He moves around to try to take hold of her by the hair.
There is something in her right hand. A sliver of her broken coffee table. A shard. It feels so right sitting there, her grip on it so tight it draws her blood. Around he comes and up and then down goes her hand with the shard in it, into his shoes. He screams. She mumbles something, incomprehensible even to her, just air bubbles and liquid, her turn to pray.
Our Father who art in Heaven.
She takes the sliver out. She doesn’t know how far in she’s plunged. Despite his screams, she might only have broken skin. It’s always this way with people who love inflicting physical damage — they themselves can’t take even the slightest breach of their own bodies.
She slashes at his knee, then at the fist flying right at her face. She gets him in the knuckle, then in the face. Just slashes. No, actually, one of these slashes has begun to yield blood. Now she’s unappeasable, with renewed energy. She flails with the shard. She gets scream upon scream. She slithers away from the stomp of his uninjured foot. She slithers away some more.
He comes toward her. You will regret this! She picks up bits of broken glass and showers him with them. He comes toward her again, mindful of the shard, dripping his blood and hers, conjoined, in her hands.
He feints. She falls for it. His fist finds the side of her head. She is crying. His other fist comes flying but she is ready. To move so close to her, he has made his face available — the closest its evil judgment has come to her. She finds an eye with the shard. It’s luck but she has also put all her remaining concentration into that plunge. It slides in like a hot knife cutting a sliver of cake. He screams. She pulls it out and finds his open mouth, taking pieces of skin and gums and his tongue. Then she finds his throat and the sliver is stuck there, stopping all of his prayers, and then very quickly, his breath, and he is just another spent body lying next to her on the floor, wetted down not by semen but by blood, lots and lots of it.
How many hours? She’d blacked out, and coming to, she is surprised by the presence of his corpse, now cold. She is barely warmer than he. She spends countless minutes finding her cell phone, then countless more trying to make herself understood by post-op Alicia. Frustrated, she breaks down in sobs, and only then does the voice on the other end go, Charmaine? What’s wrong?
She doesn’t remember answering the door but how did Alicia get in? Alicia breaks down and Charmaine has to look away.
When Charmaine peers back, Alicia is taking her picture with a phone camera. The fucking bitch. But no words come out of Charmaine’s mouth, just jumbled sounds that are meant to signal anger — and her face? How can anger form itself on her throbbing, altered features? Alicia takes another picture, then another.
Alicia leaves the room. In a moment, she returns to announce that having heard what had happened to Charmaine — Alicia had used the words “street beating” and “anonymous crime” — and with the pictures as proof, Dr. Srichapan’s office would not, as is the usual policy, forfeit the security deposit for Charmaine’s cancellation.
But now of course Charmaine would need other operations first.
And though Charmaine is grateful to Alicia for taking the initiative with Dr. Srichapan, she also knows that Alicia gets pleasure in having lasting proof of Charmaine’s downfall, pleasure that Charmaine can no longer be the prettiest of their circle.
Six months in recovery and her healed face gives her an almost Chinese cast. She has continued eating at Wah Sun because they don’t disturb her there. Alicia had called a friend and they had turned Charmaine’s bathtub into a slaughterhouse, where Benjamin’s body was cut up, desanguinated. With this friend, Alicia and also another girl, Beatrice, had disposed of the disparate parts, sealed in plastic garbage bags, in different parts of the city. Alicia would not tell her where. Except to say that the head and hands, markers of identity, were thrown into the Pasig, whose frequently stagnant waters likely sucked the bags down into its sediment.
The girls had pooled money for Charmaine’s operation and physical therapy, and they had also donated a small living wage to help tide Charmaine through this unemployable stage. How Alicia has paid the butcher/helper who took care of Benjamin’s body, Charmaine doesn’t know and doesn’t want to find out.
Seven months later, she goes to Ah-ma’s. Ah-ma, who betrayed her. She forces the fat woman on her knees, having persuaded the grandson to go into another room and then locked the door behind him. She takes out a knife. She asks the Chinese woman to take a close look at her face. Why wasn’t she warned? Charmaine could have taken measures. Ah-ma says the responsibility wasn’t with her. After all, Charmaine and all clients ask the questions they want answered. And indeed, everything went all right with Charmaine. She survived.
She lived where others perished.
She triumphed.
And her face — Ah-ma can’t help but observe how much more feminine Charmaine is now: the jaw, the nose; softer, less sharp.
In the end, Charmaine can’t make herself do it. So she asks the fat woman for money. All the money that she’d been paying over the last two years. Close to ten thousand pesos. A refund.
Upstairs in the squalor of her living quarters, the fat woman scrounges in cupboards, underneath the sofa cushions, beneath and behind the sofa. Charmaine can’t believe the stench. She lives here with that grandson? Poor kid. Charmaine takes everything that Ah-ma can find — or so the woman claims. But Charmaine doesn’t want to linger. She doesn’t count the bills. Maybe half of what is owed to her. Probably less. The bills in the pockets of her skirt as she descends the creaky wooden stairs and out of Ah-ma’s life forever make her look like a teddy bear with loose stuffing.
Alicia and Charmaine knock. Esmeralda answers the door and smiles at the two women. It’s been a long time, Esmeralda says. Okay. The fortune-teller isn’t shocked that Charmaine is still alive. That might be a sign that she knows nothing, that her son operated on his own. It may also be a sign of her acting gifts. Alicia looks behind her at the quiet residential street before both she and Charmaine disappear into the cool, shadowy interior of Esmeralda’s Sampaloc home. In Alicia’s purse there is a knife, and a cell phone with the butcher/helper’s number. But first Charmaine must be sure. How can a mother not report a missing son? But that may not necessarily be an incontrovertible sign of guilt. To ascertain that, Charmaine will stare and stare into Esmerlda’s eyes during their session. And if she finds proof there, she will act.
She and Alicia. Norma and Alicia. She has lost Charmaine in the attack. All she wants now is normalcy. But no forgiveness.
About the contributors
Gina Apostol was born in Manila and lives in New York City. She is a two-time winner of the Philippine National Book Award and has published three novels: Bibliolepsy, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, and Gun Dealers’ Daughter. She has received fellowships from Civitella Ranieri, Phillips Exeter Academy, and Hawthornden Castle. Her stories have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Gettysburg Review, and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2.
F.H. Batacan is a Filipino journalist and crime fiction writer. She worked for nearly a decade in the Philippine intelligence community before moving into broadcast journalism. Her first novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles, won the Grand Prize for the English novel in the 1999 Palanca Awards, as well as the Manila Critics Circle National Book Award and the Madrigal-Gonzalez Best First Book Award. She recently finished a collection of short stories and is working on her second novel.