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Fiction

The girl in the river

It had been a hard death, that much was clear. The Pasig River had spit the girl out at the end of a long storm. The body had been found drifting with all the other trash people hoped the river could take away from...

The yule tree

From when she was a child, Marivic could see spirits. A hairy creature, half-man and half horse and smoking a cigar, occupied the balite tree by the gate of their residential compound. Low hillocks in the garden, said by the gardener to be ant...

A child’s reality of Santa Claus

TO GO KILL SANTA CLAUS—Jason was saying, and I was listening intently—one has to shoot him down with the T-square of the Mechanical Engineers. Santa Claus—Jason continued—to both children and adults is the perennial inhabitants of the world of the World of Christmas....

The Man with the Missing Leg

The sky was bleeding its last light out onto the sky when I saw the man who lay face down on the pavement. A gaggle of onlookers was exchanging furious, if muted, conversation beyond a yellow picket-line. My first thought, naturally, turned to how...

The sky painter

Dawns would not exist without Fernando. Cloudy skies, golden sunsets, and starry nights all would not exist, because Fernando was in charge of painting them all. With a stroke of his brush, he turned night into day, and day back into night–which was...

Blank

It’s post-dismissal time when you see it again, although you won’t appreciate this one small consolation until later. At the moment, same as any other weekday, the fetching cars are advised to claim their children within ten seconds near the blue school gate....

Random Pickings

The beautiful horse

One day my father brought home a beautiful horse. She was the most beautiful white horse anyone in our barrio of Pulong-Masle had ever...

In the name of the daughter

Marya Ignacio weaves her hair with her fingers watching as the curls separate adhesively from her sweat-dripped forehead. They have been on the hillside...

Just a Pomelo Fruit

No, not again! Mayla heard herself complain when she saw the long queues. She could not make it on time for her favorite TV...

House of Leaves

“A week ago, just before you arrived, DongJosé,” my grandfather was telling me in between locomotive puffs from his rolled lomboy cigar. “A damn...