Philippine Speculative Fiction (24 page)

“I used to be a marcupo,” snaps Luz, surprising herself. She doesn’t like to talk about her scaly past and she’s never been provoked to do so. This girl, she decides,
brings the worst out of people.

“But you aren’t anymore,” says Tai, “and I just killed someone.”

LUZ FOUND OUT what she really was when she was young and she quickly developed a habit for when her parents left her in the house alone. When the house was emptied of them, of
their
sapienness
, their rationality and their even keel, it felt just about right. Everything dropped its act. The mirror stopped pretending it wasn’t looking at Luz, the TV stopped
pretending it wasn’t judging her. In moments like these, Luz’s heart unmoored from its usual place of screwdrivered tightness.

Luz would take the back door close to the kitchen that led to the basement. No one in her family cleaned these parts. She found her mouth full of cobwebs and a beetle on her face. The door
closed behind her in the dark, rust singing, shutting off the only source of light. In the dark, she began to strip. Slippers, shirt, underwear. The dust and filth on the concrete stairs crept into
the webs of her toes. She folded her clothes and left them on the top step as she went down.

Not yet, not yet. Too narrow. Too close to the surface, the neighbors will hear. The anticipation consumed her, like the energy and desire that accompanies a smoker returning to her cigarette
after an attempt to quit.

By the time she reached the bottom, she was sweating. Here was home. She put her palms flat against one side of the wall, disturbing a nest of rats, and before she could even steady herself, she
felt her ribs tear and her mouth open.

DOMINIC’S EYES STARE at the tubes of fluorescent lights on the ceiling and his head rests against the cabinet. The siokoy has begun to stink in the middle of the greasy,
spilled water that oozes under him like colorless blood. The bottom edge of his lopped-off tail looked darker than the rest of his body. Over the smell of fish, like a descant, is the unmistakable
stench of feces.

A hamburger.

That’s what Luz suddenly wants, in the middle of this grotesque room. Big and fat, with grease running on the side.

She wills the image away. Tai is standing by the door, unable to move, frozen in her denial. The girl kept changing her story when they were in Luz’s car on the way to the union office.
She had ripped his head off; she had pierced his heart with a talon; she had smashed his body against the wall; he had hit his head on the table edge; she had done nothing.

And still, Luz wants to eat. She wonders if she had forgotten to eat dinner. A nebulous picture surfaces. Yes, she had eaten; she had takeaway just three hours ago in the office before Tai had
burst in. Pad thai and soft-shell crabs. She had a Sprite.

All of these thoughts are making her hungrier with a dizzy urgency. She needs to sit down.

On the sofa, Luz opens her bag and rummages for some candy. She has a half-eaten chocolate bar. She tears the wrapper off and wolfs the rest of it down.
More!
But she bites it back and
it comes out as a moan.

Tai is staring at her from the door, a question in her face. The fish smell from Dominic seems to be growing heavier now, an evil fist that jams itself into Luz’s throat and opens each
finger one by one.

At first Luz thinks it’s her stomach reacting to the fish smell and going haywire, but it’s not, it’s something more alarming. It’s familiar. It makes her think of
milkfish and mangoes, someone nearby burning wood. Seaweed on the shore, like a mermaid’s hair, the saltiness of beach country.
Hayop nga tag-as, walay tiil o kamot, magkamang sa yuta
gamit ang himbis sa tiyan, pagkiway-kiway o pagtuyhakaw sa lawas
, a laugh, someone pulling a drink from a beer bottle,
halas, halas
. A tokay gecko squashed by a rock, its speckled
green-and-orange body almost perfectly fossilized, knobs on its skin.

No
, she tells the house lizard clinging on one of the office window’s askew Venetian blinds.

Luz begins to feel as though someone has stuck an IV needle into her from a coffee drip. She is incredibly alert. She can
sense
the fetid air rushing into the fine tesserae of her
alveoli and hemorrhaging into her blood.

A tremor in her, like an earthquake in its youth.

It’s ridiculous. She had the operation. The marcupo is gone.

Tai is saying something to her. Luz can’t make it out. Everything is bright and loud, her teeth, her blood, but Tai is opening her mouth into strange shapes and nothing is coming out.

Tai comes closer to her. Luz likes baby birds, the way their bones crunch almost willingly between her fangs. Luz likes little girls, stewed in innocence, seasoned with fear. Why else had she
driven all the way here with her?

“Toilet,” Luz says, moving her mouth. Her mouth hangs loose, her jowl unwilling to move back up. It wants to stretch down and separate and engulf Tai.

The bewilderment in Tai’s face is no help. Luz gathers what’s left of her strength and heaves herself towards the door.

LUZ DOESN’T KNOW how long she has passed out. What she remembers is staring into the mirror above the sink, looking intently into her eyes, praying for her stomach to
stop swirling. Then she was opening her eyes, staring at the ceiling in wonder from the floor. She hasn’t had a sleep as good as that for a long time. The ceiling isn’t the ceiling of
her bedroom.

When she remembers everything, she doesn’t sit up from the floor. She’s wishing the nausea would go away, like the pains you feel at night that evaporate when you sit up and put your
slippers on in the morning.

Luz sits up and vomits on the floor. It’s thick and dark and gives a heavy, stomach-twisting odor. She doubles over for a fresh wave. When she surfaces, she sees human blood in the mess:
pinkish, anemic, and unnatural.

The last time she had retched like this was after the operation. Her father had driven her from NAIA because he said her mother was off doing groceries. She asked him what he had been doing in
the three months she had been away; nothing much, her Tiyo Jemer’s left for Davao with his family to go into the volcanic soil export business, so beer and cards night was out. He asked him
how they went about with the operation, she said she didn’t know because she had been out cold the whole time. The rest of the car ride had been silent.

When she was alone in her room, she kept waiting for the urge to transform but it never did. She kept seeking for it like a phantom limb. One thing less she needed to worry about. The emptiness
was freeing. She cried a little, and when she looked at the mirror afterwards and saw she had the same eyes, the same cheekbones that glowed with a new confidence and inner knowledge that she had
nothing to hide from anyone now.

She had drifted off in bed. When she woke up, she heard her mother moving around in the kitchen. Luz went out. Her mother was whisking sauce in a bowl, her back towards Luz, and the fire was
roaring.

Luz took the chopping board to help with the vegetables when her mother noticed her and jumped away. It wasn’t exactly a jump; it was a recoil, two panicked steps away from her daughter,
hand on her clavicle. Then her mother had taken the chopping board from her and waved her away with a tight little smile.

After dinner, Luz spent the evening in the toilet sink, vomiting the rest of the blackness.

WHEN SHE COMES out of the toilet, Tai is gone. The body is still there, unmoved.

The first thing Luz feels is fury. Tai leaving is a display of irresponsibility, a blatant disregard of consequences. The body is still there and now Luz has to do something about it.

The second thing she feels, almost without a proper transition, is serenity. It’s difficult to fight it. She’s exhausted. Her bones feel like they’re about to unhinge.
It’s been a long day and she had just passed out in the toilet.

Luz comes closer to the siokoy, an old, natural prey of hers, and the delicious recognition of this rolls in her mouth, thickening. A fresh stench of decay slams her face and unwinds her,
pushing her over the edge.

She cries out as her scales rip her back apart, hysterically churning and crushing any remnant of her human form with equal parts anger and relief. A sharp crest emerges from her head and her
jaws widen and stretch, showing off her fangs and the sweet, venomous glands between her smooth, hard lips. Her hearing blurs until it finally dissolves and she can only sense the vibrations of her
forked tail knocking over a chair. She bellows, her breath producing puffs of dust and poison.

She lies there, marble-eyed and spent. Her cold, elongated body heaves rhythmically, the red and moss-green scales flexing between breaths. Her tongue flicks, mapping out the rodents and
amphibians and the dead body in the room.

How wrong and how right.

Her entire frame throbs as she takes the siokoy’s body into her jaws. Something isn’t quite right. Something is too loud, too fast. Her heart is about to burst, but she is hungry. So
she lets it.

THE CITY IS a mosaic alight. Hexagons of fire, magic honeycombs.

Tai perches next to an angel on top of Quezon Monument, turning away just right so the spotlights don’t touch her.

She wants to shroud herself with her immense wings here until dawn. If she were a manananggal, she could wait until the sunlight kills her, but she doesn’t have that luxury. The world is
under her talons. If she were a grown garuda, not the chick that she was, her wings could cover the sun.

She wants to cut them off. Have her feathers plucked out like she’s a fresh young chicken in the market. Cut into fillets and sold. Her body can feed a whole village and be useful.

She will always be forbidden to have a license to appear in public and there will always be the hostile glance. Dominic’s day will never come.

A shudder goes through her massive body.

She can pinpoint where the union office is from where she is. She had run away; there’s no other way of calling it. When Luz had run to the toilet, Tai had been left alone for the second
time that night with Dominic’s body and the implications of what she had done. Is this why people want her off the streets?

The silence of Dominic’s absence had accumulated and she had retreated. Then as she flew through the uselessly big sky, she had cried, seeing only the picture of Dominic’s mangled
tail, and she allowed her howls to take their place with the headwind.

THIS IS THE scene that greets Tai when she returns to the office.

Dominic is gone. There’s a new smell in the room, gamey and lethal. In the middle of the wreckage are thick coils, blood-brilliant scales that curl on the floor in cold, tidy loops. The
marcupo’s head is buried in the middle of the ball of muscle. Stuck inside the second coil is a huge, misshapen lump, swollen and hard like a giant sack of flour.

Tai places a hand on the marcupo and tenses her muscles in anticipation of the response. Nothing. Cold. Not the exhilaration of ocean water on a naked body, not the precision of a snake’s
hearing. Cold like there’s a bit less anito fire to go around with.

Tai climbs up and clutches the vast body of the snake with her long talons. She unfurls her wings. The room moves. The windows and the drywalls shatter. In the flying debris, Tai beats her wings
and she rises, dragging the bodies up with her.

As she smashes through the disintegrating walls, she is careful not to scratch the lump in the marcupo’s body. She gives a loud call and the tree tops quiver and children turn in their
beds.

The head of the marcupo unwinds from the coils and hang in the air, the stiff jaws still open, the dead, marble eyes catching the moonlight. Tai tightens her grasp on Luz’s slick, metallic
skin and soars over the geometry of the city, searching for a river on the way home.

Marianne Villanueva is a writer from the Philippines. She is the author of the short story collections
Ginseng and Other Tales From Manila,
which
was a finalist for the Philippine National Book Award;
Mayor of the Roses;
and
The Lost Language.
Her work has been published or is forthcoming in
The Threepenny Review,
ZYZZYVA, the New Orleans Review, Hotel Amerika, Storysouth, Prism International, Phoebe, the Asian American Literary Review, Word Riot, J Journal
and
Crab Orchard Review,
among others.
She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is completing a collection of speculative fiction to be called
Magellan’s Mirror.

SOFIA HAD BROAD shoulders and large feet which reminded everyone who knew her of her deceased father. Her face had a perpetually anxious, questioning look. She spoke little and
was often seen to be reading—either a newspaper or a magazine or a book she had checked out from the library. She was considered a woman of pure and unblemished spirit, one whose name had
never been sullied by unsavory gossip—no, never, not even when she was much younger and had been considered pretty.

Her two-story, wooden house lay on the outskirts of Sagay, a dusty town of five thousand people. Next to her house was the cemetery where Sofia’s parents, grandparents and siblings had
been laid to rest.

Wonderful Sofia! Whose intuition and perspicacity had been honed to such a fine point during her long life, during a life that had been spent, mostly, in avoiding excitement, and hence, shame.
She had been safe, all these decades. No one had whispered things about her.

As far as admirers, she had had two. She had no idea what qualities had attracted these boys. They were shy, the kind who read books and wrote poetry and felt better if they treated a woman with
gentleness. Nothing about them excited her, and after a few dull outings, she felt the boys shrinking back. The look in their eyes said,
I have made a mistake.

Then, when she turned 50, Sofia realized that she could do whatever she liked, have a man or men over, have them stay late, and no one would suspect her of indiscretion. Because she had become
old. She was beyond thought.