Vinci’s Real-Life Pulp Fiction (Part 2)

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The girl knocked on the door, which quickly swung open. He noticed a rusted lock hanging from the doorway. She walked inside and he followed, his eyes taking a moment to adjust.

Inside, he saw the house was almost bare except for a lone plastic chair in the middle of the dining room and a rusty gas stove in the kitchen. The sunlight from the front windows barely reached the other end of the house and a set of rickety stairs ran to the second floor.

But the place wasn’t uninhabited: a number of women carrying heavy firearms lounged around the place, barely looking up when the two entered the house.

The one slumped beside the door said, “Where’ve you been, Maia? And who’s your boyfriend?”

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Vinci’s Real-Life Pulp Fiction (Part 1)

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When he heard that the movie icon Fernando Poe Jr. had died, Vinci del Rosario sat by his desk for an hour doing nothing. Coming after the debacle of Poe’s lost presidential bid in 2004, Vinci thought it was too much to bear.

Posters of FPJ’s past movies adorned the walls of the small room Vinci was renting from his aunt. These ranged from the first movie he watched, Isang Bala Ka Lang, to Maging Sino Ka Man where he saw his idol actually sing.

To shake himself from his grief, he decided to lose himself working on his latest komiks. The feeling that his deadlines were always looming over his shoulder helped a lot in distracting him from the real world.

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Needle Rain (Part 2)

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They came back to the pit on the day that marked the first month after Emily died. They huddled around the pit in their light sweaters, feeling another storm hovering in the atmosphere, smelling the pungent earth, the leaves. Cleofe had her legs dangling over the hole. Brian had one leg bent with his sobbing mouth pressed over the knee, Cedric gazing at him in contempt. There was a single white rose resting on top of the soil in the pit.

Brian looked up, sucked in his breath. His eyes were deep, red hollows. “We can’t let her stay there,” he said. “We have to get her out of there.”

Cedric turned and stomped all the way back to the house. Cleofe remained still. Continue reading →

Needle Rain (Part 1)

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Dreams. That was what they talked about in Cedric Placido’s house before Ann died. Dreams.

The four of them – Cedric, Brian, Emily and Cleofe – would gather in Cedric Placido’s house, two blocks away from the town memorial park and surrounded by empty lots and trees. Little children gravitated toward the area because it was a perfect place to play hide-and-seek, and every day they’d have to make a quick stop in Cedric’s backyard to shoo the children away before entering the house. The four of them would bring chips and fish crackers and, if Cleofe happened to be in the mood, a container filled with her mother’s macaroni salad, and Cedric would break a six-pack of root beer (or sometimes real beer, if they were up to it), all of which they’d dump on the living room carpet while they dissected perennial topics like, Why The Theater Club Should Stop Staging “The Tempest”, or Will Brian Obina Ever Flunk Algebra? Brian would only shrug at the second and laugh at the first, which always made Emily want to drown him in the toilet bowl. Emily was a member of the Theater Club and tended to think that “The Tempest” was a brilliant production, even though most of the actors couldn’t remember half of their lines and they had turned the
character of Ariel into a girl.

But it was dreams they loved to talk about.

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Last Stand At Ayala Center

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I placed a hand on the small of the pharmacist’s back, feeling the skin dimpling there, as she shifted nearer towards me. I slid my hand lower, and pressed my breasts to her back, hearing her hiss softly between her teeth. I was about to ease my hand to the front of her dress, when she stopped me.

“Let me,” she murmured.

I allowed myself to be eased onto the bed and undressed, her calm and calloused hands relaxing every inch they pressed into the mattress. Very easy when you’re sprawled across a 300-thread count king bed, in one of this city’s most expensive hotels. She kissed me, caressing my cheeks, tracing the shell of my earlobe, my breasts, dipping into my navel. Her hand slid lower and deeper, into the space between my legs.

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