Pocholo Martin Goitia

  The Family that Eats Soil

  Khavn

  Regiment

  Sean Uy

  The Catalogue of the Damned

  K. Mandigma

  The Life and Death of Hermes Uy

  Douglas L. Candano

  Foreword

  Looking Back

  WHEN THE OPPORTUNITY to reprint the first volumes of the Philippine Speculative Fiction annuals in digital form presented itself, we jumped at the chance with glee. Way back in 2005 when all this first began, we remember the anxiety and challenges of putting together an anthology of the type of stories that we loved to read, by Filipino authors. At that time, there were no speculative fiction anthologies (the very term itself practically unknown in these islands, save for a handful of readers), and strange and wondrous fiction by young local writers were few and far between.

  We were concerned that we wouldn’t get enough good stories, that our call for submissions (posted on my then-living blog) couldn’t possibly reach as many people as we hoped it would, that the project would suffer a quiet death. But the stories came, and with each one, our spirits grew bolder. Here were stories that deserved to be read, that represented the beginnings of the journey of how our fellow Filipino writers moved toward defining speculative fiction, that demonstrated imaginative narrative in English. We had a book of stories that we were confident was a good read.

  We resolved to self-publish, and steeled ourselves against the potential controversies that that decision would provoke, and released a small run of this first volume. During the book launch, we began the tradition of eschewing the usual boring formal ceremonies and celebrated all the authors of the anthology instead – it was just as important for us to help seed a community of likeminded authors (though we may disagree in terms of poetics) as it was to publish the stories.

  In the following months, we engaged in many conversations concerning the book and the term “speculative fiction” both in the academe and in informal gatherings, online and face-to-face. In the following year, Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 1 was nominated for the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award. Several stories were cited in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, edited by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link & Gavin Grant (the biggest inspiration in how our series is formatted).

  We sold out our first print run.

  And we issued the call for a second volume. Then the third, and the fourth, and so on through the next few years until the 2012 edition.

  It was always our goal (and I use “our”, “we” and “us” because while I may have began on the road by myself, the series has vastly benefited from the hard work, clear eyes and different perspectives of the editors who also took the helm of various volumes – Nikki Alfar, Vincent Michael Simbulan, Kate Osias and Alexander Osias) to provide a venue for Filipino writing of the fantastic sort, even as we struggle against the labels, deliberately break the barriers of genre, and claim/create space in the realm of Philippine Literature – and beyond all that, to have great reads.

  And in your hands, in electronic form, is how we began.

  My greatest thanks to all the authors – and to you.

  Dean Francis Alfar

  Manila, 2012

  An Introduction

  I AM A fantasist at heart.

  I love the literature of the extraordinary, tales of wonder and stories that break the all-too tangible walls of reality. I love myths and legends, travelogues through uncharted territory, explorations into imagination and sorties beyond the known unknown. I love magic in all its forms, the possibility of the interference of gods, the intimation of things beyond stars, and denizens of trees and earth, wind and rain and fire. I enjoy best those stories that take me elsewhere, that speak in the language of dreams, that employ imagery both supernal and supernatural, that play etheric music or hint at cacophonous bazaar mutterings, that show me the possibilities in an empty wooden bowl or a dying mother’s wish.

  These are the kinds of stories I love to write most. And to a great extent, these are the stories I do write. But in the past decade or so, I ended up questioning the value of speculative fiction — not their intrinsic value, because the value of the fantastic is beyond question, but rather why a greater audience has yet to be found.

  Let us skip the usual argument of taste and concede the fact that certain people will always like certain things (this is spurious and leads nowhere) and just hope that exposure to new forms of literature carries the opportunity for someone new to fall through the magical trapdoor. Realism, of the mode handed down to us by the generations that came before us, is unquestionably dominant.

  If you look for speculative fiction in the Philippines, you will be dismayed. Wonder tales and the literature of the fantastic are in very small numbers and are still looked down upon as inferior (as if the strides of the past years in international publishing washed over the Philippines and left it untouched, the country snug under its invisible reflective/self-reflexive force field). The only genre that permits or encourages the fantastic is Children’s Fiction. This is wonderful, of course, but even this published mode enforces very short stories whose first priority seems to be the deliverance of an Aesopian moral (certainly not all, exceptions do exist).

  In the non-Children’s section (I hesitate to use the term “adult” because, well, why?), the pickings are even slimmer. In the past few years, Lucero’s magic realist stories have livened up the dreary Filipino word-community, harkening back to Yuson’s “Philippine Jungle Energy Café” of 80’s. There are few other examples (like the trendy collections of very short horror), but none of them are truly literature of the fantastic as I define the term — unashamedly magical, beyond lyricism and tenor and style.

  Fantasy is the kiss of death. Mainstream Filipino publishers prefer almost anything else, something that will definitely sell or has the potential to sell. They say that there is no market for the genre. And if ever there is interest from a publisher or a producer, it must morph to comply with the perceived saccharine taste of the masses, divorced from its original truth and beauty in order to accommodate trite and tired sensibilities.

  One of the few places to find the fantastic is graphic literature, but even there, the specter of another nation threatens our four-color patrimony (and besides, grafiction needs to fight its own set of battles). Japanese manga has all but succeeded in eradicating the tradition of homegrown heroes.

  To find the fantastic, we must create the fantastic. We must write it ourselves, develop it brick by enchanted brick. We must write literature
that unabashedly revels in wonder, infused with the culture of our imagination — which means being Filipino and, at the same time, surrendering that very same limiting notion — being more than Filipino, unleashing the Filipino of our imagination, divorcing and embracing the ideas of identity, nationhood and universality. We need to do magic.

  And so this anthology.

  I sounded an open call for submissions on my blog and was unprepared for the number of writers who responded. From the almost 70 stories under consideration, I selected 16 that represented the variety of speculative fiction being written by Filipinos here and abroad. Between these covers you will find magic realism next to science fiction, imaginary worlds rubbing shoulders with alternate Philippine history, traditional fantasy and attempts at that elusive descriptor, “slipstream.” For around half of the authors, this anthology marks their first fiction publication. The other half are experienced writers, armed with a busload of previous publications and writing awards — yet for most of them, this is also new.

  It is my hope that this is only the beginning.

  Enjoy this book.

  Dean Francis Alfar

  Manila, 2005

  CYAN ABAD-JUGO

  JAN’S DOOR

  Cyan Abad-Jugo took her master’s in Children’s Literature at Simmons College, Boston, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines. Her first book, Father and Daughter: the figures of our speech (Anvil Publishing, 1996), was a joint project with her father, Gemino H. Abad. Her second book, Sweet Summer and Other Stories was published by the UP Press (2004). Her children’s story “Behind The Old Aparador” won second place at the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in 2003, and will soon be published by Anvil. Her work has appeared in The Junior Inquirer, Flip Magazine, Pulp, Philippines Free Press, and Mango JAM (a cool comics digest for girls).

  In “Jan’s Door,” a dissatisfied young man befriends a mysterious door painter and learns the hard truth behind beginning anew.

  I FIND A bus ride most conducive to achieving a state of total dullness. My mind empties in the drones, stops, starts, and screeches of our long major highway, but does not quite go to sleep. And because I am human instead of a desktop, none of those colorful aquariums or matrix-like figures kick in. My own screensaver is a gray hum.

  Under this shadow-spell one day, a profile begins to superimpose itself on the gray film before my eyes. Curves of forehead, eyelash, cheek, and ponytail. We pass several more bus stops before I snap out of my reverie and pay more attention to this real, living, breathing, flesh-and-blood lady. It’s as if she has eyes at the back of her head. She turns and regards me with brows raised, challenging me to ask a question. Any question.

  Hi.

  Oops. Not a question. Her lips curve slightly downwards. Try again.

  Er... sorry for staring.

  She shrugs and faces front once more. I realize just how beautiful her face is, as soon as I’m deprived of most of it. Expressive eyebrows, adorable button-nose, piercing brown gaze, unforgiving pair of lips, heart-stopping tender ear to match the one I see.

  Take me home with you?

  She snaps around and grins. I’m not sure I asked my question out loud.

  Next intersection, she says.

  My heart flutters all the way to the next stop. She gets up, and without looking at me or at any one, walks towards the exit. I’m not sure if she really nodded at me to follow – is it possible to nod backwards? – but I decide that she has. I’m not about to chicken out of this once-in-a-lifetime adventure; it would at least be something to remember in bus rides to come.

  She has waited for me under a rickety shed, which no self-respecting commuter uses anymore, except I guess if they intend to miss the next ride. She looks at me unflinchingly, as I hop the last step down. I resist the impulse to dance a jig – not that I know how to dance a proper one.

  *

  SUDDENLY, I HAVE something to break the monotony of my everyday commute home. Now, should I feel so inclined, I can stop the bus midway between work and home, and visit somebody interesting. When I mention this to Gil – someone I hang out with at work and forget during leaves and holidays – he slaps me on the shoulder and gives me the thumbs up.

  Oh, Shorty, I knew you were straight, not that I would have minded if you bent some other way.

  He’s ragging me, of course. He knows the whole bloody saga of my love-fought-for, love-won, and love-lost (to the loser I won against). For the past two years, during lunch break and coffee break, we have planned, and plotted, and discussed the probability of winning her back versus the probability of forgetting her and moving on. Gil, meantime, would tell me of his perfect relationships with four women spread out on the archipelago. I – no naïve listener – would calculate the cost of plane rides, text messages, long-distance and cellphone calls, in relation to our wages, including thirteenth month and bonus.

  So, he says, what’s the new girlfriend like?

  She’s a door artist. I can’t resist mentioning it right away. It’s the ace up my sleeve.

  Gil doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Yeah? And her name is Dor-a?

  I’m serious, I say, she designs and paints doors.

  Okay, he says, so all day she decides what color and what doorknob. How boring. I believe the secret to Gil’s happiness is a lack of imagination. I’m just about to leave him to his happiness when he sniggers and says, And what about her knockers?

  Terrible.

  *

  THE FIRST TIME I walk with her through her front door, I’m floored. Jan lives in a small two-story house, all on her own. The first level, with almost all the inner walls knocked down, has been converted to her studio. There are huge airy windows on all the four main walls, but it’s impossible to ignore the thick, heavy, muggy smells of paint and turpentine. It’s also impossible to miss the doors strung from pulleys and hooks in the ceiling, looking very much like hanged men. I‘ve always hated the thought, and so have thought it each time I entered the place.

  Jan is more cheerful. She says it’s like being surrounded by the strangest tribe, almost all of them rectangular, and with all sorts of carvings and adornments upon them. And I’m their priestess, she says proudly, I do all the markings on them.

  What she calls her markings range from random splotches of colors or squiggly lines to stencils and weaves and string collages. Sometimes she works with chisel, and other times with glue gun. Whatever strikes her fancy, I suppose.

  Come upstairs, she says, after I gape at the strangest collection I have ever seen. She explains to me that it is her art and her business at the same time. My real home is above all this, she says, and at the top of the stairs, I see the missing rooms at a glance – kitchen, living room, bathroom – as well as bedroom. There are barely any walls here, either. Leaning on the kitchen sink is a small, roundish door, its white paint curled and peeling on the surface, the brown of its wood showing in areas underneath.

  I pose in front of it and squeak out in an English accent, It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door.

  Jan grins. That’s my new pet, she says. It’s called a pygmy door. Everyone above five five or thereabouts would have to bend to go through this one.

  Not a problem for me. Not for her, either. And I will never tell Gil that below that beautiful, perfectly oval face, she is surprisingly skinny and most unfortunately flat.

  *

  ONE RAINY AFTERNOON, I stand dripping and shivering on her welcome mat and find myself immediately oppressed by the doors suspended above me, dead men minding their own business, or more pleasantly – for I keep trying to replace the image – unwelcoming towers in the sky. Utter snobs.

  In the half-dark, as I shed off my jacket and hopefully my gloomy thoughts with it, a sudden shimmering catches my eye. One of the doors – the one with white, blue, lavender, and yellow splashes, and studded with sequins – opens. Yes, it opens. Three feet in the air, and it opens. And Jan hops do
wn, humming, as I glimpse a blur of mountains and blue sky. A breath of wind that sharpens the senses and smelling like sweet grass blow in with her before the door shuts. She doesn’t see me, but instead runs sprightly up the stairs.

  I’m not particularly stupid. I can tell when something weird has happened. It’s just that I do not want to go back into the rain and board another bus. Hallucinations and madness are much more preferable to the monotony of gray sky, gray smoke, gray screensaver, and gasoline. So, I stomp up the steps after her. I find her sitting Indian-style on her lumpy sofa, with the pygmy door on her lap, humming again. She is slowly scraping off the white paint, revealing the dark wooden carvings underneath.

  It’s turning out beautifully, she says, and then puts her scraper on the table and flashes me a smile that warms every sodden bone in my body. Help me with this, will you? I help her ease the door into its usual resting place by the kitchen sink, then clear away the newspaper spread on the floor to catch dry bits of white paint.

  When I look up from the trash bin, she leans towards me with a towel in her hand. Let’s get you dry, she says.

  *

  AS I SWITCH on my computer and put on my earpiece, Gil slides into the console next to me and says, Hey Shorty, how’s it going with your door girl? Has she made you completely forget your ex now? Taught you a few new tricks?

  If Gil is any indication of what this job can do to me, I better not linger any longer. Of course, Gil could just be naturally lecherous.

  And then my next call features a hysterical woman with a ready sob story explaining why she can’t pay her bills. More and more shrilly, she accuses me of not having a heart, and of voluntarily being the devil’s pawn by playing a part in a big corporation. In fact, she says, you are doing their dirty work while they keep their hands and consciences clean.

  Beside me, Gil is asking if I have scored. Beyond first base now, aren’t you? Have you tried…knocking her up on one of her doors?

  He laughs like the maniac that he is and makes me feel like the basest man in the universe. I stand up and wave my cellphone at our Team Leader. Family emergency, sorry. I throw everything into my knapsack, ignoring her scowls and follow-up questions.