Category Archives: Uncategorized

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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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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