by M.R.R. Arcega

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. 

The water became a permanent part of our neighborhood only a couple of years ago, when a series of storms ravaged our region. Since then, all our complaints and suggestions have fallen on deaf ears; it was as if local officials had grown tired of trying to think of solutions. After all, there was always flooding in our town– what’s so different now that the water just never goes away?

But it’s okay. We’re used to it. We can’t exactly afford to move elsewhere.

Sometimes, strange junk washes into our yard, through the large gaps in the gate’s grills. Once, I picked up a waterlogged cardboard box full of cell phone casings. Another time, I found a cloth bag full of English-language fiction books, some still salvageable.

But a week or so ago was different. A week or so ago, dead animals started to float into our yard. At first there was just one dead fish, then two–we presumed they had come from a nearby fishpond that had overflowed. But before the flood receded, there were around six. It appeared that the entire town was inundated with dead fish.

I had called Aling Teta across the road on Messenger and asked, “Do you think those are edible?”

I was running out of canned tuna, so it was a concern.

“I wouldn’t risk it,” Aling Teta said. “Who knows what those could have died from?”

Aling Teta was the best person to ask, because her family owned a couple of the small fishponds in our town. If she said the floating bodies in the water were not safe to eat, they probably weren’t.

Without inspecting the fish herself, she couldn’t tell what they could have died from. She didn’t know where they could have come from, either. Fishponds tend to overflow when there’s already flooding, and there were lots of fishponds all over town, since we were near the sea.

Still, Aling Teta and I agreed that no number of fishponds could have contained that many fish. 

Mysteriously, as the flood receded, the fish disappeared. It was as if the corpses had only come with the tide, and also left with the tide.

The next day, it was frogs. Not just frogs: corpses of huge monitor lizards– we call them bayawak and some of us swear they taste like chicken, even if they’ve never really eaten them– plus snakes, and snails started washing up.

It was weird… I’m not much of a farm person, but I was pretty sure most of those creatures could swim. So they couldn’t have died from drowning.

The smell was almost intolerable, then. But when the flood went down a bit, both bodies and smell disappeared again.

The day after that, it was mice, rats, dogs and cats. This was the real mystery. Our gate’s grills were not large enough to let big. inert things such as dog corpses through. Where were they coming from? How were they getting into our yard?

On that day, representatives from the local government went around town in an SUV modified to make the engine too high up for floods. “DON’T TOUCH THE CORPSES FLOATING IN THE WATER,” the representatives said on megaphone. “I REPEAT: DO NOT TOUCH THE CORPSES. OTHERWISE, BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN.”

They never really said what those bad things were, but my neighbors and I never really felt the need to ask. NO ONE was touching those vile things. Besides, they went away when the flood went down a bit, so why worry?

Stories went round of how people mysteriously disappeared when they touched the corpses– to clean them up in a hurry, or on a dare, perhaps. It seemed everyone in the neighborhood knew someone dumb enough to touch one of the floating corpses. Except for me. And so I doubted the stories.

“[Did you hear?]” my childhood friend Nora typed on Viber, for example. “[Mang Kanor threw out a dead cat from his yard. No one’s seen him since]”

“[Who the eff is Mang Kanor]” I typed back.

N: [The barker at the crossing! The perv! Remember, he got picked up by the cops once, when Aling Mameng made a scene?]

Me: [They’d better, I mean, the police station was right there]

N: [Point is, he’s gone now. As you can expect, Aling Mameng’s over the moon]

Me: [Someone unpleasant disappears, and the neighborhood rejoices?]

N: [You know what I mean]

Me: [I actually don’t? I don’t know who Mang Kanor is??]

Me: [I only go out on weekends to get my groceries done, and that route doesn’t take me to the crossing]

N: [Sabagay…I haven’t personally talked to him, either]

N: [Basta, everyone knows him, all right?]

N: [Also, gurl, you need to get out more. So you can know the pervs around us by name, chos]

Me: [I don’t want to talk about pervs]

Me: [Unless the ones who disappeared when they touched the bodies were all pervs, too?]

Nora assured me they weren’t. She mentioned a couple of names of other disappeared people that she knew about, plus their familiar and/or organizational affiliations. They were not known to be pervs. One was even a church layperson.

But I didn’t know any of them personally. Neither did she.

Me: [Maybe they just left for higher ground]

N: [You crazy? Who’d want to leave this place?]

N: [It’s perfect. It’s paradise]

Perfect. Paradise.

These were two words that many of my neighbors used when replying to my suggestion that the “disappeared” had just left.

And all of the neighbors who said those words, while our houses were all but underwater, were deathly serious.

***

After a few days of fish, lizards, snakes, mice, dogs and cats, the human corpses appeared.

They floated in like the other bodies did, appearing mysteriously in people’s yards and under their windows, even if there couldn’t have been any place for them to have come through.

At first there was panic. But then, a few hours later, the bodies vanished.

So even if the dread lingered, the panic didn’t last very long.

I called Aling Tana’s daughter, Kakai, with whom I went to elementary school, because I’d heard Aling Tana screaming when the bodies appeared. Even after the bodies disappeared, I heard her yelling words I couldn’t make out.

Thought I heard “God’s judgment is upon us” at some point, though.

“Is your mom okay?” I asked at a lull moment.

“She’s freaked,” Kakai explained. “It’s her blood pressure. But there’s nothing left to scare her out there, so she’ll be okay soon.”

“Where do you think they came from?” I ventured asking. “And where did they go? They sank, but we should have seen if the tide took them out, right?”

“Who knows,” Kakai wearily replied. “Who cares.”

The bodies appeared and disappeared regularly for over a week, coming and going with the tide, until people just learned to work around them. Even Aling Tana’s screams became thinner and less frequent, and were completely gone by the fifth day.

Those going to and coming from work at the height of the flood learned to poke with their umbrellas while wading through waist-deep water, so the bodies wouldn’t drift in their direction. Boatmen ferrying people who wanted to keep their feet dry learned how to push corpses out of their boats’ path with their paddles or long poles.

I work from home, so I never really had to worry about commuting.

All I ever had to worry about was a body in the yard that never went away.

The flood rose and fell, and the body remained, lying facedown in our yard, buoyed up and down by gentle waves brought on by passing boats.

It was a woman’s body…maybe. It was so bloated and rotting, it was hard to tell. Long black hair floated about its head, obscuring any part of its face.

“[You see that, too, right?]” I WhatsApp’ed to my neighbor Badong, whose bedroom had a window that looked out to a part of our yard.

Badong confirmed that he did. He said he had, in fact, been staring at the body long before I asked.

“[It’s not going anywhere]” he pointed out thoughtfully. “[It’s been hours]”

There were no bodies in the yard surrounding Badong’s family home. So the body in the yard that wouldn’t leave was a curiosity to him. And to the other neighbors to whom we pointed it out.

All we could do was talk about it. We just didn’t know what to do; no one was supposed to touch the bodies. And whenever we tried to alert the local government to it, they just said they would get to us as soon as they could.

Later in the week, some of my neighbors got permanent floating fixtures in their yards, too. The ones who didn’t were lucky. The ones who did had to stomach an odor that had gone beyond bad, and had fermented into intoxicating. Some imagined they smelled flowers, or citrusy fruit, like oranges, or dalandan.

I smelled different things from the body in my yard. Most of the time, it smelled like a barrel of rotting fish. Sometimes it did smell like flowers– Rosal, to be precise.

But there was one night, I swear, that I smelled the adobo my father used to cook when I was little. He died close to my 13th birthday. But the smell of adobo took me back to the times when he still didn’t have bone cancer, which took away his ability to stay upright.

“[The smell is making me hungry]” I texted to Taylor, living across the street. Not for the first time, I wished they would add me on Facebook already.

“[Buang]” Taylor texted back. “[You can get hungry from the smell of merthiolate?]”

“[TF you talking about merthiolate]”

“[That’s how it’s been smelling for days!]”

“[Yesterday I smelled rosal]”

“[Sis, I think you’ve had that thing in your yard for too long. Your sense of smell is whacked. Just like if you got COVID]”

I have no idea when local authorities will come to help me get rid of the body in the yard, but it’s getting increasingly difficult to focus on work. It’s like having an unwelcome guest that keeps demanding your attention. 

I even imagine that it talks to me, sometimes…but then, it might be the isolation. I’m living alone, after all, and apart from speaking to my neighbors electronically, I don’t really have people around to keep my head on straight. It’s also not easy to have friends or family over when there’s flooding all year round.

But I’ll just admit that the longer it hangs around, the less scared I am to touch it. It’s just a thing, after all, a thing that’s just there, and isn’t doing anything or really bothering anyone. Maybe I can get rid of it myself; to hell with local government people who won’t give you the time of day if you don’t have bribe money.

And I’ll admit something else: after staring at it for a long time, over a period of many days, I eventually noticed that the bloated, rotting corpse in my yard has a pink streak in its long, wispy hair.

I have a pink streak in my hair.

About the Author. M.R.R. Arcega graduated from the University of the Philippines with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism. In 2001, her Filipino-language screenplay, “Pagkatapos ng Paalam”, took second place in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards. In 2009, her short story collection, “Post-it Notes from Far Away”, was among those recognized by the National Book Development Board in their Galing Pinoy, Basahin! program. Several of her features, essays, poems, and short stories in both English and Filipino have been published locally and internationally. Currently, she works as a manager for a small Philippines-based translation company.