Fiction

I live in a community where we share everything, really everything like food, water and shelter. We share the work. We share our joys and sorrows. We work under a leader whose battle cry is: MOVE, MOVE, MOVE! Let me share how we move...

So this is how most women die, she learned, lying in pain on the floor of the main hallway at the governor’s palace. Forgotten. Her dress—once a beautiful, cream-white, sequined Filipiniana in the style of the former first lady—had been torn almost into shreds,...

Dr. Marta was seated on a stool in the Recovery Room writing her notes on a patient just transferred from the Delivery Room. Suddenly, she heard a sound coming from the unlit Labor Room-A just across the hall. The air was silent, empty,...

The gunfire echoed along the ship’s corridor. Kuya One, who was known only by his call sign, welcomed the sound this time, as it was an indication that some of his men were still alive. He sadly realized that their movement, at least...

I’ll begin with a crude reduction of La Bruyere’s opening paragraph from Les Characteres: Nothing here is meant to be the first of its kind. This thing itself is a pale and conflated imitation of what I found most resonant in the aphorisms...

No one, least of all her schoolmates at St. Celestina’s Academy, would have pictured Chona Laon Badoy as the Mayor of San Semilla in Negros Occidental. Chona herself had never aspired for political office, but only to public service, as her in-laws loftily...