Fiction

This is a rough set-up, she and him. They tumble between mornings unhinged from restless dreams and nights that lay rest to the battered day behind them. Their frank, pitiful solace begs this: a muted encounter between the sheets and some this-that, yes-no, yes-please fallacy across the table. And it has sunk just like it has risen, to depths that its heights never knew, to bottoms of bottles that neither of them will remember. So hello, hi, trace your mouth inside her thighs, and smoke the cigarette whose ash she’ll lick from anywhere it falls on. Slip into this, into her, into the suit you’ll wear lackluster. Screw him, then ache, then proceed to write your fiction.

By Proxy

“At 15, he almost burned down our town. Did he ever tell you that?” my Tito R asked me as we sat aboard the crowded confines of the ten-thirty train.

My uncle’s tone was casual, but the giddy grin on his face radiated to his ears, betraying his excitement. His thinning hair clung to his forehead from sweat, and the heat made his dark brown skin look sticky, like melted chocolate. Long thin arms sticking out of his dark blue shirt, the man in front of me was a stark contrast to the burly, mustached man who gave me round, stubby fingernails and a dangerous addiction to sweets.

An intrigued smile settled on my face after making its way through a crowd of fermenting commuters.

“No, he never told me that,” I responded, amused at the prospect of my dad as an arsonist.

Opiate for the Masses

“Hi, we’re corporate spokes whores and we’d like to help you sink further into debt and poverty. What useless product may I shamelessly shove in your face today?”

These people are my nation’s herpes. Poorly photoshopped variants of their faces are plastered on every available surface in the Philippines, and billboards of their contrived smiles tower over shanties where people live off rice and soy sauce. They hawk everything from watches to karaoke mics, slap their face on clothes, shitty schools, watches, vitamin supplements and your grandma’s panties. They use their ill-deserved popularity as corporate tools for mindless consumerism.

I turn around in the shower half-expecting one of them to be there discussing the merits of Head and Shoulders over my current shampoo, and how he or she would gladly get down on their knees to fellate me if I even remotely consider the idea of switching over to their brand.

I’m patiently waiting for the day when the universe corrects itself and the billboards along EDSA fall atop their overly-inflated egos and flatten their disgustingly fake smiles into a bloody pulp.

Proposed Draft for Contraception Brochures

-Part two of two-

After practicing on my aunt’s O-shaped fingers, I later did a cervical exam. I quickly got over the fact that I was rudely intruding into another woman’s vagina as I felt around for the borders her cervix. I maneuvered my fingers up, down, and sideways. I gently pushed them forward, only to be met by a furry little head that offered resistance to my unwelcome presence. Up, down, sideways and I still couldn’t feel the borders of her damn cervix. My aunt confirmed my suspicions that this meant the baby was well on its way.

Two hours later and the baby was still well on its way. I was growing tired of staring at the woman’s vagina only to have it stare back at me with what I could only peg as mild frustration. It seemed my aunt felt the same way as she had the nurse push on the mother’s stomach, a move similar to pressing the fast-forward button on an increasingly tedious movie.

Distracted by my dwindling desire to become a mother (sorry, Pav), I looked over to the birthing table where my aunt had literally ripped the woman a new one with a blunt pair of scissors.

I know the woman probably wasn’t pushing as hard as she could be, but damn.

Blood squirted from the mangled, bright red flesh in a way that reminded me of my two-year old brother squirting a stream OJ out of his juice box straw. This disarmed me slightly, but I quickly regained my morbid fascination with all things red and mutilated as my aunt struggled to extend the entrance to the woman’s boom-boom.

Two hours, one additional laceration and several disheartened grunts later, a malformed head finally made its way into the world with a weak cry and a bluish body.

As far distressed, oxygen-deprived, alien-looking specimens go, this baby didn’t look too bad. It had characteristics typical of newborns: little hands, little feet, little trunk, little misshapen head morphed into a cone due to trauma secondary to prolonged labor. Oh, and they gave it a furry, pink cap, so that was pretty adorable.

Everything after the baby was a blur. There was a manually retrieved placenta involved, a few post-delivery charts and a brief, choppy conversation with an anesthetized mother.

Once you see a woman’s vagina expel a goo-coated five-pound creature, you never look at pregnancy the same way again. Some people won’t want to look at it at all, but being the sick fuck that I am, I derive a strange sense of excitement from bodily processes and the gore it entails.

Unless of course, I’m on the other, less pleasant side of the delivery table. In which case, knock me the fuck out coz I don’t wanna see that shit.

An Awkward Miracle

-Part one of two-

Sitting on a stool level across the gaping expanse of an intrapartal woman’s blood-encrusted vagina, my aunt leaned sideways towards me and said:

“I’m really hungry.”

Back against the white-tiled, lying-in delivery room wall, toes inches away from what could only be a mix of blood, vaginal mucous, urine, possibly feces and amniotic fluid, I responded:

“So am I.”

At four in the morning, I had courtside tickets to a third-world birth.

As most people would suspect, the miracle of life occurs in slightly different circumstances here than it does in the United States. At the Novaliches General Hospital charity lying-in, my aunt was equipped with two nurses, sterile gloves housed in a cloth container and a long rubber mat from which the woman’s various bodily excrements slid down into a dismal looking garbage bin. It’s kind of like a water park, where pieces of poo enthusiastically dive down a stream of amniotic fluid, pee and blood.

I got more experience there, however, than I did at hospitals sporting million-dollar labor and delivery rooms.

First, I awkwardly pressed my hands against the pregnant woman’s belly trying to distinguish the baby’s feet from its head, its back from its appendages. I did so with little success, but my aunt dismissed my fears of incompetence saying that feeling a baby’s outline in utero was a skill honed with time. I certainly hope so, because it’s either that or this woman was giving birth to a poorly formed watermelon.

Later, I listened to the baby’s heartbeat. At a consistent rate of 140 beats per minute, the baby was stable, safe and definitely not a fruit.

Homecoming

Humidity greets you with unshakeable persistence. Everything is in a functional state of disarray—the roads are in anarchy and the buildings have given up but everyone continues to proceed with a precision that cuts through the confusion and absurdity.

We ate at a nicer version of a karinderya—the Filipino version of a fast food restaurant. Think less corporate exploitation, and more barbecue grilled chicken feet. The grilled pecho (chicken breast) and garlic fried rice have a rich full flavor that’s unique to the Philippines—flavor that’s borne out of ingenuity which, in turn, is borne out of poverty.

Being here has filled me with an overwhelming sense of familiarity. Within five seconds, I was reminded of everything about me—the good, the bad, the absurd. It could easily be my annoying tendency to poeticize everything, but it seems as if the Philippines and I have never lost the intimacy that can only be fostered by a 14-year relationship.

It’s good to be home.

The Total Perspective Vortex

It’s not until 11,600 miles in the air that the absolute relativity of everything unfolds itself. The unsettling magnitude of our insignificance and the depth of our self-centeredness fall into perspective once the majesty of oceans, mountains and snow appear as stains smudged on an economy class window.

Until, of course, the plane lands. At which point we are, once again, the sacred epicenter around which the universe charts its course around.