Author Archives: kyu

Scourge And Minister (Part 2)

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Between the bus stop and her apartment building, a tremendous gust of wind blows Dr. Vicente’s umbrella inside out and breaks the spokes, leaving her open to be drenched. When she gets home, she takes a hot shower then goes to the kitchen, cooking penne and heating up some amatriciana sauce. She eats standing by the sink. When she finishes, she mixes herself a strong drink and pours it into a coffee mug.

The students’ term papers are piled in four neat stacks on her desk. There is no rush to mark them now. Dr. Dimaano had drawn her aside and recommended a mandatory week off. Someone else could substitute for your classes, he had said. You take a break and get back in touch with yourself.

She knows she won’t be able to stand this.

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Scourge And Minister (Part 1)

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You pick up any stranger’s thought as readily as you’d pick up a pretty shell by the beach side because all of them, even the most banal ones, catch your eye and you can’t help it. Sometimes a thought is brilliant and hard as a diamond, or edged and serrated like a dagger, or full of intent as a snake is of venom. Sometimes it seems bottomless, smooth and pure like silk, shedding its endless layers the moment you pick it up.

So you compartmentalize. That’s always been the ticket. Keep boundaries. Focus on the color of his pants, the bit of spinach between his teeth, the flashing lights of his cellphone.

If you’re still picking up a thought when you don’t want to, then you’ll just have to read the damn thing and move on.

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Last Set

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With the conclusion of Joseph Nacino’s set and this, tomorrow, the beginning of F.H. Batacan’s, she is the last of the PGS guest-editors.

This little experiment began a year ago with some hopes and more trepidation. Being the reading advocate that I am, the biggest thought on my mind was, and still is, “Would people visit the site and read?” I think that to a certain extent the answer is “Yes”, and I give credit to the names and reputations of my guest-editors. Their story- and author-choices, as well as their own talent in telling tales, carried PGS for well a year. I’m grateful to them, and to their writers, for what they’ve done.

The end of this first calendar year brings to a close the guest-editor project. I don’t wish to bring to others the same responsibility I brought to them these twelve months. Well, not yet, haha. Perhaps it may be worth another go in the future, if there would be those willing to take on a guest-editor stint. But once F.H. Batacan’s four stories are done, the editorship returns to me for the foreseeable future.

This is as good a time as any to remind you all of the call for submissions I made some months ago, the purpose of which is to find new stories for PGS (enough maybe for another year? I should be so lucky. In truth, I’m actually confident that I will be). I have no guest-editors with their names and reputations to carry Philippine Genre Stories, this brand of Pinoy genre fiction I’ve created, but I do have the hope and confidence that the stories of the Pinoy authors out there who will submit, will.

Again, my thanks to the guest-editors, and my constant, constant thanks to all PGS readers. Let’s all keep on reading, folks. And it’ll be my turn to see you all in a couple of months. Cheers!

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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