Kanlaon

“The Hand” won first place in the 2007 Juked Fiction Contest, judged by Frederick Barthelme

She had been married quite a long time, almost 18 years, to a man who, in the last year or two, had begun to spend most of his time watching TV. When they were first married, when they were both in graduate school, they had started out with a small black-and-white. Eventually, after perhaps the 6th year of their marriage, her husband had agreed to buy a small colored TV. Finally, just two years ago, they had gotten another TV so that she could watch her favorite shows without having to wait for her husband to finish watching a football game.

In the last couple of years, time seemed to be moving very fast, seemed almost to be accelerating, and the more she tried to hold on to it, the less of it there was to hold. This was a frightening feeling, a feeling she tried over and over to analyze.

On this particular Monday evening, a light rain was falling. She could hear the gentle sound of the drops against the trees outside her window.

This morning the rain made her happy, since it reminded her of her childhood in the Philippines, when the yellowish glow from the low-watt bulbs made the rooms look unearthly, and everything in them blurred, as though she were looking at her surroundings from underwater. She remembered sitting at the round table in the kitchen, which was her favorite room in the house, where she sat surrounded by the bustling maids, the sound of people entering and leaving.

All day the question had been inside her, waiting.

Her husband was sitting on the couch. She could just make out part of his nose in profile. He’d come home only an hour earlier, his hair slick with the rain. He had his face turned toward the TV, which this evening was showing an episode of 24.

When was it that she had noticed the hand? The hand that was just a hand, nothing else, reaching out to tap him on his shoulder.

Read the rest of it here.

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“Bad Thing”, was first published in Into the Fire: Asian American Prose (Greenfield Review Press, 1996)

It was October. Dela was driving along when suddenly she felt sick, as though she anticipated hitting a car or a road barrier. She could see the collision in her mind, almost hear the thud of something hitting her bumper.

Her son turned six that year. She realized that, for weeks, she had been expecting something to happen. Driving him to school, a feeling would come over her and she would slow down and look furtively right and left, right and left. When they arrived at the school without mishap, she would be surprised and thankful, though she didn’t know who she should be thankful to, she wasn’t the praying sort. Dela would ease her unsteady legs out of the car, call to her son with some measure of confidence, and push herself through the rest of her day. Like that.

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“Oaks” appeared in my short story collection, Mayor of the Roses: Stories (Miami University Press, 2005)

The truth is, everything she did these days was what her family might call “unbalanced.”

For instance, she’d visited her husband once at his officemate’s apartment. The officemate was named Dan. She had never met him, but she looked up his address from a company roster her husband had left behind. The apartment was in a complex called The Oaks, near the San Jose Airport. There were no trees anywhere; she wondered how the complex had gotten its name. Perhaps there had been, at one time, large trees where the apartments were now. But they’d apparently been cut down, every single one of them. Perhaps they’d even been victims of sudden oak death, which she knew had been a problem mentioned in the newspapers — on the rare occasions when she happened to read them — recently. All she had seen, that one time she visited, were low buildings and rows of small Japanese cars — Honda, Toyota, Nissan — parked in numbered spaces by the building entrances.

She’d never been to this part of San Jose before. In fact, she rarely ventured south, disliking the monotony of the buildings, the featureless streets. This part of the Bay Area felt different, flatter. The buildings were makeshift, thrown together. The freeway was close by and she could hear the roar of traffic.

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“Siko” was first published in The Forbidden Stitch (Calyx Books), and later included in my first collection Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila (Calyx Books, 1991)

The village of Bagong Silang is an untidy assortment of half a dozen palm-thatched houses, about a hundred kilometers north of Manila. It falls under the jurisdiction of the municipality of San Pablo, a town of a few hundred people, a day’s walk away. The people of Bagong Silang have lived for generations along a narrow strip of mud road that borders the rice paddies. They are, as a rule, thrifty and industrious folk. When not toiling in the rice fields, they tend vegetable gardens. They own a few pigs, a few chickens– nothing much else of value.

Aling Saturnina used to live in the last house on the left, the one behind the santol tree. But last year, she and her married daughter were taken to San Pablo in a military jeep, and since then no one has seen or heard from them. The villagers don’t like to talk about the events that led to Aling Saturnina’s disappearance. When asked, they cross themselves and their eyes slide sideways and perhaps one or two will invoke the name of the town’s patron saint, as though the saying of it had the power to protect them from all harm. If the questioner becomes too persistent–as lately some of these newspapermen from San Pablo have been–they escape to the rice fields, and wait there till nightfall before returning to their homes. They are simple folk and don’t bother with things they cannot understand.

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“Sutil” was first published in The Threepenny Review in Fall 1995. I later included it in my 2nd collection, Mayor of the Roses : Stories:

I was last home for my father’s funeral. I say “home” even though I am an American citizen now, sworn in with a twenty-piece Navy band in the grand ballroom of the Marriott Hotel on 4th and Mission in San Francisco. Yet “home” for me was always that other place, that city James Hamilton-Patterson describes as “a parody of the grimmer parts of Milwaukee.”

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“Don Alfredo and Jose Rizal” was first published in Story Philippines, vol. 1 and later appeared in Sou’wester (with a new translation of El Ultimo Adios by Edwin Lozada), Spring 2007.

The man in the black frock coat sits hunched over a wooden table, presses pen to paper. It is quiet in his dank little cell in the bowels of the old fort. I can hear the scratches his pen makes on the coarse paper. The sweat trickles down the back of his neck.

The man’s eyes, like mine, like all of ours, have an Asian cast. But his clothes are European. A tailor in Madrid made his coat, when he was a young student there. That was long long ago– before Bonifacio, before the Cry of Balintawak, before the ripping of the cedulas. And his wife has brought it to him with tears, so that he can face the firing squad with dignity.

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“Silence” appeared in Threepenny Review, Issue 72, Winter 1998 and was later shortlisted for the O. Henry Literature Prize

Before Tina got married, her mother took her out to lunch with a friend she knew only as Tita Fely. Tita Fely had a loud voice. She had hair cut short like a man’s. She was married to a handsome tennis instructor and had a beautiful house in Monterey and was raising four sons. Tita Fely looked at her and said, “Don’t let your husband push you around. Don’t be too good.”

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“Extinction” first appeared in ZYZZYVA and an excerpt was later aired on KQED’s “Pacific Time,” hosted by Nguyen Qui Duc — Feb. 23, 2006

The coastlines were bare, and the soil on which the people had built their homes was slowly washing out to sea. Thus there was great fear and trepidation in the coastline villages and the people there generally exhibited the clinical symptoms of depression

I made my home in a valley roughly 8 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide, in the province of S_____. Oval in shape, this valley was surrounded by a low rim of hills with fairly steep escarpments. Interspersed among the ravines grew loose thickets of bamboo. One side of the valley opened out to a narrow beach. In the mornings I walked down to the sand and observed the almost imperceptible movement of the waves.