22038867.

doc by Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon

K10 -Mushr oom

by Margueri te Alcaza ren de Leon

GM, who was my best friend at the time, stabbed herself in the eye with a

kitchen knife. It was not on purpose, and it was declared over the intercom at school

the next day, just after the Morning Prayer.

“It saddens us to announce that a member of the Holy Trinity Learning Garden

family, Guinevere Mae Villamael of Room K1-Apple, has been in a very unfortunate

accident yesterday evening and is confined at San Lazaro Medical Center for the time

being. Let us pray for her speedy recovery.”

After the hum of a Hail Mary-Glory Be combo—the one we had always been

assured was an indomitable choice for such mishaps—was through pulsing its way

down the kindergarten wing, Ms. Cabanban read the specifics of the accident to us from

a fresh sheet of bond. I was seated next to the door back then, allowing me glimpses of

other teachers in other classrooms across the hall, holding similar sheets in their hands.

Ms. Cabanban delivered the news the same way she did all of our lessons, enunciating

each printed line in a clear, plain tone, making sure to be heard by both her students

and the mini-microphones bolted by the blackboard and the toy corner and the crucifix

and the wall-sized felt alphabet quilt.

We were informed that GM had been trying to open a sealed roll of tissue paper

for her grandmother, who was bedridden and had spilled her dinner on her sheets. They

were out of paper in the bathrooms, so GM, who had always been an extremely helpful

person as far as I could remember, had taken it upon herself to open a fresh pack. Ms.

Cabanban ended her story with a couple of morals: don’t do it if you know it’s

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dangerous, and only grown-ups are allowed to use knives.

“Who allows the grown-ups?” I asked, propping up my raised right hand with my

left like we were taught to do.

“Jesus, Alice,” Ms. Cabanban replied, still looking at the piece of paper.

GM would have done anything she was told; she had put up with me since the

school year began. But GM was not stupid, really. The thought of her wielding a large,

sharp knife, plucking away at the tissue pack like an idiot, making the plastic give with

such suddenness that the blade just had to leap straight into her right eye socket, it

wasn’t like her, really. And she would have told me about her grandmother. The thing I

liked about GM was that she told me every single thing she witnessed. She used to be

my second set of peepers.

I had a very strong feeling that she was never coming back to our class again. I

had an even stronger feeling, however, that she was actually somewhere in the

Learning Garden that same morning, confined against her will. And I had a pretty good

idea where she was.

The kindergarten population of Holy Trinity Learning Garden was distributed,

supposedly, among nine classrooms, each halved into a morning section and an

afternoon section. Every one of the 18 sections was assigned a fruit or a vegetable for

identification. GM and I were part of the Apples, the Room 1 morning section, while the

Oranges were the afternoon section. (The afternoon children, according to the

insistently informative Ms. Cabanban, were the ones who did not have high hopes and

big, specific plans for their futures, hence the later start to their days.) Room 2, in turn,

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had Tomatoes and Bananas. Room 3 had Carrots and Avocados, Room 4 Papayas and

Strawberries, and so on and so forth. Respective cartoon produce made of felt paper

and cartolina were push-pinned onto the doors, greeting us with toothsome smiles and

big, bright eyes and gloved hands caught in mid-wave.

But there was a tenth room at the very end of the hall. Stifled in shadow, just

past the reach of the final fluorescent light. It had only one cartoon on its constantly

closed door: a plump, tan mushroom sharing the same merry mug as the rest, though it

didn’t have arms with which to motion passers-by inside.

None of the students knew anything about K10-Mushroom. Save for that

indisputably real door incontestably present at the end of the hall, there was no other

evidence that anyone was in it. There was no tenth set of students sitting (in two rows

of 20, by height from left to right) at the Fr. Mangini Gym bleachers during First Friday

Mass, not a single boy or girl with a mushroom-shaped ID swapping chits for juice with

the canteen staff, or in line outside the chapel for the weekly confessional, gripping pad

and pen for the penance, or waiting for their yayas or drivers at the parking lot shed.

GM and I would pass by the room every once in a while, straining to hear even the

faintest fragment of chatter, the slightest scratching of chairs and desks on floorboards.

But the only thing we could hear was our own breathing, careful and concerned, and

the occasional bucket-dipping and mop-swabbing of the janitor, who always looked like

he couldn’t care less about anything. So we couldn’t find them. They weren’t anywhere.

We had asked Ms. Cabanban, of course. At least I did, while GM stood by me. I

always spoke for the both of us. I always spoke up in general; hardly anyone else at

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class ever did. It may be because I was seven then, a whole year older than all of

them, although my parents had always insisted that I was very smart to begin with.

Regardless, I asked Ms. Cabanban about all sorts of things all the time, so much so that

she had looked at me at that instance with such lack of surprise. Because of that, I had

also expected her to provide the answer and get the maddening mystery over and done

with. But she said she didn’t know. She said she didn’t know and that it wasn’t worth

knowing. This, of course, was not an answer that sat well with GM and me back then,

this knowing of the worthlessness of something you didn’t know. This only stopped

sounding ridiculous to me years later.

So GM just had to be in K10-Mushroom. And the fact that there was no

conceivable limit as to who or what was in there and what they did or were doing to

her, seriously, it bothered me.

I talked to my parents about it. They knew a thing or two about disappearing.

The three of us had moved from our barangay in Las Piñas to the Holy Trinity Heights

commune just in time for the new school year. (I was supposed to be in elementary

already, but the administration insisted that I re-do kindergarten in order to adjust to

the new environment. It wasn’t like I had a choice, really, school-wise or in anything

that happened since the move.)

Though I wasn’t completely sure why at the time, what I was dead certain of

was that nobody was supposed to know where we had gone. My mother had typed up

a handout bearing answers to a specific slew of questions just in case, as well as a list

of words I was not allowed to say. It was the last thing she ever did on her laptop

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before chucking it into the fire with most of our old things—notebooks, photographs,

the voice recorder, plaques and awards, whole stacks of newspapers and magazines she

and my father had written for. She had me memorize the handout and also set a match

to it quickly after. It’s been a while, but I can still recall some of it:

Q: Where did you come from?

A: I have lived in Holy Trinity Heights all my life.

Q: What do your parents do?

A: My father is a Prayer and Transcendental Literature professor at the Holy

Trinity Community College. My mother is a homemaker.

Q: When and where were you baptized?

A: On September 10, 1985 at the Holy Trinity Parish.

Q: Who is God?

A: God is Good.

My parents, though, were not as perturbed as I was over GM’s plight, nor piqued

in any way by the oddity that was K10-Mushroom. I half-expected them to be this way;

they hadn’t cared as much about anything as they used to.

Since the move, all that my father ever talked about was work, about how

fulfilling it was to see his students take to the Word of God so well, about how glad he

was that—thanks to his guidance and encouragement—they had quelled whatever

troubles they had with a none too paltry pause for prayer. I had noticed that it was

almost like the way he’d talk about his former Journalism classes at the state university,

only he’d replace words like “analysis” and “truth” with ones like “God” and “devotion.”

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It was a whole new series of terms that he had never pronounced before then.

My mother, in turn, while immune to this new vocabulary, only preoccupied

herself with the next day’s meals: what ingredients she should buy at the Holy Family

Co-op, whether pineapple fried rice would keep well in my lunch box, if it’s too soon to

have beef steak again considering we had it two Thursdays ago. She used to clip news

articles on strange murders in distant provinces or whatever new law she didn’t find to

her liking, which was pretty much all of them. She had moved on to clipping recipes.

She didn’t really read those out to us.

Anything else beyond their latest fixations didn’t make them sit up any straighter

or wave their hands around any more spiritedly. Nonetheless, the other half of me did

hope that I could still spark that old fire in them, the one that, at the slightest hint of a

story, would singe our dinners with grand pronouncements, table-slapping and friendly

debate, an energy that they used to tell me was the best thing that brought the three

of us together. Especially since what I had brought up truly mattered to me. My own

best friend, my own school. Still, they found it a lost cause like most other things.

“Don’t mind it,” my mother said, spooning more afritada onto my plate, ignoring

the utensils I had relinquished to the four o’clock position. “If they said your friend was

in the hospital, then she is. Why would they lie about that? And what does that room

have to do with you? Nothing.” She gave my father a look of pure affection. “We’ll have

cathedral window for dessert.”

“Just because you don’t know something, Alice,” my father added slowly, leaning

a bit so our maid, who had stealthily entered the room with a tray of dessert, could set

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the saucers out on the table. “Just because you don’t know something—” His eyes

darted around the dining room, as if the pitcher of water or the woolen Jesus on our

Last Supper tapestry could supplement thought and speech. Another new habit of his.

“It’s not a bad thing,” my mother piped up. “You’re such a smart girl, Alice, but

you don’t have to know everything. You’ll be fine, dear. You’ll go far. ”

I loved my parents. To some extent, I suppose I still do. I would like to believe

that the decisions they had made when I was younger were the best ones under the

circumstances. During that particular dinner, however, I let their words stand for

nothing.

There were no formal classes the next Monday. GM, we were told, was back from

the hospital. But what was far more surprising was that she had something important to

tell all of us, something so important that a school-wide assembly had been organized.

The afternoon classes had to be there that morning too, cramming the gym to capacity

with the entire children’s population of the Holy Trinity Heights commune. Even the

school’s maintenance, security and canteen staff were bunched together by the

entrance, blank-faced as always, neither pissed nor pleased by this pardon from work.

As we all waited, whatever rumpus to be had came from the afternoon sections,

the bleachers split into chunks of superfluous movement and a quite compliant calm.

The stillness only spread out when GM emerged from backstage at last, the bandage on

her eye an arresting white dot from the podium. She minced no words.

“I saw God a few days ago.”

The collective gasp among the students was a slow yet strident one, like a

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wheezing vacuum cleaner kicked to a higher setting. I hadn’t complied, though. There

was something much too unnatural about the way GM stood at that podium, about the

way her back was so straight, the way she stared out at us, never once glancing down

at that small wooden surface. It didn’t seem like confidence, really. It just looked like

she knew exactly what she was going to say. And I felt that I, having spent so much

time with her trailing and echoing and abiding by me, was the only one in that entire

gym who could tell.

“God was a bright, white light,” she continued, her tone remaining level and

determined. “God’s voice was very low, but it wasn’t scary. And God told me to tell

everyone at school a very special message.”

One quick, sharp rustle sounded through the gym as the children leaned

forward.

“God said that the morning classes are smarter than the afternoon classes.

That’s what God said. But God also said that the students in the afternoon classes are

not stupid and useless. God said that there are two kinds of people: the ones who

become doctors and teachers and people like that, and the ones who become janitors

and maids and people like that. Everybody helps each other. That is how God made us.

That is who we are going to be. That is how we can be happy.”

I had never heard those many words—much less ones as nervy as those—come

out of her in a single moment, or maybe even in all the time the two of us had ever

spent together. But they didn’t cause the audience to rupture into the racket I expected

them to. Everyone stayed static in their seats and stances, expressions bearing the

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same dim film of acceptance. We had been told of this morning-afternoon disparity by

our teachers since enrollment. It appeared that all of them save for me had embraced it

long before without any trouble. GM’s proclamation, then, was mere celestial

confirmation, a few words of testimony from the most reliable of sources that

everything was as it should be.

“God loves us very much,” GM went on.

I stood up and shuffled past the row of perfectly aligned shorts and skirts and

buckled black shoes over to Ms. Cabanban, who sat angled towards the stage as

everyone else, fanning herself with her lesson sheets.

“May I go to the restroom, Miss Cabanban?” I asked as coolly as I could. She

nodded, giving me just a quarter of a glance before gazing back at the stranger

onstage. I had actually expected her to say no. This exact same line never worked

during Mass, and I had thought that GM’s congregation, which did seem ten times more

pressing to Ms. Cabanban than hand-holding and a homily, would hold no mercy for

even the fullest of bladders. Then again, it appeared that this very sense of urgency

was what made my teacher slack for the first time. It doesn’t matter, I thought as I

made my way down the bleachers, trying not to look dismayed as GM’s pious prattle

persisted in the stuffy gym air. What counted was that I got to K10-Mushroom without

being seen.

Fortunately, every one of the Learning Garden’s guards was indoors. Keeping an

eye on them and the rest of the staff as I made for the nearest exit, I saw how

exceptionally empty their expressions were, the usual vacancy having vacated, leaving

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behind something far beyond a void. Eyes siphoned of spirit altogether, bodies held up

for the sake of it. It was GM’s speech that did them in, I could tell. It was as if my

world, which had just been so abruptly padded up with the layers of a different home

and a different life, was shedding itself discreetly, baring to me elements I was not

supposed to make out: new, cheerless people, a new sense that something was terribly

wrong, and new places. A room, in particular, and one that was surprisingly easy to run

to, the whole campus being the bleak grounds that it was.

From the outside, as always, K10-Mushroom was silent. I wasn’t sure of what to

do now that I was standing in front of it; I just had this smarting, stinging need to be

there. The real, logical reason for GM and her vision had to be behind that wooden

door. There, all that I needed to make sense of everything was kept perfectly safe from

discovery. I had to be denied access to it. The door had to be locked.

It wasn’t. The doorknob kept on turning, a current of surprise spurting through

my wrist as it twisted all the way to the right. I pushed the door open and stepped

inside.

In place of the fusty, forsaken funk I had expected such a cast-off room to

possess was a sharp, sterile air, practically shrill in its freshness. It was still dark, but as

I felt around the wall for the light switch, I could already make out a certain honey-

colored glow at the far end of the room. It throbbed and spun slowly clockwise from

behind what seemed like a perforated divider, like the wooden screen propped up inside

our chapel’s confessional. I turned on the lights.

K10-Mushroom was as large as any of the other classrooms. It also had a

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blackboard up front, and several large cork boards on the walls. These were as far as

the similarities went. A single child-size chair, missing the child-size desk it was usually

paired with, sat right in the middle, lonesome. I started walking around. Despite its

strangeness, the place was graced with a soothing silence, the kind that assured me

that there was no other soul present, that I had every opportunity to pry.

While K1’s corkboards were choked with fingerpaint-and-eggshell portraits of the

Madonna and Child and charts where each student amassed felt paper crosses for every

time Ms. Cabanban called them a Good Little Christian (the Apples always trumped the

Oranges), K10’s were filled with photographs and typewritten pages. They even seemed

from afar like one wall of our home office in Las Piñas; when putting together their

news stories, my parents would post drafts of their articles and photographs from the

field to both aid themselves and rouse my interest in their line of work. And it was when

I took a closer look that I finally felt the fear the room had set aside just for me.

They actually were my parents’ shots and drafts, transplanted who knows how

many miles away from where they used to be. They were the latest ones put up right

before our move.

Like all my parents’ endeavors, Project Milagro was something they had taken to

heart. Leaving me in the hands of trusty Tita Peachy, who’d always bring acoustic

guitars or mouth flutes or goatskin drums to while away our hours, they would hie off

to tiny towns all over the country where miracles were said to have occurred. To Lipa,

with its sudden storm of rose petals bearing faces of Jesus and Mary. To Caysaysay,

Taal, where a statue of Mary would come and go whenever it pleased, no matter where

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the villagers stowed it away. To Carcar, Cebu, where a portrait of the Madonna and

Child had shed a clear, watery substance not unlike human tears. But it was the blood-

weepers that my parents were particularly beguiled by. In Baguio City, it was the statue

of St. Therese, while in both Sibonga, Cebu and Agoo, La Union, it was one of Mary. My

parents doubted things just as much as they believed in others. Project Milagro was

what they called an “exposé.” It was one of those words I was no longer allowed to say.

Pictures of plaster people, their somber faces and stiff, rippled robes streaked

and sticky with red, were before me once again, almost like forgotten friends. They had

always spurred a special, even cherished, sense of fright in me, a quick twist in my

chest unlike anything I ever felt when glimpsing my parents’ other grisly photographs.

The ones of rebel soldiers, some of them children, gashed and riddled in rice fields, or

of fetuses coiled in beds of garbage, or of hapless jaywalkers, their freshly lopped off

limbs strewn inches away on city streets—none of these were all that chilling to me,

really. The red flaunted was viscous, valid. Real. The scarlet stripes and splotches on

the blood-weepers, however, didn’t make any solid sense, and they always left me too

eager to know more. All these tortured, taunting faces. It was almost as if they looked

glum for my sake, knowing how frustrated I must be that they couldn’t talk back and

explain themselves. It hit me just then how much I had missed them.

But that morning didn’t have the makings of a happy, weepy reunion, I knew. I

didn’t think that K10-Mushroom had been keeping a secret so damningly relevant to

me. I was used to knowing that anything I tried to discover, or my parents tried to

discover, had nothing directly to do with us, with the way we actually lived out each

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day. So I still had countless questions. Ones that actually mattered.

Then the cork boards caught fire. I jumped back, too stunned to shriek. For no

good reason, flames burst nonchalantly from the corners of each board and worked

their way in towards the papers and photographs. Soon enough, I was staring at a wall

of large, blazing rectangles, the fire smokeless, ceaseless and fierce. My parents’ drafts

curled in on themselves, like flowers quickly blooming backwards. Photographs melted,

wept, scores of faces dripping with blood trickling into piles of ash at my feet. I felt like

crying right then. I would like to think I was a tough, smart kid, really, but there was

only so much I could take in one morning. And then, as if the room could gauge my

distress, a loud, low, male voice began to speak.

“Hello, Alice.”

I kept gawking at the cork boards, which were completely consumed in flame at

that point, and thought too hard about what to say back to them.

“Hi.”

“Do you know why you’re here, Alice?”

Because there is something wrong. But I didn’t want to say it out loud. For

once, I was too frightened to admit it, to put it out in the open and hear it ring true.

“You know why you’re here,” the voice went on, a more pitiless tone building

within it, as if it already knew that I wouldn’t own up to anything. “And I do, too.”

I looked away from the burning boards. It struck me that the voice wasn’t

coming from them after all. It seemed to come more from the divider at the far end of

the room. I made my way towards it, egged on by the glow throbbing from behind its

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plain wooden panels.

The first time I saw Jesus, I knew I was in trouble.

On the wall before me was a humongous portrait of him. It was a typical

rendering gilt-framed and encased in glass—large, puppy-dog eyes, immaculate facial

hair, an exposed, bright red heart floating, on fire. When we still had a television, I’d

see the same image cutting shows short at 3 PM, bidding all to echo a deep, eerie

drone of a prayer, which my father would himself cut short with the flick of a switch. (It

was just as well; the wreath of thorns piercing his heart, the tiny sliver of a wound on

his palm, the fingers bent in an alien, unintelligible signal like a peace sign but not

quite, it was all just too odd.) The glow came from rays fanning out from Jesus’ skull.

They were just like the ones on TV, too, a waxy, metallic light swelling across each strip

like swimming pool shadows. I had always found it bothersome, really, that Jesus

remained static—poised and unblinking, both sullen and serene for perpetuity—.when

his backdrop clearly wasn’t. He was a strange and slightly scary man, and I was going

to have to deal with him.

“You want to ask me many questions,” the voice continued. It was definitely

coming from the portrait, booming out of Jesus’ closed, painted mouth. “That is why I

have opened my doors to you.”

I still couldn’t bring myself to speak. Though I did expect to find something out

of the ordinary within K10-Mushroom, in truth, this wasn’t what I had in mind. GM’s talk

hadn’t swayed me into thinking that God had anything to do with it, really. Save for my

parents’ slaving over Project Milagro, I had nothing to do with God before Holy Trinity

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Heights. Before the move, I had never been brought to a church or to Mass. A crucifix

was a chunk of carved wood on other people’s walls. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Peter,

Paul, Mary, Joseph—common names for common people. The fact that Holy Trinity

Heights assigned meaning to all of these with such severity didn’t mean much to me. I

knew that I didn’t belong there; my parents’ undoubtedly unnatural transformations

there told me so, leaving me to feel indifferent towards all of it: each First Friday Mass

at the Learning Garden, the statues and crucifixes around every corner, all this talk of

God. I’d make up sins during confession (spoiled my dinner with cookies; didn’t tell GM

she had a speck of snot on her lip all day), little things that would warrant penance

short enough to get me out of the chapel early. A chat with Christ, then, still seemed

more far-fetched to me than, say, finding out that Holy Trinity Heights was some

elaborate experiment by intelligent life from another planet.

“You are scared,” the voice said matter-of-factly.

I was. This couldn’t be denied. Neither was my hope that the voice would say

that I shouldn’t be, that it would start shedding sensible, maybe even gratifying, light

on everything that had happened thus far. I had come to that point where I was just

desperate to hear something remotely good, flat-out tired of having one much too

strange surprise after another flung at me from god-knows-where. I wanted so much to

know that everything was going to be fine.

“It is correct to be scared, Alice.” The spinning glow seemed to burn brighter,

more baleful. “You are a sinner. You have no choice but to learn from your mistakes.”

“What did I do wrong?” I blurted out, daring to speak up at last. While I was

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frightened for the most part, there was this morsel of anger building up in me, this

niggling feeling that I didn’t deserve to suffer any of this. I was seven. I just wanted to

know what was going on.

“Holy Trinity is a place of peace,” explained the voice in the same cold tone.

“There are rules that must be followed, a sense of order that must be observed, so that

peace may continue to reign. You have no respect for this, Alice. You have not been a

very good Christian.”

“I was worried about my friend.”

“Your friend deserved her suffering. But it has changed her for the better, and

now she is a servant of my church. I set her free from darkness, Alice, as I will with

you. You were meant to meet with me. Because of what you have done, I have made

sure to discuss your fate with you today.”

“What do you mean?”

I knew that I was a smart kid. And in retrospect, I did have a healthy curiosity

about things. I did have a knack for observation. Nonetheless, the voice’s brooding

banter was still something difficult to penetrate at the time. I don’t know if I could have

avoided what happened next if I wasn’t just so confused, wasn’t so nervous or

apprehensive about the haze of information being dealt to me. I really don’t know. All

that I’m sure of is that, from that moment onward, I had slipped right smack into a

dense, dank dark.

“Allow me to tell you a story,” the voice replied. “You must listen carefully, for it

will teach you a very important lesson.”

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“You mean like a parable?” I uttered in an attempt to cooperate. Jesus’ parables

were a common teaching method at the Learning Garden. They were probably the only

thing I enjoyed during class, really. Short, simple stories about simple people and the

simple yet earth-shaking choices they end up making. I thought they were hilarious,

especially the one about the prodigal son. To me, it was a tale of a silly, spineless boy

so petrified of the real world’s hardships that he came crawling back to his wealthy dad.

Ms. Cabanban had insisted to me quite sternly that it was a beautiful tale of duty and

forgiveness, though I still liked my interpretation better. This time around, however, I

did hope that the voice’s tale would have something to do with mercy.

“Good. Like a parable, yes,” the voice chimed in right after. “And I bid you to sit

in the chair I have provided for you, so that you may properly receive all that I have to

say.”

My legs were beginning to cramp from standing stiffly in place. Stepping around

the divider, I walked up to the lonesome chair, tired and obedient.

“Sit,” the voice said.

I sat, and the story began.

“There is to this day a village of peace. There, the ones the Lord blessed with

cleverness were rightfully made to preach the ways of peace to the youth, to make

certain that harmony prevailed within all inhabitants soon after they were born, and the

ones whom the Lord did not bestow with gifts were rightfully tasked to labor for the

village, to ensure cleanliness and efficacy throughout the land.

“Now, there are some families there who were once strangers to this village,

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much like Samaritans taken under peace’s wings. They once were adversaries of peace,

people who used to live off of falsehoods they would spread throughout the world,

writing and preaching about fear and rage, until agents of the Lord took them to this

village and restored their faith. The children of these families had always turned their

backs on darkness with ease, for the young have always been purer of heart and mind.

“There was, however, one young, new girl who was still so consumed by

wickedness that she had no respect for peace whatsoever, doubtful of the ways and

laws of the village. She was not only a pest to her patient elders but a parasite as well,

infecting another young girl with her sinful habits, and this girl would stand by her day

after day as she carried out her insolence.

“But good triumphs over evil, Alice. And this is how it shall always be in the

Kingdom of God.

“Thus, the Lord created two separate days and a sacred, glorious room to cure

these girls of the scourge festering in their hearts. On the first day, the Lord appeared

before the friend. But the friend was not punished for her sins. Because the Lord is

Good, she was instead bestowed a penance that would help strengthen the serene

state of the village. It was a penance of great courage, of subtracting her own sight and

becoming a prophet, and despite the grueling nature of this task, the friend had been

told by the Lord of sacrifice and loving your neighbor, and she was made to understand.

“On the second day, the Lord appeared before the wicked young girl. Having

witnessed her friend drained of darkness, the demons within her raged further, and she

set out in a blind fury to wreak more havoc. But this was what the Lord had destined

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for her, and it led them to their final, fated meeting. And it is in this meeting that the

Lord bestowed the same penance upon her, and because the Lord will always prevail in

matters of darkness and light, the girl was made to obey in the face of her demons, and

whatever dregs of hate within her was absolved, and the village’s peace was restored in

full, and it was Good.

Do you understand?”

My gaze moseyed across the dark green slab of blank blackboard before me. In

some ways, I did; in some ways, I didn’t. The story was about GM and me, of that I

was certain. But the rest of it, especially its twisting, twisted tail end, was just too

murky. Did I really not run off to K10-Mushroom by choice? Was I really with God at

that moment? And was I really going to commit that horrible “penance,” with no

opportunity whatsoever to get out of it? Everything about that morning told me it was

all unwaveringly true. But it was just a stupid story, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? Things were

not only happening much too fast, but much too vaguely, too. I had been told of my

fate, a concept that I, at that age, had never thought about before then. Was it really

something I had no hold of?

And then, a piece of chalk from the blackboard’s ledge floated up of its own

accord and began to write.

Step 1: Take the knife.

I was just about to say that I hadn’t seen a knife anywhere in the room when,

bit by bit, the solid slivers of steel glinting stridently as they appeared, a kitchen knife

materialized before me, hovering in mid-air.

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It didn’t seem like I had to take it at first. I had even tried staring it down for a

minute or two, trying to convince myself that I could just stay put for however long it

took for the knife, the room, the voice, the whole preposterous premise, to finally falter.

Yet the silence and stillness that I insisted on had itself turned into a force insensitive to

me, like an unseen, fanged creature hulking overhead, telling me with such blaring

certainty that it was all a lost cause. That it had always been one.

So I took the knife.

I am, to this day, blind in my right eye. That was the first wound—a single,

simple slash. The second wound, which I had administered on my mouth right after,

looked a tad more elaborate with its bits of lip, tongue and cheek punctured more times

than I cared to count. Now, my eye and mouth are sealed by layers of haphazardly

healed skin, these thick, caked patches that have lost all feeling. I have also been

sealed shut from everyone and everything else for a long, long time. Around 15 years, I

think, judging by how tall I’ve gotten, which was around Ms. Cabanban’s height if

memory serves me right. They hadn’t expected me to maim myself the way I did; the

one eye had been necessary, but my marred mouth had rendered me too useless, a

pawn that could’ve been but just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore.

So, as with everything else they deemed potentially dangerous yet must be

tucked away for future use or reference, I have been kept in the storeroom. I am fed

the dregs of cafeteria lunches; I am handed a water-soaked sponge for cleaning myself

every now and then. I’m like a class pet whose novelty has long expired, my basic

needs shoved to me as an afterthought through a slat in the steel door. Still, it’s

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somewhat like living back in Las Piñas, really, surrounded as I am by photographs and

articles not unlike my parents’, lying around in large, precarious piles for me to sift

through. The Villamaels, GM’s parents, had been documentary filmmakers, and I had

come to memorize shot lists of their own exposés on miracles. Inspecting whatever I

had around me over and over and over, not only did things make more and more sense

to me over the years, but my reading and writing improved as well.

I am putting all of this down now on a typewriter confiscated from a Mr.

Fernandez from the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, which I found in a

box along with his ink ribbons and press IDs. I hope someone gets to read this, really,

although the fact that they haven’t slain me for doing this seems to be a bad sign. I

know they see everything. I know they can read this, but I can’t help it, really. I need to

tell what I know to someone, to something, to the blank, yellowing back of this article

draft, because I saw something that morning that I know I must confess.

I am not a sinner. Nobody is. We had been toyed with by something far greater

than us, had been placed under laws by higher, stronger beings who sure as hell aren’t

God.

The chalk had begun to scribble again once the knife was in my hands.

Step 2: Insert the knife into right eye socket.

So I did, and it hurt, and it was a mess. What I felt back then was a sort of fierce

and fiercely constant sting, as if the most piercing, most distressing scream had latched

onto my face like a large, livid insect, trying to best my own cries. The blood coursing

down my cheek was mixed with clear, clotted pus, and it spattered thickly on the floor

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as I ran madly around the room like the scared little girl that I was. I knocked myself

against the divider, sending it clattering to the ground, and found myself before Jesus

once again.

His image had remained the same, that maddening, unconquerable calm still

bolted to his face, his fingers still knotted in that strange signal, like a curse meant only

for me. I had been taught that he was a good man. I could never really know if this

was true; it could be, but I don’t think anybody anywhere could tell for sure, really. But

whatever he was, I just couldn’t seem to match that man with the terrible, tranquil

portrait I had now begun to claw at in my agony, the dull scraping my nails made on its

glass frame as futile and infuriating as everything else. It was then, reeling as I was in

this rage and fear and pain, that I began mauling my own mouth, daftly showing the

portrait that I was still the same child, that I would be difficult and defiant to the very

end.

And then I saw them. I could spot them through my one good eye, their outlines

bunched just behind Jesus’ rays which, I had come to discover, was made not of metal

but thick, stained glass. Their forms flickered at me at every golden sweep of ray, these

sentinel statures with boxy heads and teeny waists so cinched nothing else could

possibly dwell inside of them. There seemed to be other odd aspects to their bodies,

though I couldn’t say for certain through the layers of glass between us: random,

hollow patches where faces could have been, an almost synthetic, cherry red sheen to

their skin. And at a time when it would have only been natural for me to fear them, as I

had come to fear everything else that morning, I felt the most peculiar relief. Suddenly,

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despite the torturous twinge and pooling blood, broad ribbons of comfort began binding

me whole again. Things made sense again.

I have come to understand that I may never make it out of here. It would be a

miracle if anyone gets to read this. But I still feel that need to say my piece, and I do

believe, now that this last little paragraph is slowly being built, that I have. I don’t know

exactly why they chose to do all of this. I don’t know if this is part of some scheme of

great consequence, or if this place is an elaborate playpen, or if this bears staggering

weight on the way the world will be, or if they really have nothing better to do with

their time. But there, I said it. And I swear that this will be enough for me, really, that I

will wait out the rest of my life in this hole with no morsel of regret, without feeling that

I have not lived, without peering out of that slit of a window so high up on the wall and

cursing the clear and callous skies for all the silly little things that I’ve done when I was

still young and brave and dumb, so help me God. ●

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