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Philippines Graphic Reader

Three Baggies, One for Each of Us

“Did you get it?” Tobi asked, though he already knew the answer just by the look on Jimwel’s face. “Three baggies, one for each of us,” the younger boy said.“Your mother won’t notice?” Greg asked. “I fudged the numbers on her records,” Jimwel said. “Even...

What Are Years?

“It’s now or never,” said Marie, who’s in her mid-twenties, with a rugged face, vivacious and full of urgency. She took her friend’s right hand and almost dragged her out of the seat. But her friend Ana Dimalanta was less enthusiastic. Ana was...

The Wonderer in the Age of Fake

Like any 12-year-old, Angel likes to read various posts on social media. Some she finds funny. Others, interesting or informative. But sometimes she is bothered because some posts make her doubt, still others leave her confused. She wonders if all of them are...

Seven Excerpts toward a Theory of Musicology (For Elizabeth)

Our estrangement It begins with a boat trip of course, as all things do, and where else but to Dumaguete, city in the south, year 1962, with elder sister and the old folks, who weren’t quite so old back then. Overnight at the pier of...

The Ship

“He actually did all this?” Kyla whispered to herself as she searched through old papers hidden behind the boxes below her father’s side of her parents’ wardrobe. Written on these papers were blueprints of a theoretical spaceship engine that could help get ships...

The Root of All Evil

UNDER THE UNFORGIVING MID-MORNING SUN, the habal-habal revved with one throaty growl as it crawled its way through the insanely rough terrain, its tires gripping the earth with determination. The driver was a sunbaked old man in jeans, T-shirt and worn-out tsinelas with...

Random Pickings

2 poems

He Thinks Sounds Succumb to Extinction Perhaps he no longer gives the same attention to the sounds that once fed his senses: like the inconsolable sounds of waves through an empty...

Naked

I’ll wear nothingbut my trembling desirethe wild beat of my pulsethe lingering whispers of my past. I’ll wear nothingbut the ache of my lost love the...

The Photograph

Here my mother, who must have been in her early forties, sits on a stone ledge at Fort San Pedro overlooking the Guimaras Strait. The sun must...

Hidden Sounds of Nature

White, fresh snowfall Its arrival, highly anticipated presents a silence All is absorbed All sounds trapped in all this snow The fluff, the layers have made it All quiet All slow Eventually It is...