by Cesar Miguel Escaño

Kashif’s suspicions took seed on the first day of his apprenticeship to Master Djibril, head of Datu Tarruk’s kitchens. His master used a barung, a fighting blade used by Moro tribes, instead of a kitchen knife to cut meat and vegetables.

The barung was the preferred short sword of many Moro warriors who usually carried two swords, one long and one short, into battle. The blade was shaped like an eye opened midway. According to legend, it was shaped this way because of the sword’s speed in combat. It could kill between eye blinks.  When Kashif asked his master if he should also use a similar blade in the kitchen, his master laughed.

“Oh this,” Master Djibril said, lifting the pahon made of carabao horn. He deftly flipped the blade over and pointed the curved pommel bearing a Datu’s family crest toward his apprentice. Kashif recognized the crest of House Hussin. The crest showed two kampilan arranged diagonally, forming an inverted V. The sharp edges of their blades faced each other, joining together at the tip. In the space between the handles was a message inscribed in Arabic: Siufan ‘aqwaa mean.

Marianne Villanueva is the author of Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila (a Finalist for the Philippines’ National Book Award 1992), Mayor of the Roses (the inaugural publication of the Miami University Press fiction series), and The Lost Language (published in Manila by Anvil Press). She co-edited, along with poet Virginia Cerenio, the groundbreaking Filipino women’s anthology, Going Home to a Landscape.

Her work has appeared in Manila Noir, Ms. Aligned Vol. 3, Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 9, Growing Up Filipino Vols. 1 and 2, Another Kind of Paradise: Stories from the New Asia-Pacific, Witness, Fourteen Hills, New Orleans Review and elsewhere. And she had collaborated with the composer Drew Hemenger in creating a full-length opera, Marife, about the mail-order bride of Oklahoma bombing co-conspirator Terry Nichols.

She currently teaches Creative Writing for UCLA Extension’s Writers Program.  She has also just completed her first novel, White Sails, Green Oceans, about a 16th century Spanish priest who is sent to an island in the central Philippines to fight demons. And has begun her second novel, Farm and Mountain, about the Japanese Occupation of Bacolod, Negros Occidental, during World War 2.

Marianne was published in Philippine Genre Stories in March 2011 with her story The Departure under the guest-editorship of Charles Tan. In 2023 she talks with us a little about her story featured for October, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME.

by Marianne Villanueva

Ana’s mother moves her head backwards and forwards. Her head is a flower, her neck a stem so fragile it can barely support this flower. There was a typhoon, Ana’s mother says. There was a blackout. I gave birth to you in the dark. The doctors had to use flashlights. It was just after midnight. She adds, almost absentmindedly, Typhoons are always given women’s names, I don’t know why.

Ana wishes there were something more to hold on to. Her mother is dying. Not this very minute, but with each passing day her memory disintegrates a little more. Disintegrates. Ana hates that word. But it is true. And every day that more of her mother’s memory moves away, or disappears, or is lost, the same happens to Ana’s personality, to her childhood. 

They’re in the collection center, aka sanitarium. No one calls them what they really are because it increases people’s anxiety/heart rate and memories get garbled. The mind and the body are interconnected, or at least that’s what the Interceptors aka healers tell us. They’ve been working at their tasks for a long time. I, we, have to believe them.

The same is happening everywhere. In time, everything will be lost. Without a past, who will they be? Memories are spores. Once scattered, they never return.

Joseph F. Nacino has been published in local anthologies such as the Philippine Speculative Fiction series, A Time for Dragons, Friendzones, and garnered First Place in the 2007 Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards with his story “Logovore”.  He has also published in international platforms like Fantasy Magazine, City in the Ice, Kitaab’s Asian Speculative Fiction. He subsequently helmed three anthologies featuring fantasy, horror, and science fiction in the Philippines published online, and in print and ebook form: The Farthest Shore: An Anthology of Fantasy Fiction from the Philippines co-edited with Dean Francis Alfar; Demons of the New Year with Karl R. De Mesaand; Diaspora Ad Astra with EmilM. Flores.

Noteworthy is how his story, “Insomnia”, was part of the Premier Issue of the print Digest of Philippine Genre Stories,  which was inspired by the Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters etching of Francisco de Goya. And his story “War Against the City”, what he considered his first-born child and may have been inspired by Neil Gaiman’s short stories in The Sandman: The Wake, was published in the Special Horror Issue of the Digest of Philippine Genre Stories guest-edited by Yvette Tan. He then served as a guest-editor of Philippine Genre Stories in 2012 and published Vinci’s Real-Life Pulp Fiction (Part 1) and Vinci’s Real-Life Pulp Fiction (Part 2).  In 2023, he  returns to PGS with his story “SELDA 34”.

by Joseph F. Nacino

Twenty-five detainees were lined up outside Selda 34 under the pouring monsoon. Many were dressed in regular shorts, slippers, and shirts. A few wore sandos, their bare shoulders shivering in the cold. Sullen and red-eyed, they squatted with their hands on their heads in the small courtyard of the police station, watched over by a handful of policemen taking shelter under the station’s roofed inner corridors.

Among the detainees was 16-year-old Binoy, trembling from being drenched by the rain. He vainly tried to stop his teeth from chattering.