The streets around my home are flooded 365 days a year. The level rises or falls depending on the tide, but there’s not a moment when there’s no water.
We’re talking absolutely filthy water. Households and corporations have thrown waste into it for decades. On bad days it turns black. But really it chooses its own colors. Some days, it’s a brownish orange. Some days, it’s an algae-filled green.
And there’s an indescribable smell everywhere. When you wade into the water, you can expect to come across floating bottles, cans, or plastic bags containing God knows what. And no matter how many times children are told not to swim in the sludge, they still dive in, splash around, and get it in their eyes and mouths.
Trixia Marie C. Policarpio is from Marikina City, Philippines, and is a BA Creative Writing undergraduate at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She delves into both fiction and non-fiction, crafting stories and essays that navigate the spectrum of human experience. She explores various genres, blending imaginative storytelling with thought-provoking insights as reflections of her curiosity in the world. She’s had personal essays published in Inquirer Youngblood and Positively Filipino magazine, and a realist fiction piece recently accepted for Bente-Bente Zine Volume 3. “Reverse Frankenstein” is her first published speculative fiction story.
Image by Karola G on Pexels (All photos and videos on Pexels can be downloaded and used for free).
One. Two. Three months…They say the post-breakup slump is supposed to last three months, enough time to hide out, cry it out, and then come back glowing—especially if you were the one left behind.
But here I am, nine months in, still feeling like I’m barely holding it together. Every small thing just drains me. Every time I catch myself in the bathroom mirror, I can’t help but notice how awful I look. My hair’s limp, falling flat around my face like it’s given up. My forehead’s too wide, and my skin—god, my skin—looks dull, like it’s lost any glow it ever had. Pimples dot my chin and cheeks, not to mention the deep, purple bags under my eyes. I try not to look, but I can’t help it—the worst part is the way my body feels like it’s sagging. It’s like I’m torturing myself by not moving on, yet I can’t seem to stop. My head knows what I should do, what I shouldn’t feel, but my head and heart just aren’t in sync.
Meeting up and hanging out with people feels like a nightmare now. Just the thought drains me, and I dread those “Are you okay?” looks or the well-meaning bashing of my ex that feels hollow, as if scripted for the person who was obviously dumped. My only refuge, aside from my bedroom, is the library. The strict librarian with her zero-tolerance for noise—even a whisper gets a shush—creates the perfect silence. It’s the one place where I know I won’t have to fend off forced conversations.
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. For his undergraduate thesis, he wrote a collection of interactive short stories, which was awarded Best Thesis in Creative Writing. He is currently undertaking an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Santo Tomas. His story, IN(DE)CISION, was published in Philippine Genre Stories in May, 2023.
It has been two hours and 27 minutes since the last airstrike rained down on Pasay City. Ten thousand rounds of high explosive covered Buendia to Baclaran in a blanket of pyromania, toppling all the houses out of their foundations, blistering buildings with holes and broken windows, showering the streets with sharp fractals and piles of debris. Stone, cement, fire, blood. Utter decimation. The sky, in its unchanging terminal illness, was clouded in smoke, the air so thick with ash that my larynx was clogged and I couldn’t push out a scream for help if I wanted to.
The vehicles on EDSA had stopped for good, their dead batteries part of the world that vanished, the world before 2042 when things still made sense and the city still functioned in its slow, inefficient, nearly paralyzed way of operating, but at least still functioned, and all that people complained about were gas prices rising, or the jeepney fare going up a few pesos, or some slimy politician’s scandals—as if there was any hope for Philippine politics to change for the better—where all that people could talk about was gossip, or fitting in, or worrying about if this guy or that girl likes me, if I should quit, have a bigger salary, retire to the province, go to another country, or what I’d do if the world ended tomorrow, never actually thinking that the world would end tomorrow.
