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Philippines Graphic Reader

Long before Darkness, Or, The Night Ileana Fell in Love

She had lived in the shadows all her life. Literally this meant the shadows of the mountains in the rural town where she was born and where she spent the earliest years of her childhood. Then came the shadows of the skyscrapers that...

Indignation as Elegy

An elephant without a face greeted me on Facebook today, his trunk and tusks hacked away by poachers eager for ivory. At first I thought it was a watermelon sliced in half, mistaking the pinkish blood for the pulpy flesh of succulent fruit. Why bother to extract excessive teeth and risk being...

All Fall Down

Anatalia Ayala had promised Bellisima Cua that the story and photos about her winning the Volzhacker Prize would appear in the newspaper’s online lifestyle section this week. These had not seen print in any of the inner pages of the main broadsheet’s news...

Eight Legs Is All

It’s unfair. With small bodies, they move in all directions. Once a leg gets broken—which usually happens when they resist to be caught—they have seven more to spare. No difference. They still move like they used to. Kuya Ping is one of the tikri...

The King who Had Nothing

“What makes a man a king?” A young pauper asked as he sat on his father’s lap. They sat meekly on the side of an alleyway near the town square, under the shadow of a hill where a majestic castle stood. Amidst the...

The News of You

Briefly, just after college, I left my parents’ house, thinking independence was a priceless thing. It was worth it, I liked to remind myself, especially on idle Saturday mornings with their slowness, the bread warm and inviting, to be chewed with an amorous relish....

Random Pickings

YUSARI

1 “The fish are small,” Amir lamented. “The catch is pitiful. They won’t fetch a good price. I’m afraid we can’t raise the money for...

The Eyes that Follow

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...

Amen

IN A HOLY ROOM, THE PRESIDENT PROCLAIMS: My fellow countrymen, I have always sought to protect you. The government used to be filled with...

A Farmer’s Memory

The neighbors say he suffers from dementia. On the balcony, he stares at the cloudless sky. How he declares the stars have turned into tubers of motley shapes...