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Explorers of Fiction

The Editors of MAXIMUM VOLUME

Angelo R. Lacuesta has won several Philippines Graphic Awards and Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature for his fiction, as well as the NVM Gonzalez Award. His first collection of stories, Life Before X and other stories (University of the Philippines Press), won the 2000 National Book Award and the inaugural Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award. His second collection, White Elephants: stories (Anvil), won the 2004 National Book Award. His third collection, Flames and other stories (Anvil), was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award. 

He has received several local and international grants and fellowships, among them the International Writing Program at Iowa University, Iowa, USA. His work as an anthologist includes Latitude: Writing from the Philippines and Scotland, co-edited with Toni Davidson, and Fourteen Love Stories, co-edited with Jose Y. Dalisay.

He was literary editor of the Philippines Free Press from 2006-2010 and is currently editor-at-large at Esquire Philippines. He is married to award-winning poet Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta. (Photo by Jake Versoza)

Dean Francis Alfar is a novelist and writer of speculative fiction. His fiction has been published and anthologized both in his native Philippines and abroad (Strange Horizons, Rabid Transit, The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, The Apex Book of World SF, and the Exotic Gothic series among others). 

His books include the novel Salamanca, short fiction collections The Kite of Stars and Other Stories and How to Traverse Terra Incognita, and the children’s book How Rosang Taba Won A Race.  His work as an anthologist includes volumes of the Philippine Speculative Fiction annuals, as well as the forthcoming Horror: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults and The Farthest Shore: Fantasy from the Philippines.

His literary awards include ten Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature—including the Grand Prize for Novel for Salamanca—as well as the Manila Critics’ Circle National Book Awards for the graphic novels Siglo: Freedom and Siglo: Passion, the Philippines Free Press Literary Award, and the Gintong Aklat Award.  He was a fellow at the 1992 Dumaguete National Writers Workshop as well as the 20th and 48th UP National Writers Workshop.

Dean lives in Manila with his wife, award-winning fictionist Nikki Alfar and their daughters Sage and Rowan. He is currently working on his third collection of short fiction.

DEAN and SARGE were interviewed by Ruel S. De Vera for the Sunday Inquirer Magazine about MAXIMUM VOLUME and their hopes about the future of the short story and the "growth of a writing nation." Read the full article here.

An Excerpt from "The Missing"

By Eliza Victoria

THERE WERE ONLY six of them in the group, but several times during the trip in Thailand, Harold would think that they were missing one person. During dinner he would catch himself saying, Let's wait for – and then realize that there was no one left to wait for, as he counted his seated friends already digging into grilled fish and steamed rice at the sidewalk stall. One two three four five six.Inside Platinum Mall, as they made their way through hordes of fellow tourists buying scarves and cheap shoes, the sudden bursts of Filipino words (Mahal, Ang ganda o, Tawaran mo pa) causing both confusion and delight, one of his friends said, Meet you downstairs at closing time?, and Harold very nearly said, Okay, but we should tell—

One two three four five six.

There was no one to tell, but Harold felt the uneasiness nestling in his bones, the same disquiet that invaded him whenever he left his rundown Makati apartment in a rush: Did I leave the light on? Did I lock the gate properly? Did I unplug the computer?

Am I forgetting someone?

HE WASN'T SUPPOSED to be on this trip. He had already said no back in October, when his friends were still putting together the itinerary, trawling travel blogs and TripAdvisor comments and consequently bugging him online. They were friends he met back in high school. They went on to different courses and universities, and got updates on each other's lives only through the social networks and the once-in-a-blue-moon dinner or coffee. They still carried with them the clinginess of high school cliques, but now coupled with work schedules and good salaries. What do you mean, no? You have VLs left, don't you? It won't cost much, Harold, we'll stay at budget hotels. Come on Harold, I'm saving up for the wedding and this might be my last trip with you guys. Come on, Harold. Come on, come on.

You've been looking strangely sad these past few weeks. How about a change of pace? •

> Eliza Victoria is the author of the short story collection A Bottle of Storm Clouds and the poetry collection Apocalypses. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in several online and print publications in the Philippines and abroad, including Daily Science Fiction, Stone Telling, Room Magazine, Story Quarterly, The Pedestal Magazine, High Chair, and the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthologies. Her work has won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature and the Philippines Free Press Literary Award. Visit her at http://elizavictoria.com. 

An Excerpt from "My Life as a Bee"

By Michelangelo Samson

“YOU WERE ALWAYS the performer," Auntie Fe said, her head bent into her shoulder to wipe away her tears. "We weren't at all surprised when you ended up in showbiz. In fact your uncle expected it. When your movie made it to the West Coast, we had a big party—oh my god—we plastered the whole storefront with posters, Robin bending over to kiss Vina, a car exploding behind them, Eddie Garcia looking stern on one side, and you on the other with your arms crossed—it was amazing. Your uncle told everyone who came by the store that you were his nephew. He was just so proud, you know. So proud.”

“It was a small role,” I said. They promised me a bigger one but most of it ended up on the cutting room floor.

“A movie's a movie,” my aunt said, patting my arm, forgetting that she was wearing rubber gloves covered with soap.

I was in the kitchen helping her wash up after Uncle Bitong's fortieth day prayers. It had been a long night with people staying well past the mass and the small dinner we prepared. Jeslyn, Meng and Tita Susay were also there but they were busy wrapping the leftovers in foil, partitioning the platters of pancit and dinuguan that Auntie Fe had ordered into small containers to be given to the neighbors. So I was left alone with my aunt, drying the plates that she handed over, listening to her tales of Uncle Bitong. It was clear she missed him still. His passing was so abrupt. There was just that croak in his voice that developed one day, the one that scraped in his upper register as he launched into "Born Free" while demonstrating the features of the Minus One machines he sold. It got so bad that he stopped doing the demos altogether, preferring to play a recorded version of himself rather than ruin what he called 'the greats'. By the time he decided to see a specialist, it was too late, his cancer had spread and there was barely enough time to put his affairs in order.

He called me a few days after he found out, his voice sounding normal save for a wheeze in his throat that whistled when he paused for breath. "We have to talk," he said. I thought he was calling about work. After the incident at Grilla Manila where I fought with the owner, the only job I could find was with the San Jose SaberCats as a cheer-dancer. Three days a week, I screamed and fist-pumped to get the crowd going and sometimes ran around the arena with the SaberCats flag while the SaberKittens did their halftime dance. Uncle Bitong knew I was miserable there but he told me I couldn't be too choosy because of my immigration status. I guess he felt guilty telling me to take the job in San Jose. Whenever he called he always started by telling me about new leads he heard about.

"There's a problem," he said.

I couldn't hear him at first. My roommate Darius had the TV on with the volume high. Darius always kept it loud when he was lifting. It was 60 Minutes, something about honeybees, how they were disappearing from California, their hives abandoned, the effect of pesticides or some virus.

"What was that again?" I said.

"The tests. They found out what was wrong with me. I don't have much time left. A year maybe."

Uncle Bitong stayed quiet, letting me absorb what he said. There was just the faint whistling in his throat on the other end. "—A hidden catastrophe—mass extinction—" a scientist on TV said. Suddenly San Jose seemed as far away from Vallejo as the Moon from the Earth. "Are you sure?" I asked, not knowing what else to say.

"They’re very sure," he said, “second opinion confirms it. But don't worry. I'm going to fight this. I feel great.”

From that conversation it was a short two months of intensive chemotherapy and radiation before an infection brought the curtain down on my uncle. He had a nice memorial service. My uncle owned a video store. That’s all he did. You couldn't tell that though from the number of people who came to his wake. There was so much warmth, it surprised even my aunt who didn’t expect the crowd that gathered for my uncle’s fortieth.

After Tita Susay and the girls left, I decided to stay a while longer to make sure Auntie Fe would be okay. She cut a lonely figure in the kitchen, backlit by the refrigerator light. She and my uncle had a modest house, a one-floor affair typical for that neighborhood. Now, with my uncle gone, the house felt enormous, like a newly discovered cavern that my aunt was exploring by herself. •

> Michelangelo Samson lives in Singapore with his wife and daughter. For the last sixteen years, he has worked as a banker focusing on mergers and acquisitions. His stories have appeared in the Philippines Free Press and in the anthology Fast Food Fiction. 

An Excerpt from "The Red Cup"

By Francezca C. Kwe

There are cups from which we all drink, such as that from which pours our shared suffering in these dark days, when no one is safe in the government’s crackdown on its enemies, and there are cups such as the one lodged in my pelvis as I wait to see Dr. Sacramento at her clinic. It is nearly six, time for the evening news to console us that all is well, the price of rice has gone down, and so have the margins of poverty, and the army trucks from Camp Aguinaldo are on their way to replenish the checkpoints. I have to call my husband to see if he is all right, if he has gotten home from one of his meetings as the head of the now-outlawed Association Against Forced Disappearances, meetings which now—since the state has clamped down on protest and dissent, visible or invisible—can only be held in the storerooms of small bookstores, and in internet cafes, which have at least been allowed to keep their opaque glass storefronts.

I can no longer count the number of moments I had decided to stand up and leave, but as happens in the cruel game of waiting rooms, the more you stay, the harder it is to go, and the closer it gets to nightfall, the more I dislike the idea of being out on the heavily patrolled streets, and the more sensible it seems to stay where I am, stay waiting for the doctor, until the revolution mercifully comes. And, though the order in Dr. Sacramento’s roll call is as arcane as in any doctor’s clinic—none of us knows who is next or last—the closer I get to crossing the border guarded by her ferocious secretary, the more keenly I feel what has been bothering me all day: that wayward cup that has disappeared into the recesses of my vaginal canal. It has been a very long day, and I have fished around my insides as much as I can stand, and my panic has now crumbled into misery.

At this hour, the hallway is still crammed with people shivering in the Arctic drafts of the central air-conditioning; since Dr. Sacramento shares her office with a pulmonologist, the music of our dreary wait is a bronchial volley. One elderly man who got here ahead of me keeps coughing into a huge plastic bucket so forcefully, his organs are bound to slide out any moment, and a sick child is barking close by like a Chihuahua. The rest, perhaps gyne patients like me, are wearing those anxious frowns customary in hospital waiting rooms, but which are nowadays common fashion, on the streets that the army and police have sectioned off, and in the workplaces—banks, offices, stores—from where quite a few have been hauled away by uniformed, or worse, plain-clothes state agents. It is really quite nerve-wracking to have to be in the hospital at a time like this, instead of being home—locked, gated, curtains drawn. But then, home has also ceased to be a safe place. I look down the hall that has slowly been shortening as lights go out along it.

As more and more doctors close their clinics, the darkness moves closer to where we sit, and we all flinch with every snap of a light switch, as if a lash has come down on our backs. I feel a little guilty that I am not, strictly, in the same category of pain or discomfort as my comrades here—for we are all comrades in our ills—but at the same time, I feel certain that my need is as urgent. I close my eyes and try to sense the minute rippling of my uterine muscles, as if I can pinpoint the cup’s location by listening to my body’s subterranean sonar sweeping over its seabed. It’s the only thing I can do at the moment, for comfort; I’ve tired myself out with continual visits to the bathroom to hunt around in my vagina, squatting on the grimy, tiled floor, wincing up at ants crossing the ceiling. The attempts have so far ended in frustration; I return to my seat dejectedly, offering a meek smile to my comrades, who seem to recognize me less and less the longer my bathroom excursions take. •

> Francezca C. Kwe has published short fiction in a number of anthologies, magazines, and journals and has received the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award and the Nick Joaquin Literary Prize for her work. She teaches full-time at the University of the Philippines–Diliman, and works as a copy editor on the side. She collects dogs, cats, and sunglasses. 

An excerpt from "The Other Woman Narrative"

By Daryll Delgado

Hey. I took your advice and worked on something. Wanna hear it?

Sure, sweetie. Let me just finish in here, and you can read to me in bed, hmm?

Stop it! It’s not that kind of story!

Oh, yeah? That’s too bad. How many pages? Is it long? Need to sleep soon and be up early for the meeting with the Dean. He finally agreed to let me do a full program assessment of the entire offering of the college. You should sleep too, if you want to leave the house with me tomorrow. Weather’s gonna get worse in the morning. You can go to the gym while I attend the meeting—

It’s short, a very drafty draft really. Can you listen? Tell me what you make of this: 

She works for a multinational company, as an executive assistant to an American boss, an asshole who takes advantage of her and puts her in her place, flirts with her and steals her ideas.

Hmm. Can you throw me that pillow? Uhm, I’d say: Very good, right away you’re laying out the following: a) power dynamics, b) gender issue, c) race issue. But must I be in there again? Why does he have to be American? Why is he an asshole?

You’re only half American.  And this is fiction!

At least they’re not graduate students, or adjunct professors. Just kidding, love. Okay, give me more, more details, establish the setting.

Sure. Let’s say:

There is a new project in Vietnam. From her experience, these things usually take about a year and a half. She anticipates making at least three trips to the country, something she looks forward to. But she promises herself a long leave of absence once this project is under way.

Vietnam. Good choice. Affinity with a fellow colonized state. More issues. Representation, subjectivity, ideology. Bring them on! God, my back hurts. Can you massage it? Here, here. Yeah, oh yeah, right there—

Shall I continue?

Yes, just one more minute. Oh, that feels good.

I mean, with the story?

Ah, yeah, sure, continue.

She has always wanted to visit the former French colony, the site of American failure and folly…

Ha ha, I like that. Failure and folly. But kind of trite, the, what do you call it, alliteration?

… the site of American failure and folly, and the setting of the musical to which she almost got accepted, twenty years ago, when she was seventeen, a freshman in Diliman. The year her mother died.

Ah, nostalgia… • 

> Daryll Delgado currently works for an international labor rights NGO. She is married (to her college editor) and divides her time between her homes in Quezon City and Tacloban City, when she is not traveling for work around Asia. Her short fiction and critical essays have appeared in Kritika Kultura, Philippines Free Press, Philippine Graphic, and Metro Serye, among others. Her first book of short stories, After the body displaces water, was published in 2012 (UST Press). 

An Excerpt from "Journey Back to the Source"

By Gino Dizon

Reasons to Go

TOMORROW, SAB, ROBBIE, and Jet are taking the trip. They’re in the car now just driving around, the kind that passes for adventure in this city, perhaps in any, but Angeles is landlocked. No high wind is about, the windows are open, to make the most out of friction of air. Inside they’re laughing a wet knee-slapping laugh, you would think they were such a riot. They’re laughing at things no one else remembers anymore. It’s a good idea when there’s no particular destination. They’re in their thirties. They have nowhere else to go but older. They’re two boys and a girl with a car. Everything is possible again.

Where to Stay

It’s a long way up the mountain. Some set out as early as three in the morning for the dispatch point at Santa Juliana in Capas, Tarlac. But that’s because they’re coming from Manila. A group of college friends has taken just this package. Tomorrow, at the appointed hour, a van will pick them up in Ortigas, most likely in SM Megamall. The van will deliver them straight and safely to the dispatch point, also at the appointed hour. They’re all about to finish college. They’re all about being goal-oriented. They still have the luxury of believing life happens at all the appointed hours. Besides, they’re Manileños. Everybody’s supposed to know Manila. But who knows where Capas is, or also, Angeles?

This European family, on the other hand, look like the amenable sort. Daddy and Mommy have done their research. The best stopover: Angeles City, home to a now defunct US air base, just 30 minutes away from the dispatch point. If you stand at its center, on a bridge over a river that no longer flows, you will see to your east the broken peak of Mt. Arayat, lone guardian of the plains, and to the west, rising against the sky, the jagged sentinels of the Central Luzon Arc, your destination. So this family is spending the night in a place they’ve never heard before, except possibly for its lavish cuisine, red-light district, or Holy Week spectacles. Daddy and Mommy used to be backpackers. They’re used to the hazards of adventure. They’re bringing their five-year-old boy, their only child, to a volcano’s crater.

As for the three friends, Angeles is not really a matter of choice. They were born here. They grew up here. Robbie, the one driving, is a G.I. baby. All his life he’s been shuttling between Angeles and the States. He’s had three changes of career. Now he’s taking a break. Sab, beside Robbie, is a nurse. She’s a Canadian citizen now. She and her partner of five years have just broken it off. Jet, in the backseat, laughs the loudest. Ever since his friends migrated, he’s built an entire life in Manila, then one day he’s not just so sure anymore. Or, anyway, something like that, so he’s in between jobs. It’s been years since they’ve seen each other. Now they’re all back in Angeles. All their history happened here: childhood, a volcanic eruption, childhood’s end.

What to Bring

The instruction says two knapsacks. In the second, put everything you will need after the climb. Mostly this is just your change of clothes. What else will you need after accomplishing the feat of surmounting a mountain? Already this boy from the college group is packing his book. He might need something to read during the drive. Nothing outside the window will interest him: fields, more fields, the interminable rice fields of Central Luzon.

This second bag, you will leave in your vehicle. For the climb, bring only the first bag. It should be light, stuffed only with the most essential things: valuables, Advil, bottled water, trail food. Your camera you can just sling around your neck. When you’re up against gravity, you must make an ally out of weight. The five-year-old boy knows this. He’s not bringing anything. Only his parents.

But Robbie’s all bulk. And flabbier on the sides now, Jet notes, but does not say. But he still has something of the jock he’s always been. And Sab likes this about him. Never mind if he’s not so great at living his life. Sab likes telling other people what to do with their lives. For Jet, who’s the intellectual sort, Robbie is his necessary counterpoint. He used to finish Robbie’s assignments for him. He and Sab used to bring Robbie’s water jug at football in Clark. No one could bully Jet, or make a pass at Sab, without Robbie clenching a fist or locking that person’s skull in his good grip. Those were the days. •

> Gino Dizon’s piece in MAXIMUM VOLUME, “Journey Back to the Source,” is part of a project that fictionalizes Angeles, a city situated in the contested land between two presiding gods, Arayat to the east and Pinatubo to the west. Two other stories from this project—“Dust Will Settle” and “Possible City”—have appeared in Philippines Free Press and IYAS Anthology 2001-2010 respectively. 

An Excerpt from "Exchange"

By Christine V. Lao

EVERY MORNING, BEFORE rolling up the security grill, Eloisa Henares, a woman of substantial heft but otherwise fairly attractive, lights a couple of joss sticks and jams them into an ash-filled bowl by the cashier’s counter. As the first wisps of fine smoke curl upward, she closes her eyes, and waits until the scent of faux sandalwood rises above the stale, musty-sour odor of decay and the lingering smell of mothballs. Though every item has been washed, sanitized, and ironed—Eloy makes sure of this, she is a professional—pre-loved garments can never smell new. Most patrons can’t even tell that Eloy’s stocks are pre-loved: Holes have been patched; ripped seams, mended; missing buttons replaced. Occasionally, a canny customer brings a sleeve to her nose, smells the old beneath the smoke, and makes a face. “It’s vintage,” Eloy then volunteers, from her perch by the counter.  If the mark lingers (though her body turns toward the door), Eloy says, “That’s the smell of love,” and smiles. Charmed, the other smiles back. They all do.

When Eloy opens shop, the reek of old garments rises from the sidewalk and slaps her face in greeting. “Good morning to you too,” Eloy mutters. It is early, and only the vendors without a city permit are milling about, surveying each other’s piles of fabric like seasoned scavengers. They ignore her, as usual, unconcerned by the permanence of her puesto—one of the few registered enterprises in the heart of an otherwise unregulated district—having had its start as the neighborhood modista’s work area, long before the ukay-ukay vendors had moved into the district.

In her early days at the store, Eloy had attempted to make friends, but quickly realized that the sidewalk is a mere way-station, and the faces that strike her as familiar, only similar in the manner that a brand new T-shirt on a shelf at the city mall’s department store is similar to the others of its kind lying beneath it, or on top of it, each crisply folded and encased in plastic.

Eloy knows a thing or two about these shirts, fresh off the factory line. They’re all she allows herself to wear when she tends the store. It is easier to transact with a stranger, but only if that stranger appears sufficiently familiar, sufficiently non-threatening, sufficiently reasonable, a particular type. With jeans and flip-flops, a white cotton shirt suggests: Laid-back vintage store owner behind the cashier’s counter—but that’s the jeans and sandals talking; the white shirt says nothing.

A white shirt fresh off the factory line is sufficiently quiet, if not mute, and so allows Eloy to quickly model the merchandise, without having to disrobe completely—to play the part of a helpful friend, if a client lacks such a friend. Beneath a pink notch-collar jacket with three-quarter sleeves and matching skirt, a white T-shirt says: Cheerful executive assistant happy in her cubicle. With a gold satin skirt and suede sandals embellished with coral beads: Woman stepping out of the cubicle for a supposedly casual dinner with the boss. If fat Eloy in her white T-shirt can look like a secretary with a pleasing personality in this jacket and in that skirt, why, imagine the wonders the same ensemble can do for you.

No one asks the white shirt what it wants. No one even asks what it can do.  And so when the white shirt finally speaks (as all the pre-loved inevitably do), it says: No one sees me. No one knows I am here.

When this happens, Eloy makes a fire out of the pile of leaves in her back yard and burns the shirt. Now there is nothing to see. There is nothing left here. •

> Christine V. Lao’s short stories have appeared in the anthologies Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology and Philippine Speculative Fiction; and in the publications Expanded Horizons, Philippine Genre Stories, Philippines Graphic, and Philippines Free Press.  Her poetry has been featured in Kritika Kultura, and in Under the Storm: An Anthology of Philippine Contemporary Poetry. She was a fellow for fiction at the Silliman National Writers’ Workshop and is finishing her MA in English Studies (Creative Writing) at the University of the Philippines. 

An Excerpt from "Basta"

By Glenn Diaz

“KASI YOU JUST don’t leave your stuff somewhere and expect it to be there,” I tell Scott, in a rickety bus from Pagudpud to Laoag. “This is a tourist place. Someone will take advantage of you. Now we’re going to the ano, the police station. Basta.”

Once he had called my attention regarding this “intervention of the native tongue,” a common stumbling block, he said, in the learning of a second language. Even so, when I talk to him, “kasi” and “ano” and “basta” still litter my sentences, like pesky rocks in an otherwise powdery shore. In the years that we have known each other, he has probably devised a system to deal with these pockets of unintelligible words, these “interventions” that working at a call center had been unable to remove. Now they’d become as predictable as our fights, the little harmless repartees that we enjoy, no matter how secretly.

“Bes-ta,” he repeats, mimicking my low fidgety drawl. Plastered on his sunburnt face is a mischievous grin, signaling in me something both sinister and sweet.

“What a way to say thank you,” I turn in my window seat. “Asshole.”

“Oh, Alvin,” he says, in that patient tone he takes when I’m supposedly being childish. “The logic of what we’re doing—going to the provincial capital, venturing a field from “the scene of the crime”—escapes him, he explains, as strongly as the wind inside the bus is ruffling all things light enough to fly, foremost his bedraggled strawberry blond hair. It’s so noisy, too—listen—the vehicle abuzz with talks of Me-ni Pe-ki-yaw, who apparently has a heavily anticipated 12-rounder with some Mexican later this Sunday morning (Saturday night in Vegas). “All I’m saying is, a resort town with no police detachment is a bit weird.”

“Well feel free to leave,” I tell him. “What’s stopping you? I’ll help you pack.”

“Jesus Christ, Alvin. There is no bag to pack. It was stolen, remember?”

I sigh. “I’m sorry.”

He sighs. “I’m sorry, too.”

Behind me, I detect a minor ruckus when Scott leans over to give me a peck on the lips. We are seated behind the driver, who himself takes a brief but similarly judgmental look via his rear view mirror. Always happy for the attention, Scott puts his arm around my shoulders, never mind that it is a bumpy ride and around 35 degrees. The position is awkward and will leave his arm, in a matter of minutes, besieged by the pricks of a thousand invisible needles.

“Thank you, Alvin.”

His lips so close, I feel his words vibrate in my ear. “Just doing my job, sir,” I almost say, in instinct. I exhale and tell him, “It’s nothing,” and the bus accelerates noisily, its engine clearly overworked, in the throes of death. •

> Glenn Diaz is currently finishing his MA in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, from where he also obtained his degree in secondary education. His works have appeared in several literary publications, including Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Likhaan. He is the 2013 recipient of the M Literary Residency at Sangam House, outside Bangalore in India, where he will work on his first book.

An excerpt from "Posing"

By Noelle Q. de Jesus 

THE SIGN WAS straightforward enough. “Nude model wanted for graduate-level drawing courses.”  Reading it eight months ago, it occurred to Pilar this might be exactly what she needed.  For she had no desire to take a class in something practical, as her husband Frank Stone, had suggested, something like desktop publishing or computer programming, to focus on and occupy her once they were settled in New Jersey. That’s what Frank Stone said. She wasn’t sure why, but she always thought of her husband with his full name. Not Frank but Frank Stone.

And anyway, Pilar knew she didn’t want to find part-time work. What? Type up memos, say, or mind a store?  Just the idea of sending out her resume to one of the accounting firms in New York made her shudder. No, thank you. Those days were long gone. She had no wish to return to them. But yes, she experienced a restlessness in the mornings, getting dressed for no apparent reason or occasion. She wanted, no she needed, something different.  What was destiny, anyway, at the end of the day?  All Pilar wanted was to do something she could have never ever in a million years imagine herself doing. Something like this. Maybe exactly this.

She would have never considered posing naked for an art class in the past, and certainly never in Manila, say. But here, it was inexplicably appealing.

Of course, Pilar did not know the first thing about art. That was more Portia’s department. When they were young and still in school, in the summer, Pilar always opted for practical pursuits, short courses like business math and continental cooking—useful things. Their parents acknowledged that Portia had the creative streak. It was the younger, prettier Portia who did dance, and pottery, watercolor painting and drama. It was Portia who was encouraged to express herself on the stage. That was just the way things were in their house.

But Pilar thought about it for two days and on the third day, she made the phone call. Which is how it happened that she got paid by the hour as a nude model for the art department of on community college, and now, also at small graphic arts center in the area, a post she got through the professor’s referral. These days, she posed twenty, sometimes thirty hours a week. Wednesdays, she had a full schedule because she did a three hour art class at the college, grabbed a yogurt or a banana in the cafeteria, and then drove the arts center in the next town to pose for a series of anatomy sketching workshops. •

> Noelle Q. de Jesus has won prizes for short stories, including the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature. She edited Fast Food Fiction: Short Short Stories To Go in 2003 (Anvil) and published a chick lit novel, MrsMisMarriage (Marshall Cavendish International) in 2008. A freelance writer and editor in Singapore, Noelle lives with her husband, Nathaniel Chua, her daughter Katharine and her son, Carlos. Her children are her greatest work.

An Excerpt from "Little Places"

By Crystal Koo

USHA DOESN’T EXIST outside of Migs’s admittedly enjoyable dreams.  She’s a vessel for excitement, a destination for his neurons to fire at because they’re bored of the pathways his resentment takes when he thinks of Lani. So bored they’re willing to go all the way to answering Aimee’s call for interviewees to make himself feel like he really is cheating on Lani, which he doesn’t have half the courage to do.

The woman with the bright red blouse and the effortlessly chopsticked hair is at the corner table with an untouched coffee.

“Hi,” says Migs, glancing at the blank notebook the woman has been pretending to stare at.

“Are you Aimee?”

“Migs, right? Hi.” She’s pretty, a morning bell, angular yet comforting, new world, warm, real. “Thanks again for doing this.” She brings out a recorder. Migs imagines his own voice, which would probably sound nothing like what he imagines, echoing in a small art gallery in Makati, telling everyone, no, no, you don’t get it, I still love Lani (Aimee assures him all names will be bleeped out), this has nothing to do with how much I love her.

Migs tells Aimee about Lani. Lani, a right jab at the jaw, a dramatic orchid.  Don’t leave the towel bunched up on the table, for God’s sake wipe the countertop when you’re done with the dishes, that mothering role Lani had slipped around her shoulders without introduction, like an earthquake, like a cold. Migs waits for Aimee as she bends over, taking notes, impressions, then he tells her that for the past year he’s been sleeping with another woman, Usha.

“Why do you do it?” asks Aimee. Her fingers are long and candle-like.

Lust. A lack of self-discipline.Usha is a trainee with a cubicle in front of Migs’s at the advertising firm. She was put under Migs’s team and eventually under Migs’s something else.

“Do you love Usha?”

No. He needs Usha but he doesn’t love her. He loves Lani.

How often does he meet Usha? Once a week. Does Usha know about Lani? Yes, Migs had told her on the first night, he’s not a nasty person. Is Usha in love with him? He can’t say but he hopes not.

Would he ever leave Lani for Usha? No.

Why did he agree to talk to her about this?

Migs’s voice is thick. “I don’t know.”

Aimee thanks him and turns the recorder off. Migs doesn’t want her to leave yet. “I can tell you what it feels like, that difference,” he says. “Between Usha and Lani.”

Aimee looks at Migs askance, a movement that Migs instinctively loves. “Sort of like what you get from it that Lani doesn’t provide?” she says.

Migs likes the way she puts it.

“It’s cathartic, I know,” says Aimee, staring intently at Migs, who can’t look away. “You’re not the first cheater I’ve interviewed.  Yeah, intentions. Motivations. I want to focus on those anyway.” Aimee turns the recorder on again. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Later Aimee orders a coffee for Migs and starts talking about the news, recent movies she’s seen. Migs knows she’s trying to ease him back into the world she think he’d want to be back in, the world where he doesn’t cheat on Lani. Migs smiles but the guilt sloshes around his tongue and down his stomach. •

> Crystal Koo was born and raised in Manila. She is currently working, writing, and playing in a band in Hong Kong. Her other short stories are published in or are forthcoming in The Apex Book of World SF 3, Philippine Speculative Fiction 8, International Speculative Fiction, and Abyss & Apex. She maintains a blog at http://cgskoo.wordpress.com and a Twitter account @CrystalKoo. 

An Excerpt from "Man of Letters"

By Marc Gaba

PUT BEST FOOT forward. Without trying. Upon response, leave. Allow to simmer in thought and feelings. Challenge. Forget risk, it’s a child’s game, there is life after anything. Plan. Feed. Confect. Leave. Allow to glow. Notice. Other best foot forward.

Say something true. Leave. Three steps away, turn. Say something funny. Hide the choreography. Then be on your own. Without music. Notice your size, relative to the world, that distant neighbor. Sing “Maria.” In mind be specific regarding which Maria. Walk around with the song in your head. Don’t be stupid, notice car approaching. Bask in headlights brushing against your presence: you are a Man of Letters, now become an adult remembering the girl across the table, how she knows when she’s being seen, and tell no one. You are a Man of Letters.

During the conference, forget the room of ninnies where you’ve been boxed. Forget the bathroom, the man singing like Alma Moreno, something by Tori Amos, who likes you. Forget the dim light of the bathroom, and how the switch happens to be on your side of the bathroom, so turn it off when you’re done, because you are successful. Do not leave bathroom fleeing homophobically. Pat body dry. Wear clothing. Do not remember pajamas. Go to bed. Be briefly annoyed by the light outside the hotel. Dream. Allow it. Don’t wait for the alarm. Sleep. Sleep. Wake up. Prepare for breakfast. Eat breakfast. Be pleasant without knowing why.

Notice her ass while pausing from breakfast. Let your eyes graze her back, her hair. Smell the trace she left with her morning. Go back to breakfast, go back to the required reading materials. Do your best, always do your best, but do not dazzle. Be there listening to other generations. Laugh inside yourself when you can. Understand, years later, someone’s polemics against you, but do not remember the trouble he takes to destroy your work. Remember children. Move on.

Thank God for time. By end of conference session, linger, smoking, outside. Now talk to her. About poetry. Say what you want to say, something other than what you’ve said about her work, without lying. Don’t ask her out in public. Notice her friends. Planned or not, see them. Think your own thoughts. Argue with yourself for now. Nothing is wrong, there is neither blame or fault. •

> Marc Gaba is the author of Have (Tupelo, 2011), a Dorset Prize finalist and winner of the Global Filipino Literary Award in 2012; How Sound Becomes a Name and Nouveau Bored (High Chair, 2007 and 2009); and works that hybridize literature and visual art, such as Atomic Neutral and Untitled. His work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including Gulf Coast, VOLT, jubilat, the Boston Review, and the PEN Anthology At Home in Unhomeliness (UST Press, 2008). He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. He has exhibited with the National Gallery, Mag:net, Silverlens 20SQUARE, MO_Space, Altro Mondo, Art Cabinet Philippines, Art Fair Philippines 2013, and ArtInformal. A reading of his second full-length play Minsan May Pumara, Minsan Ma’y Pumara was performed during the Virgin Labfest at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2013.

An Excerpt from "Cruising"

By Isabel Yap

WHEN THE SHIP left the harbor, Caela was standing in the bathroom holding Erika’s hair back, while Erika vomited into the toilet. Caela could hear the other kids shouting from the patio.

“We’re leaving, we’re leaving!”

“Goodbye, L.A!”

“Look, seagulls!”

Erika flushed the toilet, took deep breaths, and clutched her knees.

“You okay?” Caela asked.

“I think so,” Erika answered. Caela gently laid down the knot of hair she had been holding and squeezed Erika’s shoulder. They were only a year apart, but there were times when Caela truly felt much older. Seventeen, she already knew, wasn’t mature by any stretch, but sometimes it felt otherwise.

“Maybe you should rest on the bed,” Caela said. Erika nodded and followed her into the room. Dad and the housekeepers had left. Now that the ship was moving, Caela could feel the floor swaying gently beneath them; see the walls shifting, almost imperceptibly, as they drifted out to sea. She looked toward the patio and watched the younger kids jump up and down. Chrissie had Tita Jackie’s camera and was snapping away. Beyond them one could see the tip of the harbor: silver trucks and huge metal boxes. Across from them was another ship that had yet to leave, Bounty Star painted across it in bright orange letters. After another minute land disappeared completely, replaced by an endless stretch of ocean, a mass of gray clouds advancing, a flock of birds darting away.

LOLA MARINA DIED on December 6, eight days before Caela’s exams ended, nineteen days before Christmas, three weeks before the grand reunion in Los Angeles. Caela was at the breakfast nook reading her Physics notes when Mom started sobbing in the kitchen. She felt her insides leaden, but her feet lurched into action, propelling her towards the kitchen. Mom was by the sink, one hand over her mouth, the phone pressed against her ear. She was shaking her head, saying, “Okay, okay.” Like the word okay could change something. The earth seemed to rock beneath Caela, a trick of gravity, reacting to her quickening pulse.

It wasn’t entirely unexpected. They had discovered Lola’s cancer two years earlier, and it had slowly eaten up her body, eroding the family’s peace. Caela didn’t think about it much, never let herself think about it much, except when she would accompany Lola to the hospital and hold her hand in the waiting room. The brave smile on Lola’s face would waver like a guttering candle, and the bony, spotted hand Caela was holding always quivered slightly. “Don’t mind me, anak,” Lola would often repeat.

Sometimes, Lola would peel off her wig, and carefully comb through the few white hairs she had left. Sometimes she would hand Caela a bottle of Visine and ask her to drop a little in each eye, carefully; the solution would be suspended in her eyes for a moment, before she blinked and they trailed down her cheeks.

November hadn’t been a good month for Lola. This outcome wasn’t entirely unexpected.

Caela had visited Lola in the hospital two days ago. She had leaned over the bed, watched the slow rise and fall of her grandmother’s chest. She knew that she was watching someone die. It was a curious feeling, like she was outside her own body, watching a movie where a girl was gazing at an old, dying woman. It had felt like music was going to simmer then swell, and she was going to suddenly break into dainty, noble sniffs. But this wasn’t an indie movie, and her grandmother wasn’t an actress pretending to die. There was no musical score. The tears, when they came, burned her eyes and made it hard to see. •

> Isabel Yap moved to California in 2010 where she recently received a degree in Marketing from Santa Clara University. Her short fiction and poetry have most recently appeared in The Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2005-2010, Santa Clara Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and Lauriat: An Anthology of Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction. She won the 2013 Academy of American Poets Prize from her university, and is a graduate of the 2013 Clarion Writers’ Workshop in San Diego.