Fiction

Ghosts

Erika Carreon February 12, 2021

Root crop, sugarcane, corn, and between these, giant weeds. It didn’t matter. They all speak, their susurrations a language the Maylupa do not understand. The Maylupa and their kin have been living in these hectares for as long as they can remember. And for as long as they can remember, they have been suspicious of the crop and their private speech. Because they are suspicious of their speech, the Maylupa likewise were suspicious of everything that triggers it: the cycles of humid heat and punishing rain, the ground, the wind. Distrusting the vegetation, they must content themselves with the other living creatures that reside in the fields: eels, toads, rats, locusts, birds. The pestilences ravage the crops, the species depending on the season. 

They boil stagnant water to drink, and are constantly sick. They only know what had been held true by their sires: that these lands was theirs by rights, but that it had turned traitor to them because of the hands that whispered, tilled, conversed with them. The land was not theirs in the eyes of the Maylupa, who had all the titles and deeds to disprove the claims of the nameless ones. The Maylupa had passed down the knowledge from their ancestors that the nameless ones had cultivated this secret, private language between them and the land. 

Echoes of Pasig

Matthew Jacob Ramos February 10, 2020

Pasig River?s decline was said to be infamous. This was something else.

Eunice had promised that the ferry would undercut traffic by hours. Orife believed her, unfamiliar as he was to the congested spaces of the metropolis. He found, however, that her alternative was less reassuring. The ferry docks appeared abandoned. They sat next to a shantytown where trains zipped noisily nearby and giant billboards overlooked the landscape. In the middle of this squalor was the river?a tortured feature that seemed to bisect the city like an open wound. Small wooden outriggers and motorized catamarans cut through these thoroughfares, their wakes liberating debris and clouding up the river?s surface.

Rectokado

Cesar Miguel Escaño February 10, 2020

Hermoso wakes up wishing he had a different life.

He flirts with getting hair replacement therapy as he combs over his bald spot in the mirror. He is 45, has two teenage daughters who won?t listen to anything he says and a wife who refuses to have sex with him anymore. 

?By the time our next child enters puberty, I?d be too old and wouldn?t care for all the teenage angst in the world,? she said last night when Hermoso popped the question to her in bed. She turned away from him and promptly started snoring.