by Sharmaine Galve

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

I suppose people think that when you’re diagnosed with anxiety disorder, with the prescriptions and certificate to prove it, your panic attacks would be loud, explosive, and a complete scene- stealer. You would be a puddle of water on the floor, crying at the sight of light and sounds and people peering over you.

But, you know what they say, that’s what movies have done for us. Perpetually giving us an inaccurate picture of things.

Of course, I may be wrong. Maybe I do look spooked during a panic attack. Dilated eyes, pale as an ordinary cloud unpossessed by rain, zombie-walking like I need brains rather than wanting to eat them.

But nobody has called me out for that. Nobody even knew I was having them until I softly say, “I am having a panic attack.” Then everyone panics.

Larizza Joise Macabulos, or LJ for short, enjoys gourmet cooking, fine wine, and, of course, scary stories. A lover of all things macabre, horror, coffee, tea, and music, she is a cult worshipper of Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, and HP Lovecraft. She graduated from AB Literature at the University of Santo Tomas, and her research focused on Gothic literature in the Philippines.  LJ hopes to publish a novel and  “Crimson All Over” is her first published work outside the university. 

by Larizza Joise Macabulos

How cold, she thinks to herself as she lay unmoving, listening to a stranger: Specimens collected, at the time of the post-mortem examination, are detailed in the following autopsy protocol. The decedent is one Rosaline Isabel Palermo, female, identified through facial recognition and dental records. 

She can feel her body being lifted, arms bent around to flex her fingers and joints: Rigor is absent, with livor mortis purple in color, distributed posteriorly. Records show that the subject is twenty-three years of age, unmarried, and of Filipino descent. Length is five feet, point two, with a postmortem weight of seventy kilograms. Eye color is unable to be identified due to injury. 

Franz Austin V. De Mesa is a fiction writer with an unnatural appetite for horror, fantasy, and dystopian sci-fi stories. A certified anime and gaming enthusiast, he writes to explore the dark parts of humanity and indulge in his fascinations with the macabre, alternate timelines, and other what-if scenarios lurking in our world. He is currently a Fourth-Year student of BA Creative Writing at the University of Santo Tomas. Here he talks about some of his process in writing the featured story for May,  IN(DE)CISION.

by Franz Austin V. De Mesa

It was Saturday, 8PM. Tonight’s ulam was hotdog and egg. And in six days, I was going to become a man.

I sat across from my father who had just come home from work, and he ate like he hadn’t eaten in a month: eyes focused on his plate, specks of rice on his chin, a sweaty neck, greasy hands. Meanwhile, my cup of rice was only halfway gone, looking like a half-moon that was bitten off by the Bakunawa, only I wasn’t as hungry. 

No, there were more important things running around in my head than just eating. I had been thinking about it for weeks now. In my community, there was something called the Handugan that every boy must go through in order to become a man.