FLAMES

Angelo R. Lacuesta

I knew now that names lied, or at least spoke only half-truths. I heard him shout it
again and again. How could I tell it would happen this way? While he grew hoarse
shouting I heard my name lift itself out of the streets he shouted it from, dislocated
from his mouth and lungs. It grew more and more meaningless, until it sounded just
like the dog's barks that answered it.
And before that my name came from my parents: Ricaredo Manalo
Catalina Manalo
I had written them out on a back page of my composition notebook. I was mesmerized
by the doubled letters, the a's, i's and o's, the syllables, spare and simple, formed by
alternating consonants and vowels.
Ricaredo Manalo
Gatalina Manalo
That left out 10 letters -
IF 2L 3A 4M 5E 6S 7F 8L 9A10M
Married. That figured, early enough. My folks had been happily married just a little
longer than it took to have me and raise me.
This led me to think about my name again and how it came to them — my mother's
mother's name was Anna and so was my father's mother's. What were the chances?
Add to that the soap opera the maids always watched when we were still living in the
old house. I shared the name with the lead, an adopted teenage girl that was always
picked on by the full-blooded daughter of the house. The other daughter was less
attractive, of course. On TV, the contrabida was always fated to be born with the mean,
unattractive face, and cultivated to develop a brusque, offensive manner.
Between my father and me, it was arguably my mother who was the contrabida, of
course, though by TV standards you really couldn't tell because my mother was, and
remains, beautiful.
Something about my mother: she worked as a bank clerk after obtaining an AB English
degree. I always see her in long hair and that graduation cap, in a picture of her I have
always kept. In that photo she smiles a smile that is perfectly shaped and flawlessly
toothed, but she it looking at something off-camera. Before I realized that that was the
style of the photo studios at the time, it looked like she was smiling at something or
somebody that suddenly disturbed her pose. Whenever I look at it it still seems like I
am looking slightly above her, as though she were, instead, my daughter, my
mischievous daughter, smiling a smile taken after me, who had chosen to ruin the
moment just when it needed her. I have another photo of them. I think this was taken a
few months after they had me. But here she is again in this one, looking at something
not quite there, neither the camera nor the photographer.
What is she looking at?
My mother moved out when I was ten years old. They never told me anything about it.
She just didn't appear at breakfast or dinner anymore. My father, on the other hand,
tried to make up for her absence by showing up a little bit more.
Most weekends were with her — after the whole thing happened between them it fell
into a kind of routine. She or her driver would pick me up from school or the old house
and we would spend the day at her condominium unit. She would ask me about my
schoolmates or friends, and I would give her the same names every time. She would ask
me about schoolwork and I would tell her about that set of tests I always told her about.
She told me she'd give me a hundred pesos for every medal I showed her. I thought
about what she'd said and rotated the same set of medals every time we met for an easy
three hundred.
Then, as easily as the questions and the answers came, she would talk about my father.
Everything came right down to a very simple and repeatable set of answers— about all
the things my father ever or never did. And like vowels to the consonants I responded
in kind. Yes, I agreed with her, my father really did not need to move out of the house.
That was a foolish thing and proud thing to do. It required a large amount of
responsibility, which he never had. Yes, he always did take my mother for granted. All
my father ever did was wander around and take me to all sorts of useless things, all
kinds of weird places. At this point it was my father who became the contrabida —the
atrocious womanizer, the rootless, irresponsible vagabond, the fiend.
Once he took me to the Rizal Stadium to see the track and field finals of the Southeast
Asian Games. The Philippines was hosting it for the first time and we had someone
special just for that occasion.
My father had brought along a pair of binoculars he had pur-chased in New York over
their honeymoon. Those were good times for them. I remember there was a small trip to
Paris and a long one that covered most of Europe by train. They sent me postcards of
the Eiffel Tower, Michelangelo's David, and later on, the pissing statue in that town
square in Copenhagen.
— That's her, he said. He nudged me with an elbow and propped a pointing hand by
my cheek. That's Lydia de Vega. He handed me the binoculars so I could see.
Lydia de Vega stood on the track, in the curve of the middle lane, balanced on her right
leg. She held her left foot locked behind her, stretching thigh muscles that flared to the
hips and strained her shorts.
Then she switched legs and gripped her other foot, her skin almost as dark as the red-
brown macadam.
I heard the crowd gasp, quietly, whenever she cut those sprints short, stopping her
body into an impatient hopping and shaking.
— She keeps her muscles hot that way. You need hot muscles to move fast, my father
had said to me, grimacing at the whole ordeal of having to squint through the eyepiece.
Later, I pored over the photos and, sure enough, saw her centered in the frame, but
blurred and way beyond the reach of the plastic lens, which for all its effort, couldn't
capture what the binoculars could.
I had to rely on my memory to remember her, the way she had her hair swept back
clean in a ponytail, the way she arched her neck this way and that, pointing it at his
opponents as though her jaw, with its straight, tough tilt, possessed its own line of
sight.

She did a series of short, sticky skips and jumps off the track, before suddenly
lengthening herself and moving to collapse time and meters of track in a practice sprint.
The next shots showed her as a brown blur moving off the edge of the frame.
Ricaredo Martalo
Lydta De Vega
IF 2L 3A 4M 5E 6S 7F 8L 9A 10M H E 12S 13F
I wanted something to happen, but they were going to be just friends. I was beginning
to think that maybe he had been born with a bad luck name. It just didn't add up to
much.
We moved fast, too, soon after that. Barely two months after my parents unofficially
split and started having different schedules, my father told me that we were moving
house, just the two of us. I asked him howr he built the new house so fast. He explained
that we were renting, not building, but that it was quite a new house that a nice family
had stayed in before, so it was even better than a new one because everything had
already been worked out.
The next place my father took me to was the new house. It felt like hours before we
reached the subdivision. It felt so distant from our school.
— Here we are, Polaris street, he said, grinning as he pointed out the street sign.
He told me to roll down my window and he was silent for a while. Then he told me, as
though he were telling me something very special, that this was why he had chosen this
place, out of the many places he had considered. It was the wind, he said, and though
you can't smell it, it's coming almost straight from the sea, coming oyer those mountains
over there. They're closer than you think, he said, stopping the car momentarily and
pointing out the distant hills.
It was really just an apartment that stood in the middle of a shoulder-to-shoulder row in
a sprawling, rundown neighborhood in the suburbs. I stayed at the door while he
walked in and surveyed the tiny living room, his hands perched on his hips. He
explained that the smell was fresh paint and that it would go away before we moved in.
He offered me his hand so we could explore the upstairs. There were two tiny
bedrooms adjoined by a landing that could barely fit the two of us. He drove the heel of
his hand against the banister, as though to test its sturdiness and slightly nodded his
head as though it had passed the test.
As I looked into his room I was reminded that they weren't together anymore. Then he
took me to my room, which was larger by far, and had a large window that looked into
the street. The window had a ledge that looked good for sitting on. I tried it out and
saw our banged-up car outside. I found that I could look over the fence of the house
right across us. It was a large, low bungalow. It had a pool but it was covered by a
green plastic sheet. I asked my father about that and he said those neighbors were
foreigners and they were away a lot.
It was about four in the afternoon, then. The light came in clear and unobstructed, and I
saw the sun, still a good distance from the flat horizon, but already large and orange-
colored. My room faced west, then. "West is left," I reminded myself, then saw exactly
how my room stood in the map of things.
I really did think I could smell the sea breeze coming in from the mountains there, in
the north.
— It's great, dad.
I turned from the sun and saw him smiling.
The next weekend was spent packing our stuff into boxes, moving out and moving in. It
was strange to see all my stuff suddenly packed into boxes, and then tiring on the mind
to imagine having to unpack them again.
He told me I could skip school on Monday because I needed to help him. By Monday
afternoon all the boxes were in the living room. I felt too tired to unpack and exploring
the apartment took all of twenty minutes. There was nothing to do but watch TV.
There was a program that talked about time, showing how it could move, or how it
might not move at all. It showed how time might not necessarily run in a
straightforward fashion, that it might be like different places you could visit if you
thought about it the right way.
Someone from ancient times had also imagined that it was composed of moments, and
each moment was composed of moments-within-moments, and each would appear
frozen, without movement or origin.
They had a bunch of theories about this and figured everything out with thought
experiments. They called it a bunch of names —time's arrow, spacetime, other things I
could not quite get.
We used a box as a tabletop for dinner. My father took out sandwiches from my school
lunchbox.
— Dad, what about the maids?
— Fe will stay with us. We will have to let the others go. Besides, you're old na. You can
look after yourself. He winked.
— Does Mama know we moved?
— Not yet, he said.
— She'll be pissed at you again.
— She's always angry with me for something or the other. If it's not something I've
done, it's something she thinks I'm about to do.
I didn't know if he was happy about what I said, or if he suddenly remembered or
thought of something.
— We forgot the telephone, my father then said.
After the sandwiches we drove back to our old place. My father handed me a flashlight
and told me to go get the telephone while we waited in the car. It was my first time to
use keys on the front door. It was funny having to turn all of the locks — there was
nothing to steal inside. Even the lightbulbs had been removed from their sockets. There
was nothing in our house but the telephone. It was lying there in the middle of the bare
sala that looked bigger than it ever had been.
It was quieter than ever, too. I could hear the engine idling outside. I tested for an echo,
clearing my throat and shouting a non-word at the walls — a tentative, throaty vowel
that multiplied and repeated in a messy march.
I picked up the receiver and held it to my ear. I was shocked to hear a dial tone. I
remembered than that my mother hadn't even known at the time that we were moving,
that we had actually moved out. If she called me right then I would calmly answer and
act like I was just sitting watching TV, like nothing had changed. But then I thought she
would quickly pick up the echoing voice and the silence and would find something
amiss. It was so quiet I could hear my father revving the engine outside.
I scrambled to trace the cord, crawling on hands and knees until I found the wall socket,
the stem of the cord sticking out of it like a frayed, unwanted thread. The flashlight's
circle jolted wildly as I felt for the plastic tab that would unlock it, but there was just the
cord sticking out of the hole. I grasped the stem and pushed and pulled until it tore
away.
Ric Manalo
Lina Manalo
IF 2L 3A 4M 5E
Even their nicknames did not bode well. I wondered if they had known this before they
had gotten married. Or if I had a time machine, I would go right back and do something
about it, cause things to happen between them so that they would never meet. Then I
realized that if they had known this and thought about it hard enough to quit while
they were ahead, they wouldn't have had me and I wouldn't have been able to realize
this. I wouldn't exist at all.
— Dad, why are we moving ba?
— It's better this way, Anna. So your mom won't say anything more about me living in
her house.
Why was he talking to me like this? These were things I didn't really need to know.
— But we took all the stuff, anyway, dad.
My father kept silent, as if I never said anything, as if he were driving alone.
The first thing I hated about our new7 place was I had to wake up much earlier to catch
the school bus. The first time it rolled into our street I was anxious to see who would be
riding with me to school.
But it rolled in empty, carrying only a driver and a conductor, both of whom I didn't
recognize because this was a different route, a different number bus. From our place we
took a long, circuitous route through the neighborhood to pick up another kid. Ermar
Barbasa turned out to be in Grade 7—just a year ahead of me.
I figured it was almost a miraculous coincidence to find someone almost of your age,
from your school, especially in a half-empty neighborhood like ours. We were the first
passengers out and the last on the trip home. We had other things in common. Our
parents made us wear shoes that were one size bigger, clothes that were one size larger,
though it was more embarrassing for me because I was a girl and with girls you always
notice their clothes, along with their face and their hair.
I kept mine long, almost to the small of my back, because that was how my friends kept
it. In the mornings I could smell the shampoo off of it, and because the bus came so
early it would never be dry when it was time to go.
He always wore a cap, hung low over his brow. He had to take it off in school but he
always fished it out of his knapsack and slid it over his head as soon as he got back on
the bus. He was so thin you'd think he was dirt poor and that he was always hungry
enough to eat whatever you put in front of him. Once he showed me that he could eat
his own nose dirt, picking it fresh, then rubbing it between his fingers until it was dry
and small. Then he deposited it in the middle of his tongue and closed his mouth. He
opened it again to show me he'd swallowed it.
He laughed at my name and predictably recalled the TV soap. I told him that was old
news, and everybody made that joke all the time.
I asked him about his name and he told me had gotten it from a father named Erwin
and a mother named Maria. I found it funny, contrived, pedestrian. I told him I could
see his name spread out in flashy letters above the windshield of a jeepney, or on a
tricycle's mudguard.
I took out my composition notebook, opened it to a back page and held it so he couldn't
see what I was writing.
Ermar Barbasa
Anna Manalo
I was sure he'd seen me count the letters back and forth, my brow knotted in
concentration. But he looked like he didn't care what I'd been writing. His name and
mine shared the same kind of sound, the same kind of fate. We were destined to be
lovers.
Ermar and I took turns on the scooter my father had put together for me with a broken
skateboard and old spare parts. We spent the afternoons making our own
modifications, widening and reinforc-ing the floorboard, spreading the wheels apart a
little bit. We made a few trial runs up and down the length of our street, trying out the
scooter and also practicing our strides, making sure we got the hang of it, deciding it
was easier when we pushed with the same foot while we steered a little bit toward the
opposite side. After a few more runs we lowered the wheels a little bit more to give us
better balance.
Then we went up and down the street again, eventually ven-turing farther into the
neighborhood's open sprawl. Because he'd been there a year ahead of me he took it
upon himself to show me everything, the parts where the rich had their huge houses,
set well back from their high fences, and the parts where the poorer ones lived, right at
the edge of the street. We scooted on straight roads and hairpin turns, the cul-de-sacs
that gave us room to coast in wide circles, and the long tough inclines that we knew,
even from the first time we pushed into them, would reward us with a languid thrill of
the downhill freewheel. He showed me the construction sites that were nothing but
grass weeks before. He pushed us to the unkempt, empty lots, overgrown with weeds
and smelling of canal water. We got off the scooter and dared to jump from streetside to
the canal's inner bank. A few steps into the lot he showed me still, fermenting pools
hidden behind grass that had been left to grow wild.
We drove home in the dark after that excursion. He was still wearing his cap. I saw him
cast a quick glance at the bungalow in front of our house. I asked him about it. He said
they were in Spain.
— WTio goes to Spain, anyway?
— They're half-Spanish, he said. Spanish father, Filipina —
— Mother!
My mother was there, on our street. She had just gotten out of her car and now stood
directly in our path so Ermar had to jerk hard on the handlebars. The scooter fishtailed
and we tumbled on the asphalt. We were still in our school uniforms so it was easy to
explain to my mother that Ermar was a schoolmate and a neighbor.
— It's almost seven o'clock, she said. Do your parents know7
where you are? She was asking both of us. You shouldn't ride that thing, sweetheart.
You shouldn't give her rides on that thing of yours, hijo. It's not built for two. Besides,
it's unstable. Look at you!
I had scratched a knee badly and I was still trembling from the fall and the scrape. My
mother asked me where my father was and shouted for Fe for an answer. Her first few
steps into our house took her to the foot of the stairs. She grasped me by the hand and
we headed straight up to my father's room. She held my knee out under the faucet and
washed my wound.
Fe appeared at the doorway to tell her my father was at the Araneta Coliseum watching
PBA. I grimaced at this, knowing it would piss my mother off. She took a towel hanging
from a hook and tossed it to me. — Tell your father I'm coming back tomorrow
afternoon. I have something tonight so I can't wait for him. I was worried about you!
She looked at me square and softened her face and kissed me on the forehead. I don't
think I've ever heard of that boy before. Is he one of those in your volleyball group,
sweetheart?
— Yes, Ma. I told you about him many times na, I lied.
The next afternoon my mother talked to my father about put-ting some barbed wire on
our small fence.
— It's not exactly a very secure neighborhood, she said. They didn't even ask for the
driver's ID when we drove through the guard house. My father said he thought he'd
have a hedge of bougainvillea instead. — The thorns will make a good deterrent, he
said.
— You're missing the point. Don't you know how slow that grows? My mother left my
father to decide things, but wanted him to know that she was just concerned about my
safety. Though I knew there were a number of ways, my father asked her how she
found out about our new address.
— The easiest way, sweetheart. I dialed your telephone number and Fe told me
everything. She said it with a face that made her the kontrabida of the day.
Ermar took me to one of those empty lots and showed me a dead dog. It had been lying
there for about a week and he'd been visiting it every couple of days. Its gut was open.
There were maggots all over its innards and more of them twisting just under its hide. It
smelled of mulch and a faint sweetness, not much different from the festering pools
nearby.
He told me what he knew of animals decaying. Since he was a year ahead of me in
school he knew about life cycles and the food chain.
Later, as we explored another empty lot I told him of what I learned from the TV
documentary.
— They call it spacetime, I said.
He stopped and turned to look at me. Although his eyes were hidden in the shadow of
his cap's visor, I could tell he didn't understand it much and couldn't help much in
trying to make me understand what I had just told him about.
— That's bullshit, he said.
To demonstrate he picked up a stone, swept the ground with his eyes and squatted on
the ground. A large earthworm writhed along the mulch by his feet. With a grunt he
brought the stone down on the worm. He lifted the stone and showed me what was left
of it. Half of it was squashed into the stone and the other did a lazy twitch.
I nodded and looked away. Maybe that was not how spacetime worked. One August
morning I looked out my window and saw that the green plastic had been taken out of
the pool by the bungalow across Polaris street. There was a girl swimming in it. I
watched her cut the pool cleanly with fast strokes, her head breaking the surface only
when she had to breathe. As the girl pulled herself out of the pool she smoothed her
hair and I saw that it hung down to the top of her legs.
I saw Ermar darting down our street on his scooter, moving in little spurts. His visor
tilted as he took a quick look up at my window.
Then he freewheeled, his speed flattening into an easy coast, his trajec-tory curving
toward the bungalow. I saw him tiptoe on the floorboard and the visor of his cap point
toward her figure. He couldn't see much from down there, maybe just the top of her
head.
I darted back from the window. It was still morning and the light was on my side so he
couldn't see me, but I couldn't be too sure.
I opened my closet and picked out what I was going to wear for that day.
It must have taken fifteen minutes for him to ring the doorbell.
Or it could have been shorter than that. I opened the door and he entered the house for
the first time, his eyes darting around nervously in the darkness under his cap's brim. I
told him my father was away and Fe was in the back doing the laundry. He cocked his
ear and confirmed the faint sound of running water with a nod.
I took him upstairs and showed him my room. In a corner lay a couple of boxes that still
needed unpacking. I asked him to help me.
He took off his cap and it was as if I'd seen him in full for the first time.
He had brushy hair and a very wide forehead, cut across the middle by the line of his
cap, the upper half startlingly white. He had eyes that looked widened and wet, like
they were startled by the sudden exposure to light.
When we had taken everything out of the boxes we took a breather and sat by the
window. He had put his cap back on. He looked across the street and saw the
bungalow, quiet in the afternoon. I told him Frances wouldn't be there anymore because
she went to afternoon class. Ermar told me she attended the International School and
she was on vacation already.
— They follow a different schedule. They don't follow our rules, he said. They get
driven to school by their drivers and their yayas wait for them until dismissal time.
— I had a yaya once, when I was younger, I told him. Yayas are for babies.
Ermar nodded in agreement.
— Yayas are for babies, he repeated. He was still looking at the bungalow.
I decided she was the next thing I hated about the neighborhood. The first time I saw
Frances Neri up close, after weeks of recon-naissance, was at her thirteenth birthday
party. Her family had invited their street neighbors. There was PBA on TV that
afternoon but my father grudgingly obliged to go. Let's be good neighbors, he said. We
left the apartment at 4:30 because the invitation said 4:00. My father said it was best not
to look eager. My father opened his closet and took out a fancy bottle of rock candy my
mother had brought him from her last trip abroad. He put a ribbon around it, stuck a
card and told me to write it out to her.
To reach their living room you had to walk up a long driveway, through a long foyer
and across another living room. By the time we got there all the games had been played
and everybody was already eating, including the band and the magician.
She was the first real half-breed I'd ever seen. She had skin the color of very milky
coffee. She had dirty blond hair. She and her friends had their food out on their table
but they were engrossed in their playing cards. I remember now that she was dressed in
a short birthday gown made of beaded linen. She had pearls in her earlobes and a
cluster of santan in her hair. Ermar was there, a seat away from her, holding a hand of
cards. He was dressed in new clothes, but I was sure they were a size larger, as usual.
Frances looked at me, waved, and returned to the game.
Out on the pool, they'd floated candles, flowers and balloons on the water. I sat at the
edge and watched the hodgepodge clustering around my ankles. I shook my feet and
the stuff floated out aimlessly on the ripples. I looked up over the fence and saw my
window, dark in the afternoon. I was startled to see how small and narrow our place
was, how close it was to those alongside it, and how identical the apartments looked, all
in a worn-down row. I wasn't even sure I was looking at my window.
I heard a commotion arise in the living room. Through the sliding doors I saw the
magician waving his wand and calling the kids to gather.
The magician was in full costume now — he wore a hat, a suit and a bowtie. When he
asked for volunteers, Frances raised her hand and called out my name. He spread out a
deck of cards like a fan and asked me to pick one. I remembered the TV program and
wondered whether magicians carried real magic — that they knew how to unstring
events from their regular sequence and see, for example, the moment where I revealed
the card first, before I drew it.
Ermar sat with me for a while. We ate ice cream and he asked me when my birthday
was. Then he had to go play football with the other boys.
I went to look for my father so we could go home. I found him in a small room, sitting
in a couch with the magician. They were watching the basketball game on TV. He had
taken his jacket off and his hat lay upturned on the floor. Up close I saw that his hat was
made of painted cardboard, his suit was all crumpled and he had the most worn-out
leather shoes I'd ever seen.
My mother stopped showing up for a while, choosing only to appear on the weekend of
my birthday. She showed up in a new SUV
and surprised me with a ticket to Hong Kong.
— In Ocean Park the dolphins clap their hands and play the piano! she said.
I was thrilled, but I had made plans. I had promised Ermar I would treat him to ice
cream for my birthday.
My father protested. I protested too.
— It's for Anna, she said.
— I'm her father, he said.
— I can't take you to Hong Kong with us!
— Who said I wanted to go? he said.
— I want to stay here, I said.
— Don't be ridiculous, my mother said.
We were talking in the middle of the street. I kept looking around for Ermar. He'd taken
the scooter and had pushed off somewhere again.
— If she wants to stay — my father said.
— Let's all go somewhere else, then.
— I want to stay, I said.
— It's that boy, my mother announced. Dad, do you know about this boy? The one who
rides that broken-down thing?
— Let's all go somewhere else, then, my father said.
My mother looked at my father like she was sizing him up.
— WHhere, then? she said.
I looked at my father. I knew he was still looking for a job.
— Let's.go to Baguio, Ma, I said.
There was a long, silent standoff before my mother tossed the keys to my father.
— Punyeta. You drive, she said.
My father made a ritual out of calling out the names of the towns we passed on the
way, and all sorts of weird information about how the names were thought to have
come about. My mother slept through all this, even through the climb on the long
zigzag road to Baguio City.
He knew my mother didn't want to bother with the small hotels, so we headed straight
for the Hotel Akasaka first. The valets opened our doors and took our luggage with
white-gloved hands. At the front desk we had to endure the embarrassment of being
turned away. None of us had taken account of the fact that it was Holy Week and
everything had been booked solid. They returned our luggage and we spent half a day
driving around the Baguio City streets looking for a place that would take us.
It was my father who finally put his foot down and stopped the car in front of a
swaybacked old inn that still had its name painted on a wooden board, like it was the
War or the 1950's or something.
They had had one cancellation and my father thought we were really lucky, until he
found out we would have to share one room. It turned out to be small and gloomy, with
space for a bed, our luggage and not much more.
It was already late evening and we were too tired to try other places to stay. Sleeping
arrangements were carefully made and I had to lie between them in the middle of the
bed. They made a quiet game out of trying to beat the other at staying awake. It felt
good to be fought over.
At any rate, our small quarters made us want to get out more.
We rolled down our windows and I saw a lot of scenery, felt the coolness and smelled
the pine in the air. My father pointed out cloud formations and, on the distant
mountains, radar clusters.
I rode a pony at Wright Park — sort of. My father lifted me onto the horse and I held on
to the saddle horn while a boy my age walked ahead of me and led my mount by the
reins around the central fountain.
I pretended to push him forward, digging my heels into its flanks so we could go faster,
or turn into the surrounding wood.
I never saw the boy's face, just the back of his head. I didn't even hear him speak one
word to me. Once in a while he clucked his tongue to keep the horse on its inevitable
track around the fountain. I heard the monotonous clip of hooves under me, the
swishing sound his pants made, the soft trudging of his shoes on the dirt. I saw the
automatic way he avoided the clumps of horseshit on the ground, the soft, uneven parts
turned up by other horses' hooves. I thought about Ermar and time's arrow, and how it
was easy to see time this way.
My mother gave me money and at Mines View Park I secretly bought Ermar a wood
carving of a squatting old man. The girl told me it was a symbol of ancient ancestors
tasked to watch over fields for harvesting. We went to the cliff where you could take
pictures with people dressed in old tribal clothes and there was a good view of more
mountains. My father took out his camera and asked one of the locals to take our
photos.
The whole ordeal took five days. On the last morning of our road trip I woke up to find
myself at the edge of the bed. I looked over and saw them sleeping, lying still together
under the sheets. I could do it all in my head now, coming to the obvious conclusion
that their last names cancelled each other out, and revising everything to include their
unmarried names —
In the air in front of me I saw the letters arrange themselves into names, and the letters
of one name seeking its twin in the other, and joining it into oblivion. I saw the
unpaired letters fall in line to be counted. I saw their attendant numbers explain things,
spell out the past, tell of the future — the people for which the names stood becoming
friends, lovers, acquaintances, married folks, enemies, sweethearts. In this game, was
the name the cause or the outcome? Was all this information pre-written into them? I
wanted to think so. What a waste it would be if it hadn't been so.
We headed for home at dawn. On the road I called out the names of the towns in
reverse order and thought about how much of all my dad's stories had been made up —
about Moncada being named after Spanish nobility, Rosario after a chain of foothills
that looked like beads on a rosary, or after wild roses that grew along the river,
"rosas del rio."
By this time my folks had returned to their usual selves, looking like they couldn't wait
to get home.
When we arrived I saw the scooter leaning against the gate of the bungalow. I feigned a
bathroom emergency and left my folks in the car. My father was talking about the
possibility of maybe moving me to another school.
I ran up to his room and opened his closet drawers. I sifted through hairbrushes,
postcards, cassettes and briefs. I found the opera glasses in the bottom drawer, among
girlie magazines and rolls of film.
I ran to my room and looked out the window.
Here's the bit about my father: I have a memory of him during that time. He is standing
on the street with my mother, looking at the bougainvillea on our fence. I am looking
from my window, with the morning light on my side, hidden behind a wild mass of
thorns and gaudy pink flowers.
My mother hands my father a white envelope. My father makes a vague attempt to look
her in the eye.
— Don't think about it, Ric, my mother says.
— Things have been slow these days, he says. Give me a few weeks. — Forget about it.
Call me if you need anything, okay?
My mother turns her head to look at him, then looks at the bougainvillea instead, its
rough growth bowed down by its weight.
I pick up the binoculars and train them on the bungalow across Polaris street, across the
rippled pool, at the two figures sitting beside it.
Frances Neri
I studied her up close for the first time. She had eyes that were large and brown, but
flecked with green, or grey. Under her eyes, her skin had a sprinkling of—freckles, it
seemed — though I wasn't sure because I had never seen freckles before. I couldn't help
notice that she was wearing lipstick, its light pink gloss smudged around her mouth.
My father and my mother were back to arguing about the bougainvillea when I came
out to cross the street. I twisted the scooter around by the handlebars, mounted it and
kicked hard against the asphalt. I pushed harder than I ever had, until my thighs felt
like jelly, until I reached the top of our long street and broke into a downhill rush, going
faster than I ever had, deep into the neighborhood, passing the high-walled houses, the
small two-storey affairs with their empty garages and tiny flower plots.
I skidded to a stop in front of the empty lot where the dead dog was. I heard the faint
sound of my parents shouting my name.
— Anna!
— Anna!
So there would be no trace, I dragged the scooter with me through the grass, into the
clearing, By now there was almost nothing left of the dead dog. It had withered to
become part of the swampy earth. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to stay there. I
wondered how long he could keep it up, shouting my name. By then I had already
understood him. I had already understood everything, there and then, as I stood by the
smelly, standing water, in the middle of the sharp, unruly grass, the random, messy
mulch.
Soon I could hear Ermar shouting my name all around our neighborhood. He shouted it
again and again.
— Anna!
— Anna!
He shouted it until he grew tired of it. Then he shifted the accent to make it sound
strange, like he was saying my name backwards.
— annA!
— annA!
I thought I could hear his voice steadily gaining desperation.
He shouted it again and again, until I heard the neighborhood dogs barking in reply.
I thought that if I had a tape recorder or a time machine I could go back to this or that
moment eternally, playing it in reverse and playing it forward, again and again, until
you couldn't tell, that afternoon up in my room, whether Ermar and I were packing
stuff or unpacking it —things like crayons, Christmas decorations, notebooks filled with
penmanship exercises — with everything on both sides of that moment falling away,
unwatched, unneeded.
There is a photo of my folks that my father kept hidden in his drawer. It is a photo of
them in New York, during their month-long honeymoon. My father kept on telling me
how scared they were to have it taken — handing the camera to a complete stranger
and trusting him not to run away with it. They ought to have been more scared of him
taking a bad photo. The camera is closed in on them, the frame dead center on their
faces, features blunted into vague shapes by their proximity, half-smiles whited out and
eyes reddened by the flash.
Nothing much of the background registers. If you didn't know them, you couldn't know
how they'd met, or how they'd fallen in love, or separated, or how they might end up
after a year or ten years. It could have been taken at any time. They could have been
anywhere.

Angelo R. Lacuesta has received the Philippine Graphic Literary Award, Don Carlos
Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, NVM Gonzalez Awards and the Madrigal-
Gonzalez Best First Book Award for his fiction. His collections of short stories, Life
Before X
and Other Stories and White Elephants: Stories won Manila Critics Circle National Book
Awards. He has also co-edited, with Jose Y. Dalisay, Fourteen Love Stories and, with
Toni Davidson, Latitude: Writing From the Philippines and Scotland. He is the Literary
Editor of Philippines Free Press.