Never have i ever, p.18
Never Have I Ever, page 18
“It’s not me,” I say, without thinking.
Silence. Then Senya bursts out laughing, doubled over, shrill and gasping. It’s the loudest sound I’ve ever heard her make. Her laughter makes me feel ridiculous, but I’m relieved in a way: if she thinks it’s impossible, it must be. I had nothing to do with it.
“Of course not, Miss Macky,” she says. “You’ll use the law instead, right?”
I stare at her, mouth open. My hand trembles—do I want to hit her? Or cover my face? Edna gazes at the river, neutrally.
“You wouldn’t do a cruel thing like that,” Senya continues, back to her soft voice, like something escaping a dream. The words seem kind, but her eyes tell a different story: you wouldn’t dare, and anyway, why would you ever need to?
I take a bath as soon as I get home. Since it’s not my usual time Aling Dinday hasn’t been able to heat up any water; she makes a fuss, saying it won’t take long, but I assure her I don’t mind. The cold water wakes me up, makes me angry. It’s a feeling, I think. At least.
I stare at the tiles, unseeing, running soap over my body. I keep wondering if I’ve ever wanted anything, if I’ve ever had to fight for anything. I don’t notice the bug until it skitters up my calf, the brush of its legs against my skin nightmarish.
It’s huge. I shriek. I fling my leg out, slap it away with my hand, slippery with soap. Half-crushed, it tries to crawl away; I waste a whole tabo of water drowning it, heart pounding as it swirls into the drain. I don’t know whether I’ve killed it or helped it escape.
“Macky?” Aling Dinday calls from beyond the door, summoned by my abortive scream. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” I reply, a trembling hand against my chest. “Just a bug.”
Tito Benjo and I eat in the carinderia that evening. We do this once or twice a week, so Aling Dinday can have a break from cooking our dinner. I nudge stewed goat around on my plate, while Tito Benjo debates basketball with three manongs in a nearby table. I can’t eat or I’ll be sick. I’m about to ask if I can go home when Edna crashes into our table, tears streaked across her face. “Ate Macky! Governor! Itay—Itay is—”
We run, with Tito Benjo puffing behind us. Edna stops on the edge of our farm. The moon is so bright, I don’t need another light to know that there’s blood everywhere. I smell it rising from the grass; when I kneel down beside Aling Dinday, sobbing as she cradles Mang Edgar in her lap, I feel it, slick against my knees.
“Who—” I ask.
“We don’t know. He went out to buy some beer. When he didn’t come home—” Edna can’t continue.
“I’ll get the car,” Tito Benjo says, voice pinched. He charges off.
“Manang,” I say, crouching next to Aling Dinday. “Breathe. It’s okay. He’ll be okay.” It’s irresponsible to say that, when we don’t know what kind of injury he has, which weapon was used. I grip one of her shoulders; with my other hand, I touch Mang Edgar’s wrist. There’s a faint pulse running through it. He makes a breathy, croaking sound—hope flares treacherously in my chest.
“Who did it?” Aling Dinday sobs. “Why? Why?”
Someone drunk. With a hot temper. Looking for trouble. Someone who felt like a free beer. A stranger from out of town. A stranger in one’s own town, with a grudge. What if they were trying to get back for something?
“Edna! Manang!” Senya comes running down the road, with Mang Okat behind her. When they reach us, Mang Okat kneels across from me, and Senya pulls Edna into her arms. “We got your text. What happened?”
“Manong, manong, please,” Aling Dinday breathes, clutching Mang Okat’s hand. Her voice wobbles.
Mang Okat rubs Mang Edgar’s forehead, his lips, his shoulders. “He needs a hospital,” Mang Okat says, sounding defeated. “This isn’t something my healing will work on.”
Aling Dinday draws a heavy breath, as Tito Benjo’s car comes up the road. He brings it as close as he can, then jumps out. Carefully, he and Mang Okat lift Mang Edgar into the car. Aling Dinday wipes her eyes and climbs in after them.
“You stay and watch Edna,” Tito Benjo says. “It could be robbers. Lock up the house.”
I nod, knees and fingers wet with blood, shaking, shaken.
Senya calls the police. They come—the barangay captain and one barangay tanod, both of them in pambahay. They take notes and ask questions, inspect the ground cursorily, flashlights shining on the wrecked grass. They assure us they’ll drive around town for suspicious individuals—tonight, and again tomorrow. Medyo mahirap lang kung walang witness. Pasensiya na po, ma’am. That last toward me. I give them my number, ask them to please call if they find anything. Edna is silent, unlike herself. Senya smoothes Edna’s hair, murmuring, but even she has to leave eventually.
“Please keep me updated,” Senya says. Edna and I lock up the gate behind her. We stop by Edna’s house so she can grab her toothbrush and a saggy little doll named Kokoy. When we get to the main house, I set all the locks on the doors, and check the windows too.
I call Tito Benjo. The first two times he doesn’t pick up. The third time it’s choppy because of bad signal, but I manage to make out that they’re at the ER. “I’ll call you with updates,” he says tersely.
I turn on the TV, but neither of us care to watch. I tell Edna it’ll be all right, that the hospital isn’t too far, Mang Edgar’s super strong—but that last just gets her crying again. Eventually I give up and say we should go sleep. It’ll make time go faster. Edna doesn’t protest. She curls up beside me on my bed, Kokoy ensconced in her arms, tears streaming out of her eyes. I wrap my arms around her narrow shoulders.
“Ate Macky,” Edna murmurs. I tense, not wanting to say the wrong thing. “We have to find out who did it.”
“Yes. Shhh, shh. It’s going to be okay.” I remember the leisurely way the policeman crouched, curious but not urgent.
“We have to make them sorry,” she adds. The words should be menacing but there’s no heat to them. She’s merely saying what she wants, like a kid. Because she is a kid.
“Yes.” But if the police don’t find anything, what recourse do we have?
“You’ll help, Ate Macky?”
“Of course.” When Tito Benjo returns, he’ll certainly complain to other officials.
“Promise?”
“Promise.” I still don’t understand what happened. It’s not that Mang Edgar wouldn’t hurt a fly—I think that, but I don’t know that. I don’t know anyone in this village, really. I’m removed from how they live, sheltered in this house; nothing touches me. I get to have no fear. I will always get to have no fear. “Go to sleep,” I say, ’cause I’m good at that: looking away, letting someone else solve things. “We’ll hear from them in the morning.”
Edna goes quiet. I don’t know if she’s asleep or not. Images keep flashing in my mind: Mang Edgar tending goats, his missing front tooth, how troubled he was by my attempts to help Edna weed the garden. How I thought being here meant he was safe—we were all safe, with Tito Benjo in town and my family’s name like a talisman.
It wasn’t a curse. Mang Okat had said so. So who would want to hurt him? Why?
Does there need to be a reason?
If you wait too long you lose too much.
How easily you can hold death in your hands. How there can be no consequences. Words on a page or judgement handed from on high seem so pathetic. I pull my blanket up to my chin; helplessness, at least, can’t follow me into sleep.
“Ate Macky.”
I startle awake. Edna is crouched by the bed, her fingers on my arm. It’s still dark. Outside our window the moon hovers, bloated, dull silver.
“What is it?”
“Come on.” Edna stands. “We’ve got to hurry.” She starts out the door.
I trip out of bed, pull on my slippers. Edna seems to vibrate with energy as I undo and redo all the locks on the main door. She walks briskly down the path, waits as I open the gate, but doesn’t continue to the street like I expect. Instead, she crosses the goat fields, past rows of tito’s kalamansi and sticky corn, right into a thicket of trees—the forest beyond our farm.
I’m afraid I’ll lose her in the darkness. There’s no path, but Edna walks on surely, steadily. I have to hold my hands out to keep from tripping on roots or getting scratched by branches. I don’t know how long we continue like that; I still half feel like I’m dreaming.
Eventually I see a dim fire—the glow of several candles, beneath a balete tree, its gnarled roots stringing to the ground, splayed against the soil. I blink to focus. Someone is kneeling before the candles, wearing a sky blue skirt, hair wild over both shoulders.
She sees us and grins. Her eyes are half-lidded, glazed with a strange ecstasy. Edna sits cross-legged on the ground. She looks up at me, eyes prompting. I’m shaking slightly, but I sit next to her.
Senya holds out her hand. There are fat beetles on it, the same kind I’d seen in her house. The revulsion in me is so strong that I gag. She skims their shells with one finger, makes a clucking sound in the back of her throat. Then she drops them onto her lap. They rove around in lazy circles. She withdraws something from her shirt pocket: a needle, with white thread running through it, ghostly in the moonlight.
She picks up a bug and pierces it with the thread. My hands curl into fists; my fingers dig painfully into my palms. Senya pierces the bug, again and again. The woods are silent, but with each movement of Senya’s stabbing hand screaming erupts in my skull. Screaming, laughter, crying, screeching. Worse than the worst headache. My breath comes in sharp fragments; I touch the skin beneath one ear, expecting to find blood.
She does this to two other bugs, then sets them down on the floor. Instead of curling up or twitching to death, the bugs appear unharmed. They begin moving in a line, pale thread strung between their black bodies, and that’s when I notice the cloth doll lying next to the candles. It looks like Kokoy, only smaller.
The bugs burrow their way into it. Senya watches, hands folded in her lap. The doll flops back and forth as the bugs tear their way through it. Then, from the same holes they bore in, the bugs burrow their way out. Senya whispers to them—or to us, or to the candle flames?—and their black shapes scuttle into the darkness, thread trailing behind. The sounds in my head slowly die away.
Senya sighs. She looks drained, the bags under her eyes alarming, but her mouth curves into a peaceful smile. Edna stretches her hand toward Senya, and Senya takes it. After a moment, Edna reaches her other hand to me, and I reach for Senya’s, closing the circle. Their fingers are slim and cool in my grasp.
I witness the fierce concentration in Edna’s face, the dreamy anticipation in Senya’s, so different from how she is during the day. For a few seconds Senya’s eyes meet mine and she nods at the maimed doll. What do you think, Miss Macky? Our way.
Like a secret offered up. Locked beneath my tongue. A power I can’t understand, that I give myself to because it’s the least I can do. I promised—which means, until the end, I’m not sure the choice is my own.
We stay like that, waiting in the dark, while the candles burn and darkness twists and seethes around us. The peaceful town with its unremarkable terrors, asleep. It feels like a long time before the screaming starts, but it could have been mere minutes. In a village this small, every sound is amplified.
Tears are running down Edna’s face. She squeezes my hand tighter, the fury in her eyes matched only by the serenity of Senya’s smile.
I look down at my feet. I imagine the skin along my veins cracking apart, gushing with blood; dark beetles crawling out, making their way up my ankles, my knees, eating into my belly. Pouring out of me, trailing my guts with them, slick with blood. I think of the man holding his knife towards Senya. Mang Edgar in the goat field, singing to himself: a song for the moon, about love and death; a song Aling Dinday probably sings to him, teasingly, swaying her hips, like she did to me, as a kid. Like she probably still does for Edna.
I curl my toes and hold their hands, and we wait until the screams stop. We wait until we are satisfied.
My shirt is crusty when I wake up, from Edna’s tears and snot. She’s rolled away from me, and is facing the wall. I can’t remember when we came back. I’m not sure we ever left.
I fumble for my phone. No messages. I hold it outside the window, trying to get a signal. After a few moments, there’s a ping: Tell Edna Mang Edgar will make it. Tks.
Tito Benjo comes home that morning, and charges off to barangay hall after a quick breakfast. Aling Dinday and Mang Edgar are back a day later, after the village has found and buried the bastard that did it. He’s a stranger, not from this barangay, or the next one. Tito Benjo seethes that this wouldn’t have happened if he were still governor. We’ll never learn the motive, if there was one at all.
Mang Edgar’s head is heavily bandaged, but his laughter when he sees Edna is warm and bright as ever.
I stop by Mang Okat’s house my last day in town. Edna’s sulking, but I’ve promised to make it up to her by bringing a souvenir from Manila next time. Christmas seems more likely than summer, especially if Tito Benjo decides to host. With luck, I’ll be in law school by then. I wonder if it will mean more to me.
I find Mang Okat and Senya on the steps, shelling boiled peanuts.
“I’m heading back to Manila tonight. Manong, thank you again for your help the other day.”
“No more headaches?”
“None. No patients today?”
Mang Okat shakes his head, then stands. “That’s right—I have something for you!” He enters his house and rummages around his bottles.
Senya holds out a handful of shelled peanuts.
“No, thank you,” I say.
“Ready for your test?”
“Sort of. I’ll feel better when I take it. At least it’ll be over.”
She laughs as Mang Okat emerges and hands me a tiny bottle, filled with oil. “Just rub a bit of this on your head when it hurts,” he says.
“Thank you, manong.” As I fumble my pocket he waves his hand: don’t bother.
“Just take it,” Senya says—to me this time. She sets aside her bowl of peanuts, stands, and gives me a quick, awkward hug. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
I’m halfway down the road when I turn back to them, bottle clutched in my hand.
Senya gives me a small smile and a wave. I wave back. Something crawls up the side of my neck, perching behind my ear. I pinch it between my fingers, hold it away, let it drop to the ground. I see, briefly, the black thread trailing from its body, before it scuttles off to safety.
How to Swallow the Moon
“I want to know the fires your hands bring—”
— Having Been Cast, Eve Implores, by Barbara Jane Reyes
Tonight, as in every night, she smiles when the door opens. Her arms loop over your neck; she leans in and rests her head against your cheek. She looks down at the basket between you. “Is this for me?”
She already knows the answer, but: “Yes, my jewel.”
It’s four golden mangoes this time, and a bunch of lakatan bananas, stubby and sweet. She lifts a mango to a patch of moonlight, turning it pale silver. “From who?”
“Aba Ignayon.”
“Which one is he?”
“The one with a very square chin. His head is like a box.”
She laughs; her laughter soothes the knot tightening in your chest. As her sixteenth birthday nears, the number of suitors grows by the day. They come from farther lands, ever distant shores. The gifts they bring grow more numerous, more elaborate. They are given audience for an afternoon, discussing with her parents. Sometimes they are blindfolded and taken to a dark room, where they kneel, waiting in agony, ’til at last they are permitted a glimpse. You sit with Anyag on the other side of the wall, watching her hold her laughter while she carefully pushes her smallest finger through a hole cut into the wood. There is usually a sharp intake of breath on the other side. Then you both wait, quavering, until at last a door clicks shut, and you fall over each other, erupting in giggles.
Part of your pain comes from not knowing what will happen when she marries. Will she stay here and become a lady of the village? Or will she leave with him, for some faraway place where you can no longer be part of her life? These thoughts haunt you more than you care to admit. To distract yourself, you inspect her weaving progress for the week, the colorful tapestry only begun: the impression of a woman, bare-shouldered.
“A sirena?”
“Mm-hmm.” She takes a banana and peels it. “I dreamt of one,” she says. “She sang the song of Buyi-Lahin, so sweetly. While the men rowed close in their boats . . .”
“Dreaming of men now?”
She shrugs, talks while chewing. “And why not? They’re only people. You know the only man I’ve ever seen is my father, so I have to imagine. Anyway they’re no different than women, besides what is between their legs.” She snickers. To her, men’s bodies are funny. She has never had reason to fear them, of course, which is a relief. But that could all change, one day not too far from now. You decide her curiosity is a good thing. It might make the wedding night easier. She continues: “It was strange; in my dream, Buyi-Lahin was no man, but a woman without hair, who rode a steed of dark copper . . .”
While she recounts her dream, you gather the materials for bathing: clean clothes, a smooth stone to polish her feet and elbows, coconut milk for her hair, salt crystals, and a midnight cloth to shield her from view, even if no one dares come by the river, lest they be put to death for straying eyes. You would hold the knife yourself, slit their throat, pluck their eyeballs, partly because it is your duty: she is your handiwork as much as her family’s. And partly because you love her, despite all your efforts not to.
