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Fiction by Jeff Javier | July 4th, 2010
The day Doy left with his motorbike, our little white cat Fishy began mewling on the front yard. She had lost half of her weight and her eyes were always watery and flaky. She would not eat or drink and her breathing was getting heavier day after day. I didn’t know what happened to her. Had she eaten something? Did our tomcat Porky rape her? I didn’t know. All I knew was she was dying.
Doy found her five months ago together with Pating the day he showed up with his motorbike. They were in a box just out of the gate and he carried them up to my apartment. Doy had said before that he had a surprise for me. I thought it was the kittens, but it turned out to be the bike. He told me how he tricked his old man into buying him that shiny black bike. He promised me that he would take me anywhere with his bike, helmets off, from the beaches of Mati to the mountains of Cotabato. But I liked the cats better.
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Poetry by Jeff Javier | January 31st, 2010
I once wrote it like how I drop a stone on still water. The first word would splash and the lines thereafter ripple in and out of paper going back to the first words and out again to the margins, through the fibers and on the four corners on this thin crust of a paper, now shivering on the creases, waves rolling, tsunamis mounting, swallowing monuments and mountains, roaring and marching in and out the field, multiplying liquid soldiers, one ripple clashing against the other, creating more splashes and little spheres up on the air.
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Fiction by Jeff Javier | June 28th, 2009
Everybody has a boyfriend named Jonathan. Johnny, Jonas, Junjun, Nathan, Anthony, Tony, Wanwan, Tantan.
Skin glistening with sweat, Jonathans always talk rough, walk big, and hang out with their guys after a basketball game. They have clean haircuts, pressed shirts, big backpacks, and white rubber shoes. When they are with a girl, they hold doors, shake their shoulders and puff their chests like young roosters.
These Jonathans will have roses and chocolates, candlelit dinners for two, and quick kisses in dark movie houses. You practice your lips every Friday night for a date on Saturdays with Anthony.
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Fiction by Jeff Javier | June 7th, 2009
I went back to her house and banged on the door. She opened it a little. She looked surprised.
“I’m a woman,” I said, lifting up my shirt and risking the catarrh.
She smiled.“I know.”
I didn’t go home.I stayed.
- Jeanette Winterson, “The Queen of Spades”, The Passion
She finally came into my stall that first night of May, wanting her future to be foretold. She wore a soldier’s uniform, stolen from a man’s wardrobe, hiding the soft form of her body. When I revealed to her that she would meet a love she would regret, she reached for my mask and peered into my eyes.
“Green,” she said, “like turbulent body of water.” She walked away without paying.
When the fairground closed down, she was waiting outside the cobbled street. She didn’t mind the cold air. She followed me home, tailing distances behind me, hiding in dark alleyways. On my door, she knocked only once, twice. I opened it. I asked her to leave if she was only looking for fun.
“The carnival has ended,” she said.
That was when the real night began. She entered and she stayed.
But she won’t stay that long. Her body says so.
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Poetry by Jeff Javier | February 17th, 2008
(After Cecille Laverne dela Cruz)
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A B
Two parallel lines, fated never to meet in a two dimensional plane.
If you place line A
to compliment line B,
you’ll end up with a telephone pole.
Santa Claus flies to all children,
from North to South, good and bad to give
candies and charcoals – all around the magnetic pole.
If you’ll allow me,
let me talk you into a vision
where the world melts like chocolate
and every day will become Christmas day. Things
will fly that every concept is nothing but good and good.
I’ll even let you come to play in Santa’s factory.
Come, then.
I’ll talk my tongue onto your pole.
Fiction by Jeff Javier | October 14th, 2007
My little brother returned home two days ago from Diliman for the vacation. Now, he sits beside me while I navigate the channels to check what television networks have in store for the summer.
Not a minute passes that David says, “I don’t like that they call our generation the Generation Y.”
I turn to look at David. Only eighteen years of age, a year younger than I, and having to spend two of those years in that university, and look now what he thinks the world is doing to him.
“It’s a slap to our face that we are named so because we have a predecessor that was labeled Generation X. It’s that structuralism thing. You are named this because you are after that. Blah…blah…blah…”
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