I Shall Fatten the Fish with the Flesh of the Dead

“For three years now?”

“Yes.”

“And the owner doesn’t want it occupied?”

“In a way, but not exactly. She refused to be inconvenienced, you know, so she tells people that a man hanged himself in there ten years ago, or that another man killed his wife two years after that. She thinks it’s on her conscience to tell potential tenants, anyway.”

The young man and the landlord stood before the second floor’s sink, above which a window looked out onto a cluster of bulbous clouds in the east. Below was a concrete yard, hardly a fourth of a basketball court. Up ahead, between the yard and the smooth stone wall dividing the lot from the house next door was a patch of earth where a mango tree stood, its branches thick with new leaves, devoid of fruits or flowers, its roots disappearing into an overgrowth of weeds and a snarl of twigs. The concrete yard itself was unkempt. On the ground lay presidential candidates—grinning faces frozen on discarded tarps—obscured by brittle leaves, a shuttlecock, and wrappers for candy bars. This yard belonged to the house the landlord had emphasized was “cursed.” The one-story house stood to the left, its windows shut, the glass both frosted and inert with shadows.

“Then why put it up for rent, Mang Berting?” The young man, Anton Marasigan, Jr., asked. He wasn’t too keen to hear the story but he felt Berting was the kind of old man who’d take offense at being deprived of the chance to talk. Besides, Anton wished to have an amicable rapport with the person who owns the dorm.

“No one wants to buy a house like that,” Berting intoned. “And because she’s now a childless widow in L.A., she had nothing else to do but have a relative come in and look after the property and hope that someone would be willing to stay and make it useful for her.”

The talk then slipped to the specifics of Anton’s rent. When everything was explained, and all questions were asked and answered, he and the old man went to the latter’s office on the first floor, where the young man paid for his deposit, signed some forms, and left copies of certain documents.

This was in August of twenty-sixteen, more than a month following his decision to leave.

His decision had much to do with his belief that if he didn’t, he would turn into what he detested the most:  Anton Sr., a man of principles. And because the father hailed from the North—Ilocos Sur—his principles were the sort that the son found to be nauseating.

It wouldn’t have come to his having to leave if twenty-sixteen hadn’t been a bad year to be a person with unshakable convictions. But it soon became clear that silence would be the last thing to be observed in the household. It began with his father listening to speeches—even forgetting to turn off his phone as he lay on the couch, with the person who promised to fatten the fish of Manila Bay still talking on the screen on his beer belly, rising and falling as he snored. Then there were his speeches at the dinner table, repeating the ones he had heard, echoed by his wife. When he came home from work—he was a driver for a mogul who also backed the campaign of the mayor-turned-president—he at times brought with him materials Anton would rather have seen burned. Fold-out fans, calendars, wristbands, and even a mouse pad. His father handed him the mouse pad, assuming it would help some way or another, and Anton couldn’t help but say:

“Ew. No, thank you.”

The father took offense, and it was obvious to the son that he had things to say about the unwarranted reaction. Indeed, it was ironic that things only came to a head when it was Anton himself who, upon seeing his parents in the living room glued to the television, remarked:

“Why do you think a criminal is suited to lead us?”

Thus begun the arguments, the terrible silences, and the ugly debates about what constitutes a criminal over food or drives to places. It got so bad that when the subject of their debates had been decisively installed in the country’s highest position, the bitterness Anton felt was compounded by the way his mother and father gloated in the form of jibes.

“She’s a loser, anak. Haha joke lang!”

“Bakit, takot ka ba ma-tokhang?”

And so by the end of June he had resolved to live on his own terms. As he was both a scholar and a working student in the university, all he had to do was borrow money from his well-off friends to detach himself from what he saw as evil in his own home.

One Sunday, when his parents were out to get the dogs groomed, he quickly filled his bags with clothes and books and toiletries. Then he booked a cab. And then, out of their gate he went, straight to the dorm he found on the internet, after weeks of searching.

It took almost a month before full sleep came to him in his new home. Within the month that followed, he had bought the things he needed—the room was only furnished with an AC, a wooden bed frame, a square table and a squat stool—and he had to make a few more loans to purchase things like pillows, mattress, and microwave. Besides his work as an assistant at the school’s library and his schoolwork as a junior in college, he was weighed with the need to be more practical than he believed he already was.

Beyond all that, he was a neither a miser nor someone who willfully repressed himself. In fact, on the third month, he finally gave in to one of Bien’s persistent demands to go on a night out. Bien was one of his more affluent friends, from another course. They met during an audition for their faculty’s student chorale, where Bien was rejected and Anton was accepted but had declined to fully sign up as the rehearsals happened on the weekends. They found things to talk about while waiting in line, before a room in the student center building. They exchanged contact and had for three years now become a fixture in each other’s lives. It was Bien who first offered to lend him money when he heard about Anton’s situation, and it was him whom Anton had first invited to the room when he at last furnished it with what he needed. When on the third month Bien had asked him for the nth time to go out for a drink, he finally said yes.

“Thought you’d never come,” Bien said. They were in a quiet bar in Poblacion, leaning on a tall table with Bien’s partner, Oscar. To an extent Anton had also become friends with the latter.

Oscar said, “I was told you moved out.”

“I did.”

“What? Into a convent?”

“Huh?”

“You hardly go out with us anymore. You look so strung, too, if I didn’t know you, I’d think you’re a virgin.”

Anton threw Bien a look of feigned reproach, who just shrugged as if to say “His words, not mine.”

“Well,” Anton said. “You still don’t know me enough.”

He looked around the speakesy. The place was dark, and it was only a bit brighter in the bar, while the rest swam in shadows and a glaze of velvet hue from the lights tucked in discrete corners of the low ceiling. Pairs, solitary men, and little groups stood around the tables.

“Try me,” he told Oscar. “Like before.”

“Well, well, well.” Oscar rubbed his palms together, looked around for a while, before his gaze landed on someone at the bar. “There. A daddy in an office suit. He’s looking at you, anyway.”

“Babe—” Bien was saying, but he was cut off by his partner.

“Nah, let him have a good time. Right?”

Anton rolled his eyes at his friends, took a shot, and walked away from their little table. He wove through the other tables and patrons until he reached the bar. As he was approaching, he observed how the man tried to look casual as he drank from his cocktail glass. He threw a furtive glance in Anton’s direction, fidgeted with his tie, and tapped the wet surface beside his glass with nervous fingers. It appeared to Anton that the man might either be having a stroke or was simply a nervous, handsome silver fox.

“Hi,” Anton said upon reaching the man. “Is this seat taken?”

The man turned to him and said No, still trying to look casual as he drank from his glass.

“Are you with anyone?”

“I…” It was then apparent that the man, who looked well over forty, struggled to find something amusing to say. “I’m hoping I’d be with…with someone tonight.”

Good Lord, Anton thought. Then he arranged his stance, bringing to light the best of his features, the things he had to show and do to get what he wanted. For that’s what he was: Someone who wants, and someone who goes for the kill: “So. Where do I grovel to get a drink?”

The man didn’t seem surprised. He was, if Anton’s senses were right—and he believed he always was—charmed. His prey said, “No need.”

It didn’t take long for him to have an amaretto—the same as the man’s. He was already a little tipsy, and it turned out the the man’s drink was equally as potent as the bottle his friends had for their table. In a while he had the man’s name, and the man himself was a bit less inhibited. At length they found reasons to both laugh. Anton asked the right questions, positioning himself so as to reveal the best of his features. All of it worked. The man, now without shame, had a hand on his waist. And then right at the bar, their faces pressed against each other, mouths a little indiscreet. When Anton broke the whole thing off, the man asked for his number.

“Thanks for the drinks, sir.” Anton quickly stood from the stool. “I have to get back to my friends, though.”

He gave the man a quick peck on the cheek before walking off, refusing to look back.

At the table with his friends, the lovebirds regarded Anton with reverence, a bit of pride, and glasses raised in the air.

“Cheers to you,” Oscar said. “Our brave whore.”

“Indeed, I am!”

Glasses clinked.

At school they would meet when they had nothing better to do with the free time between their respective classes. One afternoon, they were at a billiards place just behind the university.

“Hey,” Bien said, leaning on the pool table to take a shot. Around them were other tables, seen through a haze of cigarette smoke, buzzing with conversations from other lounging students. “Sorry, Oscar’s such a troublemaker.”

Anton looked at Bien as he lit his fifth stick. He puffed and blew to a side, away from his friend, whom he knew had asthma. “No trouble at all.”

“Did you get that man’s number?”

“What man?”

“The man in the…” Bien stood straight, picking up the cue ball and handing it to his friend. It was a bad shot. “What the hell. Never mind.”

When he was handed the ball, Anton punched his friend playfully on the shoulder and positioned himself to take a shot. It was equally bad.

“Damn,” he said. “We’re really good at this.”

“I don’t even know why you want to hang here. I blame Oscar again. He was the only good one.”

“Where’s he, anyway?”

“Class.”

“That nerd.”

“You’re one to talk.”

When Bien began coughing and his eyes grew red from all the smoke, they went out to find a place to eat.

“Wanna have Sex?” Anton asked.

The joke was tired, so when it was asked among their friend group they just all understood what it really meant. In this dingy carenderia, three minutes away from the billiards place, Sisig Express was filled with students from the same university. They were lucky enough that one of the plastic tables were being vacated by a group.

While having their lunch—sisig on a hot plate paired with a mountain of rice—they talked.

“I remember this guy you introduced to us.”

“Which one?”

“The one from the College of Business. Whatever happened to that one?”

Anton appeared to think about it, chewing.

“Oscar thinks he’s nice, good for you even. Our other friends, too.”

“You know what. I don’t know. Something happened, then nothing else.”

“So, he wasn’t a date?”

“Date? Ew.”

“A one-time thing?”

“Maybe two. I really don’t know. I think he was good, though, so there was a second round.”

“There’s no harm in trying to be with someone, Anton—”

“Be with someone?”

“Look at me and Oscar.”

“You’re good for each other, I give you that,” Anton said. “But that’s not for me.”

The place slowly began to be emptied out. The hour for the next classes was approaching, and the two of them finished their food. When they were done, they went back inside the gate of the school, bid each other a good rest of their day, and parted. Bien to his next class, and Anton to his shift in the library.

Anton was deployed to Humanities, where he assisted the librarian four hours a day. It wasn’t a grueling job, and in fact it even gave him time to catch up on the things he had to read for school when there were no acquisitions to be taken care of. Sometimes, he’d pretend to haul a cart full of old books on the pretext of organizing them, and then he’d sequester himself in an obscure section between shelves and do his readings as a Journalism major. That he was in Humanities was nothing short of a miracle, too; when an assignment came, he could just grab what he needed without checking them out, even finishing papers within his shift.

That afternoon, however, he simply had to be there to fill in the hours and to get paid. He stacked books without needing to, inspected the desktops, the logbooks, and had an empty exchange with his fellow student assistant about what there was to do for the rest of the week—which was almost nothing. Bored by all these, he took Gravity’s Rainbow off a shelf and tried again to understand the first few pages. He was close to dozing off at the desk when a hushed voice suddenly said: “Excuse me.”

At first he thought it was the head librarian. He jolted himself awake and scrambled on his seat to appear attentive, and looked at the source of the voice to his right. It was a boy in an Accountancy uniform, one of those who struck him as a son of some wealthy businessman who paid their way for their child to be in the school.

“Yes?” Anton said, looking up at the tall, smooth-faced guy.

“Hi, uhm,” the boy suddenly looked shy, looking at the book Anton had shut and placed on the desk. “Is there any chance I could borrow that book from you?”

He looked at the novel. There was something terribly painful about reading the novel, and yet he always found himself picking it up and staring at its pages.

“Sure. I don’t think I get it, anyway,” Anton said. Then he added, as he was handing the book to the boy: “But it’s for room use only, ha?”

The boy smiled warmly. “I know. I’ve been coming here to try to finish it.”

Anton then realized this must be the one who was taking the book off the shelf during the times when he couldn’t find it. This must explain as well the dog-eared pages he had to straighten out every time he picked it up, and that day it was on page 191. Anton never got past page 8 after all these months.

He remained seated for a while after the boy walked off with the book. He felt cozy in his jacket, especially since the AC seemed to be always cranked not to “Cold” but “Freezing.” When he finally found the will to stretch and stand, he strolled around the place again, not knowing what he wanted to do until he finally spied the Accountancy major at one of the desks on the other side of the library. The book was propped up on a wooden stand, opened, and the boy read with such absorption that his brows were furrowed, as if worried about something in the book Anton could hardly understand. Occasionally, the boy would stop reading and write some notes in a wide journal.

Anton padded the floor quietly. He was suddenly attentive to the movements of the boy, and he walked between shelves, taking dusty books out, cracking them open, and shutting them. He read nothing. His senses were attuned to the table where the boy sat. After almost an hour, the boy finally closed the novel and his journal, stood away from the table, and walked to the shelf where the book belonged. All this time Anton was pretending to read something off a leather-bound volume of Montaigne’s essays, which seemed to have never been opened ever since its arrival in the library. He was standing by the side of a metal rack, occasionally raising his eyes to see what the boy was up to. When he saw him taking his backpack and heading for the exit, Anton returned the tome and went to the front desk to tell his colleague that he’d be stepping out for a while.

He caught up with the boy at the elevator. As they both waited for it to arrive, Anton cleared his throat and said, as if he only realized then whom he had chanced upon: “Oh, hey, you’re the guy who reads Pynchon.”

The boy turned to him, smiled, chuckled and said: “Yes.”

“I never understood that book. But I keep wanting to read it, anyway.”

“Maybe because it’s funny?”

“Is it?”

“It sure is, I think so.” The boy suddenly looked reluctant. “I read at least an hour a day, when I can.”

“I see. You going home now or do you have class?”

“Home. But I’m going to the restroom first.”

“What are the chances? I’m taking a bio break myself.”

“You’re a student assistant, right? At least I see you there often.”

“I am, yes. What year are you in, by the way?”

“Fourth.”

Interesting, Anton thought. Senior. Older.

They rode the elevator and got off on the third floor, where the restrooms were. They talked on the way. When they reached the male restroom, Anton began to steer his words, and then his eyes, to direct their interaction to something less academic. By the time he was washing his hands before the mirror he and the boy had their gazes locked on each other. There was no one else around. It was a floor with a lot less foot traffic, and the only sound came from the blades of the ventilator on a wall.

Anton dried his hands, and walked to the furthest cubicle, keeping his eyes on the suddenly entranced boy. The latter followed. When they were both inside, the boy whispered nervously, “I haven’t done this before.”

The boy looked up. His breathing shallow.

In a tone he aimed to sound innocent, Anton lied: “Me, too.”

He reached behind the boy to bolt the door.

Fifteen minutes later, they emerged one after the other, with the boy asking him about his life.

“What’s your major?

“What’s your IG?

“What’s your name?

These were all asked as they washed their hands, and not one of them he answered. He’d only smile and say “It’s classified information.”

After drying his hands, Anton said goodbye before walking away. He ran up the stairs instead of using the elevators, back to the fifth floor where Humanities was. He thought of picking up the book. He looked at his watch and realized his shift was about to end, anyway. He thought of his new home, his meal for that night, and the sleep or the dream he might have. He never again thought of the boy.

In the weekend that followed Bien had again dragged him to a bar. This time, it was on Tomas Morato, and while sitting idly with his friends on a leather couch, a man who in the dark seemed familiar approached their table.

He was tall, muscular, and bearded. “Hey,” he said.

It was clear that he was talking to no one else but Anton. The latter said: “Do I know you?”

“It’s Jerry.”

Anton squinted through the strobe lights. “Oh, yeah. What’s up?”

“We have an event. We’re leaving at four. Wanna come? My place again.”

Anton threw Bien and Oscar a look as if to ask for permission. Bien just shrugged, while Oscar grinned and took a drink from his martini glass.

“You guys could come, too.” Jerry told the couple.

“Oh, no, no, no.” Bien said. “But thanks for the invite.”

Oscar smiled a little too eagerly at the man. “My babe here isn’t really a fan of—” he waved a hand in the general direction of Anton and Jerry “this—whatever this is.”

The man nodded, his response weighed by an unspoken understanding. He turned to Anton, “But you’re coming, alright?”

Anton looked around the bar. Not a face, so far, had been convincing enough to be approached. “I’ll say 80-20. Someone interesting might go through those doors.”

“I’ll look for you before we leave.” Jerry turned and disappeared in the mass of dancing bodies between the tables.

When there was a lull in the pulsing music, Anton asked his friends if it was okay for him to leave earlier.

“Why are you asking, anyway?” Bien said. “You’ll leave us no matter what we say.”

“Babe!” Oscar slapped his partner’s shoulder. Then he turned to Anton, “What Bien is really saying is: He’s worried.”

“Worried? Why?”

“The last time you joined them we had to pick you up. And you threw up in the car.”

Anton was suddenly engulfed with shame.

“Would you just promise,” Bien said. “That you’ll be careful this time? No funny business.”

“I’m not sure if I’ll be coming, anyway.”

Bien scoffed. “Right.”

When the clock struck four, as if on cue, Jerry was back at their table to take Anton with him.

“Keep that bitch safe!” Oscar yelled at him as Anton was taken to the exit.

Anton woke up in a strange yet familiar bed in a room lit by an afternoon light through a thick lace curtain, without his clothes. Other men lay on the bed with him— and on the floor and the leather couch in a corner—in different stages of sleep and undress. His head was throbbing and his nether parts were aching. He fumbled around and realized he had left his things downstairs—in Jerry’s living area.

He picked up his clothes from the floor, careful not to wake any of the snoring men sprawled on the carpet, and quietly slipped out the door. Downstairs, he found Jerry and a few of the other bare-chested guys seated around a table, smoking and sipping from cups. He remembered he was naked and dressed himself right then and there, while telling their host, “A cup for me, please.”

Jerry stood up and poured him a cup of coffee, while he settled at the table in front of an empty chair. On this chair, Anton sat and finally let out a groan, rubbing his head. He asked the men: “What time is it?”

“Two.”

“Holy shit.”

A wave of laughter passed around the table, including Anton himself. He searched the room for his things, spotted them in a corner, and picked up his phone. As he went back to his seat, he saw that it was powered off.

“That thing kept ringing,” Jerry said. “I had to turn it off.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

When Anton turned it on, he saw that it had more than a dozen missed calls and unanswered texts. It alternated between Bien and Oscar’s numbers, asking him how he was, where he was, and if he was home. Newer messages still came as he was sifting through some of the ones he received.

At three, when his head settled a bit, and as the others were waking up and going downstairs as well, he texted his friend.

It was Oscar who later arrived, alone.

“Is Bien mad?”

“Fuming,” Oscar said as he drove off the street where Jerry’s house was. “Worried sick.”

“Sorry.”

“Nah. You tell that to him on Monday, in person. He almost couldn’t sleep because of you.”

“I mean, I’m alright.”

Oscar ignored the remark. He shook his head, though still smiling good-naturedly. “It’s like we have a child.”

The first thing he did, upon being dropped off at the dorm by Oscar, was to stumble his way upstairs and straight to the sink. He retched on the metal basin so loud that at one point, Mang Berting was running upstairs to check what was happening.

“I thought someone was yelling,” Mang Berting said as he watched Anton with amusement. The young man haunched before the faucet, heaving, letting out of his mouth a river of bile. “I would’ve whooped your ass if anything solid comes out of your mouth.”

“Sorry, Manong,” Anton looked up at the landlord helplessly.

“Ah, you poor boy,” the old man said. “I’ll get you something. Wait for me.”

The old man walked away, heading downstairs, while Anton remained bent over the sink. Before him was the window, beyond which sunlight slanted on top of the mango tree, where small brown sparrows flitted in and out between the fresh green leaves. Below, the yard remained still in the shadow thrown by the dorm.

The world spun. It was fortunate that he managed to keep his composure in the car, or Oscar might have lost it as well. Here, before the sink, he finally acknowledged the need to be sick. And the pebbles of light that suddenly appeared before his eyes, superimposed against his vision of the tap and the window and the silent houses in front of him.

Which was why he thought he was hallucinating when a movement caught his eyes down below.

It was a cat, its fur as black as the approaching night, walking on the concrete yard and heading towards the thick weeds. It took him some time to realize that it was real, and that it wasn’t simply walking. It had seen something between the grass, and its stance suggested that it was stalking. There was something slow, deliberate, and a little unnerving about the way it approached whatever it saw.

Because there were faint lights dancing before his eyes, he had trouble being certain of the thing the cat was spying on. When his vision cleared a little, he saw a piece of wood on top of the grass. It was in fact a fallen branch. Dried, leafless, and perhaps on its way to decomposing and being a part of the earth that made the weeds and the tree possible.

Anton wondered what it was about the piece of wood that the cat had been so invested in. For a while, in his drunken stupor, he thought that the branch wasn’t a branch but a rodent, the size of a fat, stunted limb or a full-grown rabbit.

But then the cat leaped.

As it did so, something shot out, up in the air, from behind the grass flattened by the fallen branch. It was almost a blur of a movement, but the black-furred thing was even quicker: in a blink the predator had in its mouth this shadow that moved from the leaves.

Anton now watched, sweat trickling from his temples, down to his chin.

The black cat had in its mouth a bird. It was a little sparrow, one of those that usually nested in a mango tree. It must have strayed to the ground, hunting for worms and—seeing the cat—had tried to use the color of the fallen wood to hide itself.

But there was no way to trick the eyes of a starving stray.

And now the bird was in between the fangs, its wings quickly moving in an attempt to free itself. To no avail. The cat walked in the middle of the yard, on top of the tarps, and wasted no time killing its prey. Anton could imagine the fangs closing in on the bird’s neck, the rest of the teeth sinking through the feathers and the flesh, before snapping the little bones.

Blood sprayed on the fading face printed on the tarp.

Suddenly, from behind, a voice: “Here you go.”

Anton almost jumped, and realized that it was Mang Berting. He turned and saw the old man holding a steaming cup on a saucer. He didn’t ask, but the old man said anyway: “Ginger tea. For your head, ‘Nak.”

He took the cup, thanked the old man, and settled it beside the sink. The old man asked him if he was feeling better and he said “a bit,” which was enough for Berting to walk away and return to his office downstairs.

Anton turned to the window. Down, on the yard, the cat and the bird had disappeared.

Only the face remained, grinning beneath a spray of blood.  

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George Gonzaga Deoso, 28, is the author of The Horseman’s Revolt and Other Horrors (USTPH, 2020)and Tropical Psycho: Tales of Darkness and Terror (Tomas monograph, 2024).