by Marianne Villanueva

Ana’s mother moves her head backwards and forwards. Her head is a flower, her neck a stem so fragile it can barely support this flower. There was a typhoon, Ana’s mother says. There was a blackout. I gave birth to you in the dark. The doctors had to use flashlights. It was just after midnight. She adds, almost absentmindedly, Typhoons are always given women’s names, I don’t know why.

Ana wishes there were something more to hold on to. Her mother is dying. Not this very minute, but with each passing day her memory disintegrates a little more. Disintegrates. Ana hates that word. But it is true. And every day that more of her mother’s memory moves away, or disappears, or is lost, the same happens to Ana’s personality, to her childhood. 

They’re in the collection center, aka sanitarium. No one calls them what they really are because it increases people’s anxiety/heart rate and memories get garbled. The mind and the body are interconnected, or at least that’s what the Interceptors aka healers tell us. They’ve been working at their tasks for a long time. I, we, have to believe them.

The same is happening everywhere. In time, everything will be lost. Without a past, who will they be? Memories are spores. Once scattered, they never return.

Joseph F. Nacino has been published in local anthologies such as the Philippine Speculative Fiction series, A Time for Dragons, Friendzones, and garnered First Place in the 2007 Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards with his story “Logovore”.  He has also published in international platforms like Fantasy Magazine, City in the Ice, Kitaab’s Asian Speculative Fiction. He subsequently helmed three anthologies featuring fantasy, horror, and science fiction in the Philippines published online, and in print and ebook form: The Farthest Shore: An Anthology of Fantasy Fiction from the Philippines co-edited with Dean Francis Alfar; Demons of the New Year with Karl R. De Mesaand; Diaspora Ad Astra with EmilM. Flores.

Noteworthy is how his story, “Insomnia”, was part of the Premier Issue of the print Digest of Philippine Genre Stories,  which was inspired by the Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters etching of Francisco de Goya. And his story “War Against the City”, what he considered his first-born child and may have been inspired by Neil Gaiman’s short stories in The Sandman: The Wake, was published in the Special Horror Issue of the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories guest-edited by Yvette Tan. He then served as a guest-editor of Philippine Genre Stories in 2012 and published Vinci’s Real-Life Pulp Fiction (Part 1) and Vinci’s Real-Life Pulp Fiction (Part 2).  In 2023, he  returns to PGS with his story “SELDA 34”.

by Joseph F. Nacino

Twenty-five detainees were lined up outside Selda 34 under the pouring monsoon. Many were dressed in regular shorts, slippers, and shirts. A few wore sandos, their bare shoulders shivering in the cold. Sullen and red-eyed, they squatted with their hands on their heads in the small courtyard of the police station, watched over by a handful of policemen taking shelter under the station’s roofed inner corridors.

Among the detainees was 16-year-old Binoy, trembling from being drenched by the rain. He vainly tried to stop his teeth from chattering.

Philippine Genre Stories has always aspired to be able to publish stories exploring the genres in the Philippine languages. In 2024, in addition to the submissions of previously unpublished genre stories in English, PGS is opening its portals for submissions of previously unpublished genre stories written in any of the native languages with an English translation.

With Mia Tijam, author of the 40^th National Book Award Finalist for Short Fiction in English “Flowers for Thursday”, co-editor of Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler, and editor for the Special Section for PWDs and PADs of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ Literary Journal ANI 41: LAKBAY, still serving as Guest Editor, please email your submissions to philippinegenrestories(at)gmail(dot)com.

Celestine Trinidad is a pathologist who writes fiction of various genres in her spare time, including speculative fiction, romance, crime, young adult, and children’s short stories. Her other stories have been published in various print and online venues such as Philippine Speculative Fiction, Philippines Free Press, Philippines Graphic, and Insignia. She won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature in 2008 for her short story for children “The Storyteller and the Giant”.

Her first official published work was in Philippine Genre Stories Issue 2 with the story “Beneath the Acacia”, based on the legend of Maria Sinukuan and her suitor Tikbalang, back when she was just in her first year in med school. She was published again in Philippine Genre Stories 2012 for her story Under A Mound Of Earth (Part 1) and Under A Mound Of Earth (Part 2). Celestine returns to Philippine Genre Stories 2023 with her story “THE ONES WHO LINGER”.