Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1 Page 4
(coconut) + (body) - (head) = (coconut man)
And one time, when he was fifteen, the boy had found a little girl swimming in his softdrink and, careful not to be noticed by his family at dinner, he gently put the bottle to his lips, opened his mouth as wide as he could, and swallowed the girl whole, hoping to preserve her in his guts until he was of the right age to have a girlfriend. She took up residence in his chest, just to the right of his heart, and sometimes in the night he could hear her knocking on it, begging to be let in. As the years passed, her knocking became less and less frequent, until recently, just a few days ago, it stopped. The boy felt lonely and began to find solace in writing.
Knock knock.
Here he was, tapping away at the keyboard in the dead of the morning, the coconut man hovering at the window, and the boy felt the bitter pang of loss, fueled in the most heartfelt sense of the word by an encounter at the gasoline station just two hours ago, when his best friend waved goodbye from the passenger seat of a taxi cab, headed for the airport and on to places he had never seen. All roads lead to Rome, and his best friend was off to the Vatican to be blessed by the Pope, and if “goodbye” truly means “God be with you,” then the boy meant it in the most meaningful way he could say.
Midnight turned to morning like a lost soul turns to faith, and in his darkest moments the boy wished he could dredge up every painful memory etched like scars on his body and excise them, quickly and methodically, like a surgeon. They rolled in like leaves on an august wind, glorious and dying, shriveling up into fragile crisps in the rainy cool of the mid-year. High above on a nameless hill, one that the boy could not see, obscured by the morning fog and drizzle, stood a church, and atop its highest parapet sat the Mother Superior, Yanilla, struggling hopelessly to count the unnumbered leaves of the acacia vines crawling upon stone walls, imbuing in each one a love story drenched in tears.
Far below, a slippery pebble road led from the back door of the weathered church into uncharted woods, and there the parish priest, Father Josephino, found a dead, fallen angel hanging from the branches of the great narra tree, its body bloody and ruined, but its wings still glimmering in the moonlight. To this day, the altar boys still whisper tales of this priest in the hushed candled walkways behind the cross. They say that Father Josephino took the dead angel’s wings, fashioned them neatly onto his shoulder blades, and flew off into the cloudless sky, joining the stars in their fleeting brilliance. His sister, Yanilla, upon hearing news of his disappearance, joined the convent, and was later revealed to be mad.
Years later, after her ascent to the esteemed role of Mother Superior, she threw herself off the church’s highest parapet, hoping to fly. As the ground slowly dawned upon her, she felt her years ebbing away, suffusing the night air with promise, which wafted on the breeze, across the forest, and into the town beyond it. They say her ghost still haunts the church at night, telling stories of a perfect lover from a future she had glimpsed at the moment of her death, who smiled with such sweetness that she forced her soul to stay on earth to search for those perfect lips, destined never to say a word that she could hear, or plant a kiss on her barren face, ephemeral.
The townspeople felt Yanilla’s longing on certain rainy days, set somewhere deep in their souls, irreconcilable with the truth of their lives. Their town was built out of boxes, perfectly-measured quadrilateral cases, each one belonging to a specific citizen with a designated function in their society. In one of these boxes, the man from Yanilla’s denied future was still trapped in the past, a boy without a broken heart, tapping away at the computer screen in the early hours before dawn, still fighting to convert a nation of rebellious words into some semblance of order, a causal sequence of events, leading up to a turning point in the realm’s chaotic history.
The coconut man had disappeared, and now the deep blue shadows painted the walls of his box with an unsettling silence, creeping up behind him from beneath the wooden floorboards, a silence imbued with the stealth of time. Afraid that it might rob him of the precious few words he had yet to set down, the boy focused on the perpetual hum of his computer and the clacking of the keyboards under his fingers, which vibrated just at the edge of his consciousness, hovering somewhere in space. A red orb twirled in the darkness past the moon.
In space, the stars are twinkling their way into supernovas, and the merry aliens of Mars were twirling down Olympus Mons in search of an imaginary god. They had come to this lonely planet in their joyful barongs and baro’t sayas, dragging their carabao carts and slave children, prepared to terraform the land. In their bags were plastics full of letters, and one by one, they tossed the letters into the red soil, watering them with ink, laying them out in the sun to dry, and hoping that one day, one sweet day, they could reap what they had sown. It is common knowledge that aliens have a taste for words, in fact, they barter for it regularly, and on Mars, a manuscript appeared, word by word, a story not confined to the gravity of earth. Writers would dream of this for centuries, and on certain nights, a boy could sit on his computer and lay out the manuscript for Earth-people to behold, attuned to words hidden somewhere in the sky.
The sky was cloudless, stars blinking. Shadows crawled into their corners and settled down, away from the light. “Goodbye,” his best friend had said.
“Goodbye,” the boy replied. (God be with you.)
The taxi swerved out of the gas station, screeching on the cement, leaving an almost transparent trail of smoke behind it. The boy smelled the fumes of gas and lit a cigarette, unafraid of an explosion, because the bleeding wounds that covered him from head to toe had scabbed over and left him impenetrable, invulnerable, nigh-indestructible. For God’s sake, he could have walked over to Tondo wearing tights and a cape, knocking the balisong knives and unloaded guns from holduppers’ hands, punching their lights out, bam pow sock, with a cocked head and a perfect smile returned valuables into the hands of their rightful owners.
“I believe in superheroes,” a well-dressed old man might have said. He would have gone on to his well-dressed mansion, and feeling himself losing control in a predatory world, he might have just taken off his head, flushed it down the toilet, and replaced it with a coconut. The superhero, unaware of this ominous plot development, would calmly return to his box, say his magic word, and instantly, the superman would revert to his alter-ego, a twenty-year-old boy, sit down on his computer like a good reporter and type out a story.
Mild-mannered and unassuming, the boy typed, a class-A, newly-minted, fresh-meat adult, wearing blinders and led down a quiet intersection by his driver, dragging a kalesa cart behind him. Click, clack, click, his hooves on the street, the noise they made when his fingers ran along the keyboard, words and sound and fury. In all honesty, the boy had forgotten his magic word, and was now busily trying to eke it out of himself by typing a thousand onto the computer screen. What would it be?
The boy searched his soul; an ancient, archaic labyrinth, gods and monsters walking its halls. Confusion spelled out by the tangled pathways of his knowledge, leading up to a forgotten corner of his vocabulary, a dusty, cobwebbed spot to the right of his heart, where something moved, something trembled, something yawned and awoke. His lips quivered.
Knock knock.
The boy began to choke on his own tongue, wait, it wasn’t his tongue, it was something in his throat, bubbling up from deep within him, an upturned stomach, no wait, the waiting vomit of his soul, ten, wait, it might have been something else, ten dresses, something in the air, a sputter, a cough, his lips forced open by silky hands. Something crossed his teeth, jumped his lips, fluttered out of his mouth into the computer. A magic word:
Tendresse
She remained still in the morning glow of the page around her, words lined-up straight like soldiers on a death march. Her fragile wings beat with a rhythm and tone not of this world. “Where do I belong?” she asked, “Don’t you remember me? I’m your girlfriend—caramel sweet, bubbly and light, a sure treat to sup from the veri
table cup of life.” She slowly peeled off the many layers of her clothes, her dresses laid bare on the table, and the boy could see her naked before him, ready and willing to be used:
Ten*dresse”, n. [F.] Tender feeling; fondness. [Obs., except as a French word]
“Fuck me.” She was pleading. What else was there to do? The boy had found the magic word that would turn him into a man. Never in his wildest dreams did he imagine that someone so beautiful would want to consummate with him. The boy had always been so alone, lost and angst-ridden. Now here she was, on her knees, arms outstretched, lustfully waiting to be touched.
“Will it hurt?” the boy asked. “Is it a complicated process? What would I have to do?”
“Oh, just love me. Give me a little of your time. Some conversation, a word here and there… I could go with you to college if you wanted. We could do it under the table. Then at dismissal time, you could hold me around your arm and walk me home, and all your colleagues and classmates would be green with envy.”
“I should parade you around the campus? Wouldn’t that be… controversial? You’re very exotic, you know. People might talk.”
“People always talk. Why should you listen to them? They just waste your time with gossip and lies, saying things they don’t really mean. Me, I’m the real thing. I love you. Don’t you want me?”
“This feels wrong…it isn’t the way things should be. Shouldn’t we wait a few more years? Maybe when I’m older, when I have more time and money, I promise, things will be better. You know how hard life is already, without having to take care of you.”
“Life will be easier when you hold me. Simpler. Try it.”
“I—I just want to do the right thing…”
“How can you say that? Look at me! I’m beautiful! I’m everything you’ve ever wanted!” She stretched her hand out of the screen and ran her fingers down the side of his face. The boy felt blood rush to his cheeks.
“It doesn’t make sense…”
“Love doesn’t always have to follow logic, darling. You meet someone you like, and suddenly the world is changed. A plot twist, the stories diverge, and then nothing will ever be the same. But you. You don’t love me, do you?”
“I don’t know…”
“It figures. A girl waits half a decade to find true love, and all she finds is a boy who doesn’t want to break his heart. I need a real man to slap me around. Someone I can believe in.”
“I believe in you.”
“Do you? Would you fuck me? Even just once? No one will ever have to know.”
“Alright…”
They did what lovers do, and after, Tendresse disappeared into the crowd, the boy left her where she was, standing still somewhere in her own story, echoed twice, thrice, and the boy resigned himself to writing once more, tapping on the keyboard with the fury of one who had never met love, but knew of it. In the darkness, an angel flew over the moon, Lord knows how, a mad woman died, aliens made a home for themselves on Mars, more than we could ever do. And a story, a spiraling story of stories, winded itself down to an end.
“Goodnight moon. Goodbye.”
The boy was twenty. Ten years ago, the coconut man had found its way into his room. Here it was now, liquid sloshing around in its hollow head, standing gaunt over the boy as he click-clacked on the keyboard.
“I suppose you want to fuck with me as well.”
“No. I am here to ask you a question.”
“Why?”
“That is the question. Are you crazy enough to answer?”
*
THE SUN ROSE to stunning brilliance at dawn, a yellow orb of life, its ray washing over the dreary shadows of the boxtown and the church, light glinting off dewdrops, on the unnumbered leaves of the acacia vines, the forest of narra wood and coconut trees, swaying, still swaying, in the fresh, clean breeze of a new day.
The boy lifted his head from his computer, blinking away sleep. The screen was blank save for a single word; no stories here except maybe his own. Reality arrives. Time. It was time to get dressed and ready for school.
His mother walked into the room. “Happy Birthday, son! Good morning!”
“Hey mom. ‘Morning. It’s my birthday?”
“Wake up and get ready for breakfast, silly boy. Twenty years old, hmm...I suppose you’re a man now.”
“Nah, that’s still next year. But yeah, haha, maybe I am.”
It’s an old story, growing up, but no matter how often you read it, it always seems new. Look at yourself in the mirror. Can you see a wrinkle? A white hair? Can you see in your eyes the depths you’ve been plumbing all these years?
(coconut) + (body) – (head) = (coconut man)
(body) – (head) = (coconut man) – (coconut)
(body) – (head) = (man)
(boy) ?
The boy remembers the girl, Tendresse, with a fondness that grew since the first time he saw her, swimming. He might forget her one day. She might as well. And the coconut man is somewhere out there, on the byways and highways, on the streets with empty railroad tracks, in the shadows of your very own box, waiting to ask a question. He flushed his head down the toilet long ago, and could never look back. The hollow sloshing is echoed. Listen:
Would it really matter, if you were to count the days left with your hands?
Knock knock.
“Who’s there?”
It’s your life. Right outside. Knocking. Listen. Breathe.
Are you crazy enough to answer?
FRANCEZCA C. KWE
LOVELORE
Francezca C. Kwe’s fiction has been published in the Philippines Free Press, the Sunday Times, TOMAS, Dapitan, and OIST Magazine. She has received the USTetika and Don Carlos Palanca Awards for her work, and has been a fellow for fiction in four national writers’ workshops. She is currently completing her first collection of short stories and editing an anthology of contemporary fiction with Ian R. Casocot.
A shorter version of “Lovelore” first appeared in the Philippines Free Press.
THE EXACT DATE is lost, but they say it was a November night when Fray Domingo awoke to the sound of the wind keening outside his window like a grief-stricken woman. As he was of pure Castillian stock, the thought that it could be ominous never crossed his mind.
Seconds later, as he was sitting up in bed scratching his belly, the wooden door opened with a crash and in rushed an undetermined number of burly figures who pounced on him, wound strips of cloth round his head and stuffed him into a huge canvas sack. They bowed out of the room reverently, taking care not to disturb anything, and stole down the stairs of the convento as swiftly as they had come. Under the dark shadow of the church, they deposited the sack on a cart hitched to a restless horse. Once the company was on board, the driver prodded the horse into a back street away from streetlight and sentry, and then into the country road.
How long they traveled, no one knows—some say they exploited the cover of darkness, trying to outrun the dawn at unnatural speed, and some have them creeping cautiously for days around the fringes of towns, hiding out in abandoned shacks to slip away once night came. But after some time they stopped at the foot of Mt. Napulak. The men hauled the sack off the cart and trudged carefully into the bush, softly whispering prayers. Above them, thin clouds lifted off the moon’s languorous eye. They broke into a clearing and released Fray Domingo from the sack. Pinning his arms, they divested him of his robe and garment, and the rags round his face. Then they released him abruptly, pushing him into the forest’s arms. They stepped back into the trees, leaving the friar stumbling in the dark.
With his sight utterly black, Fray Domingo must have frozen before the strangeness around him, the hulking shapes of the trees, the hissing of the darkness. Rising around him was that immense presence which he had always sensed oozing out of this land’s every pore, even as he anxiously tried to dismiss it with cross and cassock. He must have realized how every bit of it was the absolute haughty European expatriate’s nightmare. Imagine him:
fat, naked and whimpering, trying to fold unto himself.
He hears rustling, and his temper momentarily asserts itself, for after all he is the cura of the diocese of Jaro, Iloilo, envoy of God and one of the lords of this heathen land. Rage begins to stir inside him as he remembers this.
Who’s there, he calls out.
The sound of his frantic breathing fills his ears.
Warily he says, show yourself!
The trees start sweating profusely and the blue night parts for a large shadow. All around him, things start to come alive. When he opens his mouth, he hears the low cry of a bird in the distance.
In town, all through the night, the endless howling of the wind was heard, rattling the windows and the eaves, as if telling the future in an unfathomable voice.
*
OF COURSE, NO one knows exactly what happened in the forest. But thereafter, the world would be changed. In the aftermath, you and I would be born many, many years later, the mark of that night as fresh as if it had gone on endlessly in our dreams.
I first heard the friar’s story as a child, along with countless other children before me, whose yayas had employed its fantastic possibilities at bedtime. You were spared it in your own small world, but you must have wondered. Growing up in Jaro, the story was inescapable, like an invisible inheritance that spoke in different voices. And like everyone else, I formed my own clear memory of it, conjuring its sights and sounds at will.
There are many versions of Fray Domingo’s fateful night: a host of gigantic black beings appearing and bearing the friar away to their secret world at the tops of the kapok trees, grinning engkantos materializing slowly from the earth at his feet, the stench of rotting flesh announcing the arrival of the amaranhig, who pursue him through the trees all night, even the asuang leering their foul faces at him and sweeping him up to play catch, though in this version it’s a wonder that they did not try to eat him, for he was worth any good-sized pig.