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.

They were probably only two weeks old. They were small and frisky and were very afraid of us. They would hiss every time Doy would reach his hand to them, rubbing their tiny chins. Stray cats, like stray boys, were not new to me, so I let Doy keep them.

I met Doy on the summer after his high school graduation. I had just moved in to the neighborhood and he had former classmates around the area that he liked to hang out with. I sometimes saw them play basketball by the open court on hot afternoons or cram up in a little store, drinking and singing on warm nights.

It was one of those nights when I was walking home from my summer class that I found him bent before a sewer canal. With one hand on the wall, he looked as if he was barfing. But when he lurched down towards the sewer, I let out a “Hoy!” He looked up and smiled. With his other hand, he showed me a muck-covered kitten.

“That’s my cat,” I said.

“Well,” he said, looking at the kitten, then back at me. “He is a dirty cat.”

I led him into my apartment where he washed the cat.

“You are lucky,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“You see this cat,” he said drying up my kitten on the table. “He has three colors: red, black, and white. You are lucky. This boy is lucky.”

“The cat is a girl,” I said.

“Really?” he said. He brought the cat to the light and squinted at the kitty’s behind. “Oh,” he said.

He then placed the cat on the table and it crouched there tight with its freshly dried fluff. “Look, she crouches like a pig. She’s fat and has no tail. Does she have a name?”

I said I don’t know.

“Let me call her Baboy. I’ll come here everyday and feed her.”
I never thought he was serious in inviting himself over. He was drunk.
In less than two years since we met, more cats appeared in the backdoor in the morning and meowed at us for food. There were Edward, Gandalf, Edison, Judy Ann, Baboy, Baboy’s litters Porky, Porkchop, Chicken, and many more cats. Doy decided on their names.

Before, I only called each cat that would wander into my kitchen Mingkay. Before, I would only give them leftovers. But over time Doy would buy cheap canned sardines and deep-fried isaw for them. He would clean their ears, wash their feet, and tend their wounds. He even helped Gandalf the grey cat when his tooth got stuck in a beef bone. Doy had especially saved that bone for him after we had Doy’s birthday lunch. Gandalf was crying the whole afternoon and Doy had to endure Gandalf’s scratches to slip out the bone. Later that night, Gandalf the Grey sent three kingly gifts of dead mice for the evening party.

So the new kittens, Fishy and Pating easily got comfortable with us. Though they would still run away with spiked-hair tails, they no longer hissed at us. Once we touched their little heads, they would settle down and close their eyes. They probably knew the smell of our hands: something to do with the type keyboard-warmth of my palms or Doy’s ink-stained fingernails. The two of them would play on top of the washing machine, scratching each other’s backs and nibbling each other’s legs. The other cats would lie everywhere in and out of the apartment: some near the windows, on warm appliances, or up on the neighbors’ shaded roofs.

On afternoons, Doy would come to my apartment from his school. He would only remove his shoes and run to the kittens. He would bring them down to the floor and would take pictures of them that I always post on the fridge.

Doy had ways with cats. Or rather, cats had ways with Doy. Sometimes I thought I was also a cat having ways with Doy. He always treated them like family.
“I’d be the daddy,” he would say, always something like that, tickling the cat while it sleeps. “And you’d be the mommy.”

“That is disgusting,” I would answer him. Doy would then pout his lips, roll his head away from me and quickly give his attention back to the cat.

He would be silent as he continued tickling the cat. I would then leave my paper works on the table and come over to him. I would lie beside him on the wooden floor and rub his hair. He would always ignore me after then. He would tickle the cat and I would rub his hair until I fall asleep. When I wake up, he would also be asleep, facing me with his hand over my shoulder.

“How’s your class?” I asked one afternoon. He was now in his fourth semester in college.

“Good thing I now have more time in the afternoon,” he said.

“So you could come here and bum?”

“I like it here,” he said. “The windows are large, it is airy and it never gets too hot. How about your thesis?”

“Finishing up,” I said. “A little revision, then passing, then graduating, then off to Manila.”

“You will leave me then?” he said, pouting his sometimes dry lips.

“Of course not,” I said rubbing his hair.

He was silent for a long time. He stroked Pating on the head.

“You know why I like cats? They have this kind of sense of humor that’s not like dogs. They are cunning, merciless, and sarcastic. Dogs are simply loyal, sometimes they just look stupid.”

Doy rolled on the floor and brought the sleeping cat on his chest.

“They are merciless,” he continued. “When they are young, they’re cute and full of fun. They will scratch on your jeans, jump on your lap, sleep on the table and poop on your shoes. Then they will run here and there and will lick your fingers as if they’ve done nothing. But time will come when they will not come to you anymore.”

Doy looked at me for a moment, then back to the cat, touching its whiskers.

“They will make you feel unwanted,” he said. “They will steal your fish, will be gone for many nights, go home injured with blood on one eye. Then they will grow old and weak. And they will return only to let you rub their tummy and lick your finger for the last time. And when it’s their time–they always know it’s their time–they would leave without evidence. You never know what happens to them. Did a truck hit them? Were they kidnapped for food? Did they just fall in the sewer and rot?

“They are merciless,” Doy repeated. “The thing I like about cats is the very same thing I don’t like about them. Especially those princelings, tomcats, vagabond little monarchs. They will leave without evidence. Not even poop in your shoes.”

I reached for him and took the camera strap from around his neck. I focused the lens on him and started shooting.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Taking evidence of my princeling,” I said.

“I’m not leaving,” he said. “You are leaving. And I am not your prince.”

“I am not talking about you, stupid. I’m taking pictures of Pating.”

Pating was stirring in his sleep, shifted his head and placed it on Doy’s chest.

“Prince Pating,” he laughed. “The Black Knight of West Uyanguren.”

I took only few shots of Pating that afternoon. Most of the photos were of Doy’s face. His features, his nose, his eyebrows, his lips silhouetted before the light from the door. The line rose up and down and plunged deep from his chin and down to his neck where the afternoon sun sank into its curve. The faint scent of his cologne wafted every time he took his breath.

A few days later, Pating went out of my apartment door, down the steep wooden stairs, and never returned. That’s what Doy never liked about cats.

A few weeks later, Doy did the same thing.

SEVERAL DAYS AFTER Doy left with his motorbike, Fishy had been mewling again. She was now hiding under the pile of lumber woods beside the neighbor’s quarter downstairs. The neighbor was both annoyed and concerned. Fishy was noisier than the usual.

The neighbor was no cat doctor but she helped me prepare a medicine drop made of water and powdered paracetamol, one drop in the morning, noon and night. I didn’t want to lose Fishy this time like how I lost Pating two months before.

Around noon, Doy returned with his motorbike. He said he only wanted to get his things. I knew there was no need for talk. He simply stuffed his shirts and pants into a bag without folding them. He took his shoes and his books. The photos he left on the fridge. He didn’t even bother to ask for water or what I was having for lunch.

Doy and I came down the apartment. Then he was off with his bag to the bike, while I gave Fishy another drop of medicine.

But Fishy was not under the woods anymore. She had crawled out several feet away and she was not mewling anymore. Red ants were crawling on her mouth.
I called Doy before he could start up his bike.

He immediately looked for a spot around the front yard. The other cats came to see what Doy had been digging. There were Baboy, Gandalf, Porky, and other cats from around the neighborhood. They knew what happened here. They knew what was lost.

Doy placed Fishy in her shallow grave and touched her head many times, calling her name again and again. “Fishy?” he said as he widened the hole. “Fishy?” he said as he carried her to her grave. “Fishy?” he said as he positioned her head properly under the makopa roots.

I thought Fishy moved. But it was only the shadow of the leaves. She was not really moving. She won’t move anymore.

“Rest in peace, Fishy,” Doy said and asked for forgiveness.

When Doy had completely covered Fishy with soil, I gave him a flower I picked from the neighbor’s pot. Doy placed the flower on the small mound.

This was not the first time Doy and I lost a cat. But the others went away–like Edward, Edison, Judy Ann, Pork Chop, and Pating–choosing to die unknown, unloved, and unburied.

But Fishy stayed. She wanted us to have that burden of slow death, of losing a family, of knowing that emptiness. That was her way of making us human.

Doy marched back to his motorbike, started it and revved out of the gate and out my life. I went back to my apartment where I knew I would never hear Fishy mewl or Doy’s bike roar again. I closed the door to the afternoon sun, where cats were back sleeping in their warm places and everything was silent once more.

—-
Jeff Javier’s struggles with his BA English thesis at UP Min are still far from over.

But when I almost got the excitement I want then it suddenly goes quiet: the water rests, the storm calms, the stone has reached the bottom. The surface shines and glitters once more, diamond on smooth transparent fabric, leaving a high resonating note, sending chills on my spine, hard and crackling, like how cold electricity on water can be on, and now the ripple vanishes but I know the echo goes on and on under the surface, beneath the tension where mathematical equations create their own wars, the x’s and y’s and z’s magnifying the invisible curve, the elliptical orbits, expanding the universe, never ending, never dying, creating more worlds.

The stone remains motionless down there. Until I drop the next one and it creates another splash.

I once wrote like I could contain eternity in a red plastic drum.

—-
Jeffrey Blasabas-Javier is a Creative Writing student in UP Mindanao

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.

On your eleventh date, Junjun waits for your arrival at his favorite internet station. You imagine a night on a secluded beach with Wanwan, gathering smooth shells along the coast. During afternoon breaks, Tantan steals away from class to join you on your pineapple pie diet at the canteen. You sit on a park bench with Jonas, holding hands, talking about nothing, filling the silence that you think is as big and as round as love. At the finals, Tony waves at you from the courtside before going into the last quarter — and you give him a flying kiss from your seat. Nathan is hesitant but, at last, lets you have a sip of his beer. And, always, Johnny drives you home after a party so he can have a chance to talk to your father, like any good boy does.

Many times you travel out of the city and you are tired from the trip. You yawn at every passing town and you start to dream when Anthony pulls your hand and allows you sleep on his arms. You lay your head and he smells like baby powder. From then on, you wish every bus trip would smell like his arms.

But, during the holidays, when every Jonathan must stay in the city, the December wind freezes your heart and the rushing of shops on the tinted window isolates you on the journey home. The colored lights blind you, swallowing, taking you back to a childhood dream: a sudden vision of a different boy.

Arms flung apart, his eyes widen into smiles. He pulls you from the station even before you could get your bags. He asks you to run through his meadows, to take a hit from his joint, and to watch him catch fireflies for your delight.

He will always have that name, written in longhand — always the one that you used to doodle at the back of your notes when you were nine years old. He will always have that name you cannot call your own. And, still, you laugh when you hear yourself saying it.

—
Jeffrey Blasabas-Javier is a Creative Writing student in UP Mindanao.

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.

It lies beside me curled and warm, naked under this sheet. Her boyish face sleeps tired and sweet as if from running, from night swimming, from chasing the bright carnivals away.

After this one ringing night, everything now falls silent. After the thundering of the world, lightning now resides quietly on our skin. No more cries when I reach for her lips. No more screams when I trace the form of her hand. No more trembling of the bones when I dig my fingers into her back. A premonition of the day after doomsday: After this one night of rumbling and shaking, crumbling and breaking, circles of this magnitude ripple back into an empty spot. Everything goes back to that moment when we are still strangers, that very empty spot, going on to that moment when we forever pretend to be strangers, that very empty spot.

Everything becomes clear now. The dawn is fast exploding and its waves reaching under the curtain, touching the lines on her webbed feet. Never has morning been so beautiful and detestable at the same time.

She stirs in that sleep, blinks away from the light and staggers out of bed. She looks at me. My presence is a question, the room is a question.

She gathers her clothes on the floor, easily slipping into her gentle fabrics and into that soldier’s uniform. It is loose on her small body.

Without a second glance, she walks out that large door and never looks back. From my window, I wait for her to turn her head as she disappears into that small alleyway beyond the morning piazza. I wait for that reassuring smile, that wave of goodbye. She never looks back.

The world is waking and everything rushes into that morning. My husband arrives an hour later tired and acrid from one of his travels. He looks at me and he wonders at such wetness and loving in my eyes. I tell him that I miss him. I hug him, close my eyes and think of her. He never knows the kind of sweet torture I found in her.

The following weeks are bare. In the afternoon, the odd silence once again fills this empty room. But it is never the same for her scent remains. My husband and I walk out into the streets of Venice, into a coffee house and sit on the farthest table, away from the window, away from any sights. We drink the same coffee, eat the same pastas, and talk about the same tales that plague foreign countries: the bitter molasses, the war of spices, the trade of opium and silks, and the sinking of the big ships with the world’s finest figurines. But he never believes the tales of this island, of its bright carnivals, of its nightly masquerades and of love happening over and between its canals. When I take out my cards and ask if he wants his future foretold, he sinks in his seat and sips from his cup.

Nights with my husband temporarily seal up voids. He only comes to fill that empty spot but nothing more. He does not know what real ends to reach, what real holes to fill. He moves but he does not shake. I can no longer look at his fingers filled with fat rings. In my lifetime, there have always been and will always be other men like him doing the same thing. But not like her knowing such emptiness, knowing such depths. I wait for her return.

The nights of waiting turn into weeks, then into months and into years that forget how sweet it is to be young dancing with the masked crowd under the laughter of the stars. “Life does not let anything flourish until its proper time,” she once told me. Life will deny me of the sweet tortures. It will deny me of her.

By this time, I now have children, a girl and a boy, who follow my every move with glowing eyes. They grow strong and beautiful until the time comes that they realize they are capable of dancing in the same carnivals under the same stars. The girl rebels and follows her heart. The boy pursues the footsteps of his father and ventures into unknown lands. By this time, their father now stops traveling, haunted by an exotic disease. He now only waits for the ghosts he made friends with in his journeys, sleeping all day in a separate bed.

I wait for his departure, and my waiting for her is at its longest.

I wait for her to come out from whatever alleyway she is hiding, also waiting. Always waiting. Then, she comes out, the face whose future I once foretold, who peered into my enamel mask and saw beyond my eyes. “Green,” she whispers, “like a turbulent body of water.” How I embrace the chill that still slithers down my spine at the thought of her whispering through my hair, saying she yearns to drown into the seas of my eyes. How she can’t wait forever for the fair ground to close down and follow me home. Still, she is hesitant, always tailing in the distance, knocking only once, twice. Not that she’s not eager, she says; she’s only afraid of where the real night begins.

I wait by door when the carnival is silent. I wait for whatever man’s clothes she is in: a white priest’s habit, a clown’s suit, the king’s cloak, a soldier’s uniform. And together we remove it. I wait for that singleness of our breath, the melting of our skin, the same rumbling and thundering filling the voids in our worlds. I wait for her to come.

By now, we are two old souls. She regrets, she says kissing my crumbling skin. She regrets not what happened that night many years ago, but what did not happen the nights thereafter. She tells me the tales of her travels: of the nights alone in different carnivals, of the singing calls of the gondolas, of the lands conquered by men, and of the love she abandoned. She regrets. And I close my eyes embracing her tiny withering body.

I know she will not stay. But her eyes will tell me otherwise. Surely not stay long but she will forever come back to this empty spot. I too will do the same. We will go away, come back, go away and come back again to this empty spot, multiplied and magnified like rings in still, calm waters.

We shall pass soon. We will go. But we will always go back to this spot. And we will become one of the ripples that make this place the source of unending.

—-
Jeff Javier was a fellow at the recent DWG-ADDU Writers Workshop held at Ponce Suites.

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.

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…”

Click. One of those Latin American soap operas in which the lady in heavy make-up walks to a guy in grey moustache. The blue-eyed lady says something in a Filipina voice but her lips are saying something else.

“They say we are always irritated because we’re still with the subgroup MTV Generation, always ranting, always impatient.” Another Slap. “How could they name us something we can’t associate with?”

Click. The screen is filled with dancing lights and fast beat as The Pussycat Dolls rip their cloths off and stretch their legs into infinity.

“MTV is not what it used to be during the 80s and the 90s. What we have now is the remains of what MTV used to be: shit in its purest essence.”

Click. An ordinary-looking stove is being advertised for ten times the actual cost. Endorsers say it doesn’t smoke and doesn’t heat up to burn human skin. In short, it doesn’t cook.

“Every other era is a shit from the other. Modernism was the shit of 19th century industrialization. Commercialism was modernism’s shit. Commercialism has many shits but MTV is its well-known known shit, just a channel of trash and advertisements.”

Click. Foreign news says that India will sue a Hollywood actor for kissing one of its beauty queens in front of its audience. The reporter says that the three lawyers who are pursuing the case said what the actor showed was a sign of disrespect to the Indian people.

“Advertisement to lousy boy band, pop princess, rock stars, their fifteen-minute-trend fashion, their beauty, their youthful energy and sex.”

Click. Different foreign news shows the face of the Korean boy who went into a shooting rampage in Virginia. The picture of the boy with his hands raised with a hammer is shown side by side with a Korean movie poster with the actor holding a hammer in the same position.

“There’s no music on that channel anymore, only sex. What’s worse is every other network is also saying that their putting what they usually place on TV: the usual forensic drama, emergency room drama, classroom drama, teenage love melodrama, and noontime game shows.”

Click. An advertisement of Chinese pills shows before and after pictures of a woman’s belly.

“But what the viewers don’t know is that every show is subliminally inserted with the word sex. The only show that they are not putting sex into is the ‘Find the Hidden Mickey Show’.”

Click. An actor-running-for-the-senate is holding a cellular phone while he blabs on the glory of piso communication.

“There. That I can associate with. A cellphone. Texting. Call us the TXT Generation and we will embrace the label with open arms and open legs. But please, not with MTV or those lousy TV shows, and especially not with sex.”

Click. A well-known TV personality gave birth.

“One last thing, they’ve added a spank to TV, they successfully injected reality to TV. With reality, they can successfully glorify sex. Might as well they call our generation the Sex Generation.”

Click. News about the latest political killing.

“Why are you so quiet?”

Click. An advertisement for another actor running for the senate.

“Have you seen the new video of My Chemical Romance? Can you get any cornier?

Click. A prisoner running for mayor.

Click. Boxing superstar running for congress.

Click. God running for councilor.

Click.

“Why did you turn it off?”

Static.

I turn a knob, not looking at David. “I wonder what they’re playing on the radio.”