tightening the tale

I have a week to soak in comments and firm up my short story, which I had expected the class to crease their foreheads about and accuse me: what the fuck is this? Somehow I pulled through. My head-game scare story scared them.

I'd love to get slapped with a shining grade in this PhD subject.

Here's how it starts out. Bright and sunny. Such a nice day. But there's a doppelganger in the house.

When Did I lose the Knife?

by Irwin Allen B. Rivera

I CAN TELL, WITHOUT opening my eyes, that chirping birds mean half past nine in the morning. Into my comforter I cocoon myself some more, into the small sea of softness and the scent of fabric conditioner. I want to drift off till noon, when the birds are gone and all that pervades me is the empty house, still as a pond in a retirement home, and just as quiet. It's the Christmas break anyway, and with December this cold, I find no motive to swim out of bed, and fall, voluntarily, on the wooden floor, with a thud that would send Jeff, my housemate, mumbling about me over breakfast in three words: oversleeping lazy bastard.

But the birds won't go away, and Jeff isn't here to annoy me. Neither is the reason why the birds, on a December morning with nothing, supposedly, to do, irk me. Inside my cocoon I cover my ears, willing the birds to vanish by reason of my not hearing them. 'Bullshit,' I hear Jeff say in my head, with the same venom he reserves for when I sometimes think out loud. Maybe he's right. I bolt up, suddenly, still hugging a bundle of my foamy blanket. The world, despite what my professor says, is still there, here, even when I don't want to hear it.

The same premise holds for small square yellow post-its on a tact-board above my study table, a sock-throw from my bed. Four large strikingly yellow ones scream in red ink: Paper on Personal identity for Professor Perez due in two days. 'Fuck it,' Jeff says again in my head. 'Just get it over with.'

I don't want to hear it, Jeff. Get out of my head. Take the world with you.

JEFF DID LEAVE, YESTERDAY. But I go through the motions anyway. I crawl to the other side of the bed, away from the morning light, closer to the small clock under the lampshade, fail to reach it, and fall on the floor with a thud, still cocooned in the comforter. Verified: it's only 9:35 am. Jeff would be done showering by now. The shuffling I would hear downstairs would be him in the kitchen. And if I open the bedroom door a crack, I'd hear the whish of something being fried, the scent of brewed coffee, and the complaint of some guy about me using his shampoo again. Some kids were raised well.

Except that when I thud on the floor, there is a humming nothingness in the house. And I suddenly find the chirping of the birds eerie. Slowly, I peel off the comforter, bundle it up and throw it on the bed. I open the bedroom door a crack and hear a squeak that must have been always there, unnoticed, by me. No shuffling and no scents of morning breakfast joy.

In my shorts, I descend the stairs a deserted man. Mrs. Adoring's pots hang unmoving in the kitchen. The stove is as clean as Jeff left it. I smell Domex on the kitchen tiles. And, inspecting the shower room, I can't find Jeff's shampoo.

But I still have that paper to write.

the sudden clue sleeps

Ma'am Jing threw me a clue in class. I caught it in midair, like an afterthought. I shot my mind's hand up, absentmindedly, and cupped it. It's like when you're pushing your grocery cart down the isle, mentally squinting (what is it again that I need?) and you notice you've been holding something you picked up from the other isle: ahh! this is it! A clue. I hate my own writing, the clue said, because I listen for flight. For lyricism. Something I only mold in moments of downward plight. Or fleeting out-the-window gazes. Not a mood in the everyday. But if I hummed a metaphor and a rhythm for every articulation, I'm thinking I'd trip. Getting up, dusting my knees, I'd mumble and go for blunt and pedestrian. Like pulling out a branch from the mud, because I could shoo a stray dog away with it, just as I could with a sleek 9 iron golf club. The shame of the mundane! (When I read recent journals I etched in fatigue, I squirm at how wayward and pointless they sound.) 

To talk always in poetry. How else must I talk to myself so I'd listen? (Note to self: you're not even a poet.)

-----

A classmate, naturally I didn't ask for his name, because I thought I knew, and the way we talked, it's as if he knew that I knew, anyway, I've dropped hints in our talk that I'd show him my on going sudden novel. Sudden novel. I'm still reveling in the sound of that. Sudden. Novel. That's not a short story. It's got chapters. Maybe even an epilogue. A sequence of parts that long is not ordinarily sudden. It is not. But it is. Each chapter, composed of smaller scenes (episodes), are written like sudden fiction. Smallish, self-aware of a time limit, and they end in the moment following the moment they started. Put them all together and loop some scenes and symbols, and that's a sudden novel. But will it work? I'd have to put the chapters side by side and let another pair of ears listen to the short burst, for his mouth to sip the teaspoons of scenes. Since I'm inflicting this on him, I should know his name. 

-----

Turns out one of the short stories Ma'am Jing assigned is a chapter of a novel. Sly devil old woman. Fooled me into thinking we were into short short fiction (the other name of sudden fiction), not that I complained. If a chapter is that full and yet so short, how would the entire novel taste like? Anyway, what's important is that I skittered into class unprepared to talk about my assigned story. I could talk, yes, but it would have no shape. A chaos of rambles. Good thing she upped her chin in someone else's direction. The guillotine fell not on me. So I'm uploading my more refined, thought about, talk, to our eGroup, over the Christmas vacation. 

-----

One of the stories assigned is written like prose poetry. How can people write like that? (Translation: what the fuck? this is so great! i can't write like that even if i trained for a lifetime.) 

-----

One should stock up on sleep before running off, blinking silly, out of the house after a sudden toothbrush, so early in the morning. I had to catch the train to class two cities away. That's probably why I couldn't think straight about the story assigned to me. I had only read it twice, with no notes etched down. Just some confident private mumbles. But at the time those mumbles, my mumbles, about the story, seemed brilliant. Therefore I was brilliant. Sadly, no greatness survives when you articulate those mumbles. I hereby promise to sleep the night before. 

Long, even beats

I'm exhaling loudly through my nose again. Slow, even long breaths, filling my lungs with air and helping not in the least. I'm that pissed. I'm trying, like I promised my therapist, to be aware of how I appear to other people. My dropped down shoulders rising to every inhale, my feet planted firmly and wide apart, my hands wanting to claw at something, my eyes in slits.

I blink and imagine wide open fields, like my therapist said, sunny all around, not a soul in sight. But the image in my head is a Gilbert from accounting choking into purple, the twin thumbs of mine digging into his adam's apple. But that's self-indulgent. I blink again and shake the scene out of my head.

Mark from marketing walks past me and I smile. He throws me a nod. I give back a shrug and that's the end of that. Socializing without words in corridors. Mark was probably sent to check up on me, how many veins on my skin-head skull is popping; he waits crack, as he administratively holds my section's new budget proposal hostage.

I've decided it's two-for-one month. Mark is joining Gilbert at the back of an anonymous van. The one I haven't used in a year. Because I thought this year would be a good one.

I exhale, relieved this time, the kind of exhale an pest exterminator gives out after examinining a house falling to termites. It'll take a lot of work but it can be done. It will, be done.

I walk to the end of the corridor smiling. Mike sees me again and his foreheard wrinkles up in a question. I throw him a nod and a smile. He's getting what's coming.

And oh am I coming. Am I coming.

disquiet

He sits in front of me, from across the table, like a wax statue: his back straight, unmoving; his gnarled hands cupped over a walking stick pointed at the wooden floor. His eyes straight into mine. He doesn't need rigor mortis to lock his limbs in that pose. His pride will do him in, and as the first-born, I should inherit everything (but he has to die first).

But as the only de la Casta to be cut off (cast off?), I'd get nothing from the old man. Father closed his banks, shut down his factories, and shook other gnarled hands, for the last time, fifteen years ago. I was fifteen.

Business, I always thought, appeared in Alejandro's mind as a means to buy respect. To my two uncles, father's brothers, business legitimated loud nights drinking with the governors, the mayors, the head of police, and actors who brandish guns. Business was, to the other de la Castas, a given. A wallet to open up in public, to draw in envious eyes, to waste and wine.

So when Emerito and Pablo de la Casta stabbed their eldest brother, and left him for dead, mother's heart stopped, right here, on the spot Alejandro's walking stick points at. Like an epitaph.

Father stomps his stick once. It is enough. I raise my eyes, from the floor, to meet his. Is it settled, then? his eyes ask. Father is, always has been, too soft.

There is so much for which he should not forgive me. His brothers. My mother. And soon my own brothers.

Yet he is here. In the house he used to call his home, now my own.

I stare back a long time. Steel against unyielding wood. Steel doesn't blink, doesn't creak. Finally, Alejandro sighs, from across the table. He is amused that I am amused that he is amused.

The man who taught me to trust in others, but plan ahead anyway, leans on his walking stick, as he limps away. He knows that I know that I'd do it anyway. His coming here was his way of giving me a stiff hug. The kind gentlemen of old times gave their sons.

The door closes behind him and I am left alone in the house that raised me.

turning white

"So, then. Where are the bodies?"

Burt didn't answer. He just stared at me, and blinked once, like I was too obscenely forward.

"The sooner I see it, the sooner people get paid," I sighed and looked away, making sure the sound of the word "paid" trailed off into the next room, through the open door behind me.

Burt grunted, turned on his right heel and crossed the blood-mapped carpet, avoiding the forensic tags, the deflated body bags, the white-coat lab guy zooming in and leaning into the blood work. We had all thought this private party would end up with tomorrow's headlines. Mafia boss gets laid. Gets done in. I followed Burt, skipping the darkened red on the already red carpet.

Martinique Berrangerie hung on his necktie, the slow pendulum swing of his body stilled by two more forensic kids, but in blue, not in lab coat white. Compared to them, Burt was near retirement, and I was at my peak, but already retired from the force. The lifeless, naked man with drooping eyelids, limp arms and sagging skin was my boss. Burt's, too. Unofficially, that is.

Berr's right hand's body was not in the room, making him a suspect, since the boss-man was last reported to have been guarded by him. Strangely, rumors had it that the chief accountant was here. That was not according to the boss-man's plan, as far as I knew it. But there was only one body here. No right man. No accountant. And until forensics disclose everything, the front story will be that a hired bitch-for-the-night turned out to be a hired killer as well.

'I was got paid," that was the right hand man's dictum, his rationale. I always found that funny, and as Burt murmured to a beat cop beside him, under the bathroom's door frame, I looked around for lipstick or blood scribbles: "I was got paid." No dice.

Anyway, I got him killed. The boss-man. Just as he arranged it. And I was here tonight, dodging badges, shaking hands with people who knew me and knew my work back as a detective, because Berrangerie arranged for a spectacle--his death--so his gay son could inherit the declining Crystal Meth business. Daddy copped out, got out, bailed out on his son. Never mind that. I was got paid.

I could feel Burt watching me watching him. Now let's see who's the better detective. A hundred bucks says that beat cop is going to cuff me, but not before Burt has theatrically declared to the cop-filled motel room, that they have reason to believe that I had something to do with all this.

I kept staring at the body. Burt grunted and as if on cue, I turned around. His mustache just twitched. He does that when he's happy. I cut off his speech and ask the whole room, "His prints," I point to the hanged man. "Do they match with the boss-man's?"

"That's not important right now," Burt yells a level louder than me.

"Really?" And a staring contest between a former detective and the Captain that mentored him ensues. I know what Burt was thinking. With the boss-man down, his illegitimate source of income, he could return to his pristine moral ways, and maybe even sleep at night. So he's pinning this on me, the cop who copped out.

"Let me save your sagging career, Burt, before you showcase all this to the cameras." At that, Burt, crossed his arms and exhales through his nose, blinks at me. His get-this-over-with pose.

"The $3,000.00 suit on the bed."

"What about it, cop-out?"

"It won't fit the hanged man."

More staring.

"But it will fit," I said slowly, thumbing in the direction of the corpse behind me, as through I was hitchhiking, "the beggar from fourth and Main."

I had never seen Burt turn that white, not in the ten years I solved cases for him.

short of proof

During summer vacation back in second grade, my cousins and I had this routine of running all over Grandma's house, shrieking as we pushed the kitchen screen door open, shoving the maid aside, scaring the cats away, jumping over our wash lady's pyramid of laundry, and rushing back indoors, to begin the cycle once more.

By lunch time, our monstrous appetites could only be appeased by Grandma's cooking, particularly her sinigang na baboy sa sampaloc. We would heave rice on our plates and fish out the long green chili from the soup bowl and crush it in our small bowl filled with patis—this as we recounted how many times Loloy tripped on his own toes, if Yeeyee's dress got snagged again on the Aratiles trees lining up the looban pathway, and how many times I bit my own tongue while talking loud and fast as we ran.

Rest after lunch meant a ceasefire on shrieking, running, and teasing each other. After that we bathed, and went through the obligatory rub of prickly heat powder on our necks and napes and backs. And like sleepy penguins, we would hobble inevitably to the bamboo papag in Grandma's garden, that open space between her room and Yeeyee's mother's sewing shop. The afternoon sleepy trance would take over, and we would doze off in the garden, which remained cool despite whatever slant the afternoon sun took.

After one such long morning of running and a grand lunch of Grandmother's cooking, I found myself staring at the snoring faces of my cousins. I wanted to wake them up, and remind them not to sleep right after a hearty meal, because that would give you nightmares, but I was fast sinking into sleep myself.

I remember waking up, still dazed, but I managed to stagger to the covered drain near the pathway, to pee. Our wash lady waved to me from the other end of the pathway, which stretched four rooms beginning with Grandma's, and ended in an open-air wash area. A breeze must have lifted the white bed sheets and shirts, sending them sideways, tugging at the clotheslines. A wall, whose cemented bricks were greened by moss, enclosed the pathway's right as the room windows did on the left. I waved back to the sheets, waved back to our wash lady.

The lights had not been turned on, as they usually were by nightfall. I rubbed my sleepy eyes, looked back, and saw my cousins snoring into the pillows they hugged on the papag. At the wash area, white sheets and shirts still swayed to a cold, whispering evening wind. I shivered as I worked with my shorts. Moonlight had magnified the concrete pathway into pale gray, darkened the moss wall to an ominous hue, and made the flowing white sheets emit a strange and humming white brilliance.

Rubbing my eyes with my right hand, and holding my shorts down with the other, I peed. Then, the wash lady waved at me again, all the way from the wash area. I smiled back, taking my hand away from my eyes to wave back weakly. All that sinigang must have made me slow and dizzy.

The wash lady stood up and stared at me.

I had never seen her hair that long, her dress that white. I had never seen her walk without moving her legs. She was never that pale. That was not our wash lady.

Quick shallow breaths fogged out of my mouth. I couldn't feel my legs.

She was halfway across the pathway, past two rooms, and I shut my eyes because I could see hers: they had no whites in them. And I saw why she didn't move her legs: under her long dress protruded none.

Loloy's name managed to whimper its way out of my dry throat. I pounded on the mossed wall, hoping the sound would get someone's attention.

I opened my eyes again. Her translucent dress from another era barely moved as she hovered, just one room away from me, on legs that weren't there.

I pounded and pounded. If only palms slamming on concrete made the same sound they did on plywood.

I could still pee but nothing wanted to come out. I leaned on the wall and pushed against it, hard, sending me flat on my back and coughing thin, cold air when I hit the ground.

Eyes squeezed shut I covered my face with my arms, as though bracing for a blow.
Nothing happened. I opened one eye to squint: she was gone.

I crawled to the papag as fast as I could, not trusting the wash lady's disappearance, expecting a bony hand on my nape any moment. I pulled the pillow from Loloy's tight embrace, annoying him awake. He sat up, grabbed the pillow from me and hit me with it.

“May momo, Loloy,” I whispered, not wanting to turn around.

“Ano?” he said.

Then it left us. The cold air was gone. My breath had ceased to mist when I exhaled. My voice was back. I could move my legs again. Moonlight was simply moonlight once more. I turned around to face a familiar but dimly-lit pathway.

“Ano sabi mo, Kuya?” Yeeyee asked. She was awake, too.

And I was going to tell them what I saw, what almost got me. But all I had to show were my mossed hands and my wet shorts.

I never told them.

you tube

The Bomb Squad, a section of the more responsive Special Weapons and Tactics division of the Metropolitan Police, filed a report that was read out loud 23 August 2007, during a Senate hearing attended by hundreds, on how come only two senators were left alive after all twenty four of them attended the engagement party of the President's daughter.

"The two Senators [a former starlet and a former basketball player] went to one of the farthest and thickest-walled areas of the President's mansion," the Bomb Squad leader began. He said it haltingly into the microphone of the hot but fully air-conditioned hall. His dark blue uniform clung to him in the heat, and he wiped his forehead with a hanky.

The Vice President, from behind and at the center of the half-moon table across the same kind of table where the bomb squad leader sat, asked the policeman to explain in detail this area, this area found to be far from the center of the explosion, an explosion that killed the invited captains of industry, Tim Yap, and some other irritating news anchors and columnists (who can't write anyway) whom no one will miss.

"It was the private bathroom of the President, Mr. Vice President." Murmurs of disbelief from the audience and members of the press filled the hall. The VP leaned back for effect, looked away, took in the moment. The murmurs died down and he leaned close to the mic.

"Perhaps they relieved themselves at the same time." Hoots and laughter from all around. The VP is smiling with the audience. This is his moment. He who casts the first gloat wins.

"Yes, Sir," the policeman said, "one can imagine the lovely Senator sitting on the toilet while the former coach relieves himself standing up, in full view of the other."

"You trying to be funny, Captain?"

"No, Sir. The expensive facilities in the comfort room allow only that explanation, assuming you use the term 'relieve themselves' to mean simultaneous urination."

"Are you offering another explanation?"

"No, Sir. Forensics found traces of semen. Semen is not usually funny, Sir." Tears of joy filled the media members' eyes; they could not stop themselves--they stomped the floor they stood on, threw knowing looks at each other, and yelled and clapped at the wit of this policeman. Screw the alleged sanctity of a Senate hearing. Most of the Senate is dead. The remaining two are elsewhere. And no one in the room hardly remembered that so many people are dead. [The President and her daughter, sadly, were late to their own party, and therefore survived.]

"Where were such traces found?"

"The bathroom, Sir."

Woohoo! -- a photographer yelled and the audience followed with more hoots.

"Quiet, quiet!" the VP yelled. When the murmurs and jeers died down, he asked, "Are you saying that you can place the two senators at the bathroom at the time of the bomb explosion?"

"Yes, Sir."

"Definitively?"

"Yes, Sir."

"But the semen traces could have been left there by someone else."

"That is correct, Sir."

"So how can you be sure the semen came from, err, one of the senators?"

At this, the policeman leaned back, looked away slowly, sighed, and went back to the mic. "You have to understand, Sir, that my team was barred from examining the crime scene. We were only allowed unrestricted access to the surrounding area, which we examined. Evidence we thought was related to finding the culprits we were ordered to turn over to the Office of the President."

"Yes, of course. We all want to get to the truth."

"And what materials we found to be unrelated to the manhunt for the culprit we brought back to headquarters and merely filed."

"Yes, it's your procedure, I've been briefed. Go on."

"And that our computers sometimes crash, and so we uploaded some materials to the Internet."

"That's unorthodox, but I guess given our cost-cutting measures, that can't be helped."

"Sir, perhaps this is not the venue to discuss these things..."

"Nonsense! Tell us, tell us all here, tell us the truth. Hold nothing back."

Slowly, the captain spoke. "Sir, we have, ahm, security camera foot--" But he was never able to finish his sentence. The audience ooooooh'd in unison, drowned the voices of the police and the VP, and started chanting, "Scandal, Scandal!"

The media suddenly jumped over the cordon separating them from the rest of the inquiry; they jammed their recorders and mics into the captain's face. Camera lights and lens focused on the one who would let out a bomb. Where is the footage? Where is the footage?

The captain's lips could be seen making out two distinct words.

jump

And so, Hinus Long, strained out of his wits, took up Jenny the bitch's dare, and walked towards the open third floor window. The rain-grey half-empty parking lot would be waiting below. Hinus shoved Marky to one side: get out of the way ass-boss, Hinus hissed as he took long, quick strides towards the light. The studio room where he churned out web articles dimmed in the coming evening's yellow light. Cost-cutting memos ordered them to cut the air conditioner, the fluorescent lights, the free coffee--so only the humpback thin lamppost outside illuminated the studio. Yellow was in Hinus' eyes as he broke into a run. Fuck you bitch if I live you die with the ass-boss, he yelled as he gained momentum. Other web writers and graphics people stood up from their hobbitty cubicles to gape at the spectacle. Rebellion is the man, Sharky whispered, adjusting his necktie (and screw this dress code, he added). Sharky knew Hinus asked for a raise and got visually middle-fingered in return. The ass-boss' secretary bitch drilled the final hole: you're not getting a raise, Hinus; take a running jump. Maybe I will, Jenny, he said and walked away, and now Hinus was in the zone, the open canvass of the window coming closer, closer--somebody stop him, screamed the bitch, because someone had to say that, but the room moved not one finger as Hinus jumped and stretched in midair and slammed into the wall below the window. Stunned, no one moved. Finally, Jenny's high heels clak clak clakked to the lying unconscious Hinus. What were you thinking? the bitch said. Ommigod. Jumping without your glasses, you near-sighted idiot.

snow every fifteen minutes

There is a cat meowing from outside my bedroom window, its snout pressed on the opaque glass, one front paw on the ledge, the other thumping the glass, like its was knocking on a neighbor's screendoor. Lemme in, lemme in. I can make out a blurred pink nose on white but dirty fur--maybe canines--when that small mouth opens to tease my cats to come out. Come out, come out and have my first born, it howls in a pitch so high and so familiar to me. Rawwwrrrnnggg. 

I own three female cats. I also own waterguns of varying effective ranges and milliliter capacities, a slighshot, a pellet gun, two pairs of throwing knives I bought but could never have the heart to use. The most evil thing I did to the rooftop tomcats of my neighborhood was to leave them a full plate of Aling Lisa's pancit bihon, cooked on her birthday and half a bilao sent to my door. She's my landlady. The tomcats are hers. The tomcats never touched the plate I left on the tongue of galvanized iron right outside my bedroom window. I picked it off the roof the evening before I went to sleep, to throw it down a large garbage bag in my kitchen. When my groomed, cultured, domesticated cats saw the plate and sniffed the scent of that pancit, they properly looked away, without a single meow. 

But now I'm swinging my legs, sitting on a table I had just cleared of readings. What to do with this howling in heat cat. There are days when Snow, the tomcat tapping my window, prowled the rooftops looking as clean as cotton. I always thought Aling Lisa routinely caught the small tiger and used an industrial strength vacuum cleaner on it. And there are days when Snow looked like he slept in a ten-wheeler trucks muffler. I want to kill that cat. But Aling Lisa would kill me. I am annoyed. I am running out of options.  

I'm still working on this...

curse that book

I got hold of a spell book with some curses in them. Thirty bucks from a gnarled old lady with a humpback. Her makeshift rack on the street bend near my apartment had small boxes full of them old books. Like she was moving, and that afternoon of my day off was her rummage sale day. Curses, huh? I almost ran back home, my long hair getting dishelved by the wind. Smells like it was going to rain. Dead leaves all around falling like confetti, like one big sudden autumn. I don't remember our street having so many old trees. Never mind that. How many people do I hate. Wonder if I have to buy candles? Hope this book doesn't make me yell Latin at the turn of twelve, and in front of a mirror at that. Har har. I fumble for my keys.

Dog-eared and with some pages torn off, the pages remain thick, like it absorbed all the sweat and dead bugs of the last half century. I've seen dead books like these in my school's library, in the section the nuns told us not to visit. Of course I snuck in there whenever I could. I always thought the nuns hid porn up that attic, and not the History of the Holocaust with so many nude pictures of dead Jews. Or several copies of Salman Rushdie's' Satanic Verses, which was a good story, really. I even found some autographed copies of Bertrand Russell's Why I am not a Christian. A nun or two long ago must have been a vehement secret fan of the atomic era enlightenment period. Never mind that. I slid out of my shoes, unzipped my skirt, got out of my blouse and bra, and walked barefoot to the kitchen in my undies, holding the book with two hands. Naked offering here I come. I hope there was one. I pulled up a chair to examine my find.

It should smell ancient, like it belonged to a previous world, but it doesn't. I sniffed it, the way I sniff newly bought books from Powerbooks and National Bookstore. Smells of disuse, this book, but not age. I opened it and flipped the pages, hoping to see a bookmark or a dead rose or bugs or a sheaf of small paper, maybe a sepia picture. Nothing. What kind of paper did they use here? The pages are coarse, rough on some parts, but the handwriting is legible--longhand from a time when notes revealed the soul. The words were carefully chosen. The strokes are elegant. That's what I thought. The spine is hand-sewn. Lovingly. I'm beginning to like this book. I grabbed my cell and text'd Angela--she lives next door. "Come over here now. Get a load of this." A knock on the door. I grab a bathroom towel and cover myself up. If my landlord, that maniac Mang Ramon down the hall, could see my like this, he'd mention marriage again. For the third time.

"There had better be a single man inside, or you're dead!" Angela yelled after banging at the door, and again more banging, louder this time. Knocks aren't enough for this woman. I let her in, long loose shirt with no shorts underneath and all. I know so. That's how we dress after school hours. Like sluts within reach. Ah the freedom. Long skirts and tight blouses in a private school within earshot of nowhere. If a woman lusted in a forest but there was no man around, does it matter? Never mind that.

I showed the pages to my co-teacher/ neighbor / best friend without telling her what the book was about and she said she didn't know I could read German. I yanked the book away from her and looked at a particular page.

"That is not German," I said, pointing to one line of script.

"Really?" Angela said while tugging at my towel. "Say it out loud, that line."

"Fine. Stop yanking my towel away."

I cleared my throat: "When you have foreseen the gestures yourself, the soul-itch clings to the reader." Angela smiled that smile she throws at preschoolers who thought they had outsmarted their teacher.

"Ah-huh." She nods and thumbs her cell, then aims it on a page of the book in my hand. She shows me the digital image while feeling my forehead with her free hand.

"I'm not sick, Angela. See here those words are... German." I flick her hand from my forehead and stare at the page, and then stare at the phone's colored monitor again. "But I know what it says, I can read it here--"

"Read the thing on my cell, not the book."

"I can't."

"What is this book about anyway?"

"Curses."

"It has nothing written on the cover. How do you know?"

"I... I.. I just know. The old lady must have told me it was a book on curses."

"What old lady?"

"Down the bend, near the bakery."

"I got home after you did. I heard you lock your door. I passed by the same bend. There was no lady there."

"But... but...," I flipped the pages and I could read them, I really could. Or at least I didn't feel like I didn't know what the lines of script meant. I felt at home with this.

Angela walked up to me and extended her hand, asking for the open book. The book suddenly closed itself shut, and I jumped back, startled, dropping it on the wooded floor. My single old maniac landlord that evening must have had the time of his life pacifying two mestiza's barely clothed. We screamed as we ran for the door. We screamed as we ran down the hall. Along the way I dropped my towel.

---------------------------

I'm still working on this...

Determined Detergent (DD)

"We never doubted you, D."

"Of course you did," D said, and sweeping the crowd with his gaze, "You all did."

The hand sanitizers, soaps, disinfectants, detergents, and fabric softeners looked down, admitting their doubts.

"But that was before," said the elderly and motherly fabric softener. "Until you came, no other detergent was able to remove so many kinds of stains in so little time while barely wearing out the fabric." At that, D beamed, proudly standing erect and tall, as though winds were blowing through his hair, an unseen cape waving like a triumphant flag. And he knew that this was how he seemed to them at this moment. A hero.

"The master will stop having those fits," said the young soap. "He will stop throwing us into the garbage, as hardly used failures, even though some of us were innocent and had nothing to do with cleaning clothes."

"The master is strict, her standards high, her morals unforgiving," said the washing machine behind the crowd. The machine winked at D and opened up his dryer. The stain-free clothes were now dry, and the master will come for them soon.

"Focus, relentless focus and sorting out and crushing those oppressive stains, that is the key, remember that," D said in a booming voice. The laundry room, whose white-tiled floor stretches into the bathroom and kitchen, were quiet. D had them by the edge of his tongue. He had finally proven himself.

"What should we call you, stranger? I mean other than the "D" on your packaging?" asked the hand sanitizer.

"D is fine. What's in a name anyway?"

"Nothing," the fabric softener said, "and everything. A name to us like yours is symbol, pride, hope, a reason to go on."

"Maybe we should give him a name, since he doesn't have a clue," the disinfectant said.

"I have an idea," said the washing machine, and when he said the name he had in mind, D and everyone else beamed. It was fitting.

Later, the master walked into the laundry room to get her clothes from the drier. She noticed something different about the detergent's packaging.

"Funny, this wasn't here this morning," she said.

On the package's front pronounced the laundry room's pride: DD.

"That's Determined Detergent to you," said the young soap. The washing machine glared at the soap. The master might hear her. Better the master figure it out on her own.

easter

An angel slipped into His tomb and calibrated the divine egg timer: resurrect in three days. The angel looked at the body partially wrapped in tattered, bloodied cloth. "Not so all powerful now, are we?" Gabriel hovered above the corpse, landed gently on the elevated slab of stone, kicked the body once. It didn't move. It couldn't move. He quickly sent a telepathic message, to be uploaded to the angel bulletin board: kick Him while He's down; we won't get this chance again, hurry. Giggling like an eight-year old, Gabriel pulled out his cell phone, dialed a hot line. "He's out cold. We have three days off. How much mayhem can we do in three days?" "You'll see," Lucifer said on the other end of the line. Gabriel closed his flip-phone. "I'll say this out loud because You're thick omnipotent head can't get it. This elaborate rise-from-the-dead stage play you directed and starred in? This is not about them realizing they needing something called 'salvation.' It was never about them. It was always about Your needing them to need You, because You're a selfish God. What a teenager--inducing a need, an addiction, to You! You have three persons in one and none of them give You proper counsel. You need a shrink. The only reason we put up with You is that we don't know how to kill You, yet." Gabriel sighed. He felt lighter, now that it was off his chest, this Divine resentment. Now he could spend three days without his wings and halo and without that endless oppressive divine light shining above him. Gabriel closed his eyes--and heard a thud on the tomb's inner wall. Lucifer was inside, holding a crushed voice recorder, staring at Gabriel. "If you're going to think of running away, you might as well learn from the first and the best." Gabriel was stunned. He never thought God would be so distrusting that he would place a recorder in His tomb. In a blink, Lucifer stood by the angel's side. "You're not angry at Dad anymore?" Gabriel said. "No. I was at first, but I outgrew that. I have a life now. Now stop sulking, I'll show you around. Heaven is overrated."

from the darkness, part one

I am trying to get out of bed but I shudder and then freeze, ramrod straight from head to toe; back pains still me, flat on the cushion. Like a cardboard that won't get up, I just can't get up. Dad will holler for me from downstairs anytime now. Even with this week-long eclipse, I can tell, without seeing in the dark, that it's 5:30 am. Cold air and the scent of Mom's pancakes and no glow of sunlight humming from behind the curtains. I miss the sun.

"Clark, the cows won't feed themselves! Let's go!"

"Almost dressed! Coming, Dad!" How to get out of bed. I try to lift one leg up, to swing down and arc me up. Pain jolts me and I give up with the leg raise. I'm still staring at the ceiling. Well, that went well. Haven't felt this sore from farm chores since, since, I've never been this sore. Got an idea. I give it one big twist and fall off the bed.

"Uhmmm...," I moan from the bedroom floor. I can move my legs now. Takes pain to overcome pain. Less back pains now.

"Clark!? Everything all right?"

That's Mom, probably taking off her apron to run upstairs to check on me. I can speed through fields to catch bullets in flight. I can take a head-on collision with a ten-wheeler truck. I do farm chores fit for six men. But I can't get up from the floor. I'm in my shorts. I feel cold. Mommy...

Footfalls on wood. Dad swings my bedroom door open. He must have ran upstairs after my thud off the bed.

"You ok, son?"

"Just withdrawal symptoms. I miss the sun." I'm on all fours now. Have to get dressed, drive to the Luthor mansion greenhouse, and speed back here to do the chores. Crawl, Clark, crawl to the closet.

"I got an idea, son."

"No, Dad, don't help me with my clothes." I'm almost there. Red shirt, blue jacket, plain old jeans. I reach up the drawer, still on the floor, and turn on the lampshade.

"Wouldn't think of it. You've got too much Kent pride in you."

"What's your idea?" Got my shirt on. I lean on a chair for support and stand up, slowly, calf and upper leg muscles on fire. Now where are my jeans?

"I can do a portion, just a portion, not even half, of your chores. How's that?"

I'm pulling my jeans up, bending over a little, grunting a lot. There. Zipped up and buttoned. I'm sweating. Panting.

"No," I whisper, out of breath, and look at Dad through wet bangs. "Too much Kent pride."

We smile the same smile. Dad is sitting on my bed, a tumble of pillows and blankets behind him. He's going to forgive me for the mess my room is in. Just until this eclipse blows over. I wonder what I'd do without my Dad.

"Doesn't Lex suspect that you're in his greenhouse to suck up all that artificial sunlight, that you're not excited about exotic species of roses?"

I stand, feet apart, and twist at my hips, to the left, and then right. Just a little pain. Not too much.

"Well, Dad, I think his exact words were: 'Either you're getting allergic to the Kent farm or you're starting to want a bald older brother.'"

Dad laughs out hard, amused by this. I think I am, too.

"Well, he's a Luthor," Dad says in a sigh. "Got to give him that. Charming and manipulative."

"Don't worry, Dad," I walk towards the door. "I got unrestricted access to the Luthor greenhouse."

"Speaking of friends, you didn't tell me you were friends with another millionaire."

So he came. I was wondering when he'd be back from Asia, back from his training.

"Sorry, Dad. I didn't want you to worry that another rich boy with issues would try to manipulate me--"

Dad holds up a hand. "He's downstairs. He knows about your--"

"--powers, yes, he saw me in Metropolis snag a man in front of a speeding bus--" Now I hold up a hand to interrupt Dad.

"It happened in front of a retirement home. The near-senile old people on the porch saw me, so did the twenty-something attendants. He worked it out to have the attendants paid off and transferred--"

"--You certainly have a way with rich kids--"

"--You can trust him, Dad--"

"--Like you can trust a Luthor! He knows your secret--"

"--He's got secrets, too!"

"--Name one odd thing about him and his thousand dollar suit?"

"--He's got expensive toys in a cave filled with bats!"

Silence. Dad's brows knit and unknit and then he bursts out laughing again, and then stops, turns around. Mom and Bruce are at my bedroom door. My back pains have returned and I lean on the wall.

Mom turns to Bruce. "Bats?"

"Yes, Mrs. Kent." He eyes me and continues. "A zoological wonder I am fond of."

Nice suit. Black sheen. Lex Luthor's suit doesn’t sheen that black. How does he do it?

"Toys?" Now it's Dad asking, his face serious, like he doesn't want his son associating with a fetishist.

"Modified cars, a super computer or two...hobbies."

Bruce sounds like a kid reassuring my parents we did nothing wrong, just safe wholesome fun, all summer long, in our secret tree house. Can't help but smile.

"No offense, Mr. Wayne--"

"--Please, call me Bruce." He wears this eligible bachelor persona with ease. Must be a rich kid thing.

"Ah, all right. Bruce. But your secret, no disrespect meant, is not exactly at par with my son's."

"It is," I butt in, "when you know the purpose of those toys and the--"

"--It's all right, Clark." Bruce looks at me, his eyes tell me it's not my secret to give away. He's right. I have no right.

Bruce's face leans forward slightly, then his voice turns low, raspy, like a complete other person appeared in the room wearing Bruce's suit. His eyes turn into slits and eyes my Dad without facing him. Scary.

"You're probably right, Mr. Kent. And I thank you for welcoming me into your home, but I'm not hundreds of miles from Gotham at the crack of dawn for a social call."

If I still had my x-ray vision, I'd scan his body and find nothing threatening. Normal bone structure. No weapons, just a cellular phone, and an odd belt with compartments. No powers and he scares me. Luthor doesn't scare me. This one does.

"That trailer parked outside," Mom says. "You plan to stay in Smallville for a while."

Bruce loosens up a bit. Mom is perceptive, and protective, and he likes that. He throws me that you-lucky-kid look. His parents died when he was eight.

"Are you," Dad hesitates, "asking my son for a favor, since you've done him one?" Dad pronounced 'asking' as though it was a euphemism for blackmail.

"Uhm, actually," the raspy intimidating tone is gone, "I'm doing your son another favor." Now he sounds like a well-mannered kid afraid of overstaying his welcome. Charming bachelor to brooding killer to awkward rich kid in the span of seconds. Wonder what else he can do.

Dad turns to face me. "Oh no you don't. You're not accepting another gift. I know that trailer is more practical compared to Lex's Ford F150, but you can't--"

"--Jonathan!" Mom shoots Dad that look, that he needs to can that rich man's vices slash poor man's virtues speech.

"The trailer is just a cover."

We all look at Bruce. He steps back, his face recedes from the light but it is as though we could still see his eyes, even though he's blending with the shadows.

"Let him finish, Dad."

"Clark emailed me three days ago about the eclipse. First, his powers faded and he was glad to be normal. At first. But he noticed he couldn't play hero without getting himself hurt and his parents worried. And he lagged behind his farm chores."

Bruce is just about the only guy I know who's glad that darkness has taken double shifts and extended its coverage worldwide.

"What took you so long?" I look at Bruce, I can find his eyes in the darkness.

"I can't speed across continents like some people can."

"Mr. Wayne," Mom says, "oh, I'm sorry, Bruce. You were speaking of the trailer as a cover."

"Artificial sunlight generator inside. I pretend to take a road trip to Kansas to visit a friend. Then, business calls, and I am fetched by a helicopter who flew all the way from Metropolis, and which then flies me back to Gotham. In haste, I leave the trailer behind, in the safe custody of the Kents. That's the press release."

"No idea why this eclipse is taking so long?" I ask.

"Not yet."

"And I thought you were a detective."

"I'll get a few leads in the next five seconds."

A honk from outside the house. In a moment, Lex is knocking on the screen door downstairs, yelling Mr. Kent, Mrs. Kent, Clark, the family roster. He's done it so many times it's like a ritual now.

We all head downstairs. Mom and Dad first. I put my jacket on and I lean on the handrails, taking the stairs one slow step at a time. Bruce doesn't move to lend me a hand. Midway down the stairs now--oops! Bruce is suddenly behind me, grabbing my jacket's collar, steadying me. He moves like a cat. I didn't even hear his foot falls.

"Ah, I see you've made a new friend," Lex says from behind the living room couch, but he's not looking at me, he's looking at someone behind me. I have a distinct feeling I'm in the middle of a crossfire.

...TO BE CONTINUED...

unbreakable

Ramirez could barely see through the blood in his eyes. He smelled his own stink, tasted his own blood, everything he ate and drank had gushed out, and when a switch fell down voltage routed his whole being, sending a thousand tiny painful simultaneous stabs to his core, his feet kicking puddles of his own piss and shit; he would scream if he could, but even lifting his eyelids open needed the strength of his entire being. So when he tried to curse them all he did from his barely moving lips on his bluish-red swollen face that hung on a limp neck was mumble.

A hand grabbed the hair on the back of Ramirez's head, pulled it up and settled it on the chair's backrest, leaving his jaw to fall open and saliva to ooze out. "Just tell us what we want to know," said the gentle but persuasive voice.

"Ab jub balaaa," Ramirez tried to say.

"We know, we know. You just balance the books, sign the checks," the voice said in a sing-song mockery, "and keep the money in the bank for your distinguished clients. On and on, you've been repeating that since we hauled you in six hours ago." Mirano's hand let the head go and it fell down and sagged to the right. Had it not been for the restraints, Ramirez would have fallen over.

He won't break, this man, Mirano thought, at least not in the time we've been allowed to tease out the clues from him. Mirano whipped back to his Captain, who nodded. The Captain wants to talk. The door swung close behind them.

A match struck and inflamed both cigarettes. Mirano and his Captain inhaled deeply and then winced. The abandoned factory still smelled of rusted metal. The thick air of the evening was stale, just like the hole they're in.

"They have his family, Sir, that's why he is this--"

"We got something."

Mirano threw his lighted cigar and killed the tiny embers with his heel.

"We can't break the encrypted files in his laptop, but there's a pattern we saw, and it might be a clue..."

The door swung open and a raging Mirano grabbed Ramirez by the head. He screamed in the half-dead man's ears, over and over, the same question, till the Captain managed to tear his grip from Ramirez's face.

Mirano sighed and inhaled the smell of puke and blood and piss and fear in the room. He paced frantically as his Captain spoke to the tortured soul: "Just tell us what we want to know." And the Captain's eyes slid from the pulp on the chair to the pacing man who said, almost under his breath, a question that will get them closer to the heart of things.

"What is the missing pulse?"

puta ka!

"No, Marcus and I are not an item, we just hang out!" I yell to the FX-load of people: the driver, the two passengers seated up front, the four in the midsection, and three with me in the back. Only Judith beside me is the intended audience. But this is how you avoid admitting everything during the cramped ride back home. You keep your voice down until your best friend infuriates you with her prying and you cry out in denial.

"Louder. I don't think the MMDA lady outside heard you," says Judith. I can feel glances, hear random bits of murmurs inside the FX. I am the one nearest the door. Is this bitch daring me?

I pull the doorhandle before any of three passengers near me can protest. The morning rush of sirens and engine roars and bus horns blast inside the FX.

"Manang! Yoohoo! Yes, you! Marcus and I are not a couple!--"

"Puta, Ellie--" Judith interrupts, but I can scream louder.

"--we are just going out! Nothing wrong there, di ba!?"

The FX brakes to a sudden stop. I let Judith reach the door handle across me and pull the door shut. She glares at me.

I glare back: "Happy now?"

"Miss," says the driver,"could you two just text each other about your lovelife instead?" His rearview mirror frames for me his exasperated eyes. He clearly doesn't need this so early in the morning. The FX is still not moving.

"Oo nga, keep your personal lives to your--"

"Opo, Lola,--" Judith fires me that look: let's-just-get-this-over-with, --"my friend and I are sorry."

"We'll be quiet the rest of the way. So sorry po," I add.

The other passengers sigh and resume their bored looks. The driver guns the engine back to life. There's a knock on the driver's window. He rolls it down. It's the MMDA lady. Via the rearview mirror, the driver shoots me that look: nuissance. I shoot him my indignant counter-look: live with it.

"What did I do?" the driver asks the blue-uniformed manang, who tells him to shut his engines off. He does. She glares at him and walks to the back of the FX while waving for other vehicles to pass us by.

"Lagot ka, Ellie," Judith whispers.

"Puta ka," I say under my breath.

The door swings open. The manang to whom I hollered my exasperation a while ago is eyeing each of us in the back. Her eyes settle on me.

"Were you the one who yelled at me?"

I blink. No one says a word. The manang’s eyes roll up and she sighs.

"Just make sure," she begins. I can feel it: everyone in the FX is just as attentive as I am. "Just make sure that Marcus isn't seeing anyone else. Mahirap umasa."

I am stunned. Judith is giggling. The manang looks dead serious. I can hear mumbles of sus maryoseps behind me.

"Partner!" another blue-uniform yells from across the street. "What's going on?"

The manang turns to her and yells back, "It's ok." Then, in her normal voice says, "just a potential accident." She smiles that knowing smile and slowly closes the door. The driver scratches his head. The engines coughs to life and we slide away from the manang and speed up on the road ahead.

Judith is suddenly too busy thumbing on her cellphone to even look at me. Her grin tells me she is already texting the world of what I had just denied, of what had just transpired.

She presses send. I know so, even without looking closely. We have the same cellphone model.

“Good thing you don’t have Marcus’ number,” I mumble, the streets a blur as I look out the window.

“I do now.” At that I scramble to open my bag, but I already know it’s not there.

“Puta ka, Judith!”

the last bite

Jeremy saw past the daze in her eyes and stared at her pale and seawater-wrinkled fingers. A day and a half on a sinking lifeboat with Martin and no signs of rescue. At least the night and its endless darkness was over. She hated the dark.

Wonder just where this lazy current is taking them. Her wristwatch said half past three in the afternoon. Nothing to do but endure the boredom and hold out an inverted mineral water bottle, with its bottom knifed out, to catch in raindrops. Seawater dehydrates you more. So she and Martin split the accumulated drinking water evenly, and took turns holding it up. Hunger, dehydration, exhaustion, hopelessness, a shark. Jeremy wondered which would kill her first.

Above them, they sky was cloudy-bright, the kind of sky she looks at from her hammock on her apartment's terrace. She misses home, and her long afternoon siestas. "Tell me again," she wanted to ask Martin, "how your boat leaked to death on the way back to the harbor?" But she didn't Martin felt bad enough as it is. His plan to seduce her on his boat didn't work. And now it's life and death. How romantic.

A shark, Jeremy whispered to her self, to rock her back into reality. A shark would kill them. At least, she wished a shark would come. It if didn't come, at least it's something to think about. Better than the endless nothing she is enduring. Better than the thought of Martin raping her on an already sinking lifeboat.

Soon, night would come. So many things could happen. A shark might attack. Or the lifeboat might give out. Or a shark might come while the boat is collapsing. Or a shark might come while Martin is trying to rape her while the boat is sinking. How convenient, Jeremy thought.

She remembered a paraphrase of Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Right, definitely, I'm sure, a shark would come.

Their lifeboat was a lung slowly deflating, a boat exhaling air; they took turns sticking their fingers into a hole on the boat's side; they kept checking themselves for open wounds that would lure in a shark.

They hardly talked. Martin said they should keep quiet, to conserve their strength, so they could scream and wave at a passing boat or airplane for however long it took to get noticed, to get rescued. But what if Martin got tired of conserving his strength, and wanted to spend it all on her?

The sound of motor in the sky. A plane. Martin screamed, forgot the hole and waved both arms. Jeremy blinked and joined the noise barrage. The hole hissed and hissed. The plane was gone. There was more water inside the lifeboat. The boat had gotten limp. The water bottle was nowhere in sight.

That's the second plane that missed them. Jeremy blinked at the coming darkness. So again, where is that shark, she asked herself.

Something in the water moved. Probably nothing. Probably the hunger and desperation setting in. A fin. Out of the water so suddenly. Twenty feet away. Coming to them, fast. Something surely is hungry. They are not the only desperate creatures at sea.

She pointed to the fin and Martin's voice was almost a silent screech, "We're dead." His throat must hurt from all that screaming.

"I'm not bleeding. Are you bleeding?"

"No," Martin said. "We have a flair gun, with one flair chambered."

"Save it. We can do this."

"Do what?"

"Sharks are sensitive not only to scent but to sound."

The fin swam closer. Fifteen feet.

"We yell it away? Are you nuts, Jeremy?"

"Do you trust me?"

"Just tell me what to do."

Ten feet away.

"Get you fingers out of the hole and pound the boat, open palm, and don't stop screaming."

"You're nuts, we'd hasten the deflation--"

Five feet.

"Do it!"

They do. They scream. The hole hisses air. The fin slows down.

"Don't stop, keep pounding, keep screaming, Martin!"

Martin barely blinked as he screamed. His throat was in pain. The shark turned to circle the lifeboat and Jeremy turned to face it, screaming and pounding. Their voice, in tandem, might just be enough.

The sun setting when the fin turned around and vanished in the silent waters. Jeremy plugged the hole with her fingers. But it was of no use. When the sun had set, more than half of the lifeboat was submerged. Both of them clung to the floating part, exhausted. Their throats hurt.

No sound rippled the sea. The blanket of darkness came. Jeremy hated the dark. No, she was afraid of it. Instead of her phobia killing her, there was another way. She bit her lip until it bled.

the last bout

Brandon Kowalski slowly pulled the white blanket toward himself, revealing his feet. He pulled some more and saw his bandaged right leg. Stitches lay underneath, he knew. He winced as he expected pain to shoot from the right side of his torso, where a thick pad kept in place by bandages covered more stitches. But there was no pain. His wince uncurled his 33-year-old angular face into wide-eyed wonder. "Morphine," he whispered in his mind.

He remembers punching sand-paperish skin while some 80 yards from the shore. "It" pulled away, leaving bleeding holes on his right leg. Brandon tried to hold on to his surfboard, which was now broken in two. The first bite had punctured his lungs with its upper jaw's teeth, the lower jaw's force cushioned by the surfboard. Brandon barely had time to curse. Wincing in pain, with internal bleeding setting in, he scissored his legs to keep afloat, and to look around: where is it? where is it now?

It came from his left side, his blindside, biting into his left arm. The waves separated surfer from surfboard as the six-footer repeatedly punched the twelve-foot shark's nose. It pulled away again. Adrenaline had dampened the wound-pains. He was trying again to scissor, to prepare for round four, but he had lost too much blood. The green-glistening water around him was now a murky crimson.

The humming of motor boats was getting near. With his head above-water, Brandon passed out. He did not see the shark fin rise some ten feet behind him. He did not hear the whish of the harpoon from the fishing boat that came to his rescue. He was unconscious as strong-armed fishermen, pulling him aboard, grunted under the strain of his dead weight. His bleeding bulk was on deck when the fishermen hauled onto the boat the other bleeding bulk from the sea.

Now, pain-numbed but awake, Brandon touched his left arm, where he had no feeling, and which he could not move. A knock on the door. His manager, Phil, took off his hat and stepped inside Room 312. Brandon closed his eyes and suddenly felt thirsty.

"From the fans," Phil said, gesturing to the flowers inside the room that Brandon had just noticed. Phil's alcoholic 58 year-old face wore the color of a dead man who rose from the morgue because he had a bet going down, and he wanted to know if he had won.

Phil walked to the table beside the bed. He picked up a ball of wet cotton and touched the bandaged man's lips with it. Due to massive blood loss and internal wounds, Brandon was still not allowed to drink large amounts of water. So he sucked on cotton.

Brandon's manager put the cotton on the tray and wiped his hands on his crumpled coat. His lips and lungs ached for a cigarette.

"How bad is it?" Brandon whispered.

"Your days in the ring," Phil said while cupping his pockets for his second pack, "are over."

sticks and stones

The Mako shark is pound per pound the strongest shark there is. Although never reaching the length of the Great White, the Mako is the faster swimmer, and has a reputation of violently tugging at fishermen's hooks until either the line broke or the fisherman fell overboard. A small fishing boat, one story went, was attacked by the Mako they were trying to catch. It jumped right out of the water and into the boat, sending two of the three fishermen into the water. The shark landed on deck as the remaining fisherman's mind swiveled between panic and panic: to jump into the water, where there might be other sharks, or stay on deck and evade a wriggling 12-foot predator drowning in air, wildly trashing about, and rocking the boat.

Rescuers who came to the hysterical radio for help arrived five minutes later to find a silvery gray-blue corpse on deck. It had been dead a full three minutes, yet its tail continued to spasm and its jaws still twitched.

A report filed by the Coast Guard medic who talked to the fishermen who fell overboard said, "James Mathiessen, 34, truck driver by profession, was reported to have yelled in two directions, at the shark on deck, and in the direction of his friends in the water, at other sharks that might come by. John McMahon, 39, high school Physics teacher, and Mark Conneway, 32, car rental shop attendant, said that Mathiessen had yelled more at the shark that was never more than a foot away from him. He cursed it to the ends of the seas with all the insults he knew in his heart to be improper."

"We're thinking there's a correlation," Conneway said, with the dead shark fish-hooked and raised for display at the dock, where an awed audience stood. "James is undeniably more articulate than either of us [Mark]. I think that is what killed the shark and kept other sharks at bay."

"Our boat," McMahon, the other fisherman said, "is not a big one. If a Mako could jump right in and rock that boat hard, as it did, it could also flip itself overboard. But the more James screamed at it the less it struggled. It just writhed and withered and died.”

"I think," Mathiessen said, "I latched into every bad memory in my life and lashed it all on that thing, over and over. I feel lighter, somehow."

”We’re seriously thinking,” said Coast Guard Captain Harold Smith, “to require all fishing boats venturing the waters during shark-hunting season to have at least one very angry, very articulate person on board.”