by Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

Opathan | Danghus | Thursday

It was a gentle late-afternoon, pink and gold like a burden of beach roses. Tala was helping her grandfather harvest sweet potatoes with their small pod of harvester baskets. A carillon of bells pealed somewhere in the distance. The seven-year old quickly squatted down, excited and wide-eyed, as a swarm of floating air jellies suddenly streamed overhead, their amorphous, opalescent bodies twinkling like stars. Just seeing them made her heart sing with joy at the sheer awesomeness and wonder of existence. 

Her grandfather’s loud chuckle broke her reverie. “They descend from the ocean every night,” he teased, “yet every time it’s like you’ve never seen them before.”

“Lolo,” she asked, mildly irritated at her elderly companion, but still careful to use the ancient Filipino honorific for grandfather, “have you ever seen the ocean?”

“One day soon I will, my child,” he whispered, his voice hoarse as an old rocket engine, as the two of them filled a floating basket with the fattest, most purple sweet potatoes. “Any time now I will have to return to her, to Mother Ocean.”

KEITH SICAT is a filmmaker and comic book creator behind “OFW: Outerspace Filipino  Workers” which has proven to be a deep conceptual well for his pursuits in speculative fiction. His films have screened internationally with notable works including award-winners “Rigodon”, “Woman of the Ruins”, and “Alimuom”.  Also working in  animation, he was the script consult for the first 3D CG animated feature in the Philippines  “RPG: Metanoia” and helped develop the first Japanese-Filipino anime co-production “Barangay 143” with TV Asahi that is on NETFLIX.  He is also the Program Director of the NETFLIX supported short film lab iNDIEGENIUS which aims to give more opportunities to young regional filmmakers. 

He published his first short story, Ewa and the Song from a Distant Star, in Philippine Genre Stories, February 2023. 

by Keith Sicat

Aguirre wondered if these purple hints of violence on his knuckles matched better with his three-piece pin-stripe suit than his gaudy new belt buckle.  Coming from a brief black-site assignment outside of the Mega Manila Bio-Dome doing what used to be his favorite part of the job, he pondered if age was catching up with him.  

Roughing up dissidents was a young man’s game. Perhaps this was why the buckle was bothering him; the relentless reminder that he’s been downing too many premium off-world lagers.  No wonder he was eager to get his hands dirty again, catch a sniff of his former glory as a field agent.  Fisticuffs were fun!  Getting promoted to his glorified desk job meant the utter drag of wrapping your head around schemers and charlatans of all sorts.  The equations were so much simpler in the field; survive or die.  In this world of etiquette and fancy cutlery, you couldn’t assess whether you were actually surviving or being set up for your final meal.

Cesar Miguel “Miggy” Escaño loves playing all kinds of games: from videogames to boardgames and tabletop RPGs. He taught a subject called “Videogame Design and Theory” when he was a college teacher at the Ateneo de Manila. He’s a retro videogamer who pines for the old-school games he can never play again. He would like to believe that he was an expert in playing holen, shato, and sungka while growing up but it’s likely he wasn’t as good as he remembers. He’s always trying out new games for himself and his wife, for his children, and to play with his entire family.

Miggy first appeared in The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories Issue I Volume 3 in 2007 with his story “Tuko” that tackled bangungot or dying from a nightmare, and then returned in Philippine Genre Stories 2023 with a Muslim-Filipino futuristic world in  Sayf Al’Iiman.

by Cesar Miguel Escaño

Though he and his brother arrived early, Pedro felt he was late to the tournament. It was his first time to attend the National Sungka Championships, the most prestigious sungka competition in the country, though he had qualified for the turn-based game of strategy six years before. 

Better late than never, Pedro thought, as he surveyed the game tables and the competitors who had arrived before him. 

He counted 32 tables in total for 64 competitors, two competitors per table for a match. At this time before the tournament, the tables were empty. The sungkahan, the narrow wooden board used to play the game, would be distributed for each table twenty minutes before the start of the tournament to prevent players from tampering with any board before their match.