The Light at the End of the Tunnel

He chose to walk all the way to the next station to avoid the crowd and the noisy traffic. It wasn’t a nice day that Guido was having. He thought so all the while and could bear not the possibility of bumping into someone he knew. An old friend, a nodding acquaintance, the village idiot, or the town drunk; and perhaps be forced to oblige with the niceties of small talk.

No. He walked those heavy steps.

Those gallows-bound heavy steps that made the heels of his ragged old pair of brown workman’s boots echo in the dark chambers that swallowed him up as he plodded on. He could hear the rumblings of the city noise fading behind him as he drew farther and farther away from the urban oblivion.

The better for his ears to muffle without effort the crazy din of metal and rubber and asphalt screeching against each other in the surfaces of his conscious avoidance of drivel and dust. He brought himself even farther away from the dirty navel of the city with every step he took.

He walked with a stoop all the way.

Guido closed his eyes to deepen the darkness even more, as if to challenge himself like a blind man walking alone caneless. He could now hear the train’s groany siren in the distance as he stopped to stand his ground and lift his chin up.

It was time to look up the railway from where he now stood. He lifted his arms and spread it out wide as if to suck in all the foreboding halogen glare that loomed ahead.

His train had come. The light at the end of his tunnel.

Run or Die

Davo knew better than to take his chances with the first bus trip out of the boondocks by daybreak. It was too late to think of that now as he struggled through the dense jungle of sugarcane stalks and scathing cogonal grass blades that cut through the skin of his arms every time he shoved the leaves aside to make room for his escape.

One look at those crew-cut faces back at the bus hours ago and he knew, even as he tried to make a move to get off the bus as the driver turned the key and stepped on the gas to gun the engine. Undercover cops all have that aura about them that spelled trouble for people like Davo.

This was the first time he’d ever gotten on a ride with these doggone cops and with all the stash he got on him tucked in some few gunny sacks in the bus’ compartment, he had somehow sensed this was a stakeout — but no.

He had clung stubbornly to his hunches and was right about them, but had become helpless to fight his instincts to take chances with the run. The same way that drug mules often do, and often get away with cleanly, on lucky days. Unfortunately, today wasn’t one of those days.

Davo had heard the warning shots echo in the vast sugarcane fields that spanned flat across the searing midday horizon. As the sound of gunfire grew fainter as he fled, groped, and weaseled his way through the hobbling vegetation, his ears began to hear the voice inside his head grow even more desperate as it rose above the silence of his speechless flight. A voice no other than his own as he ran farther and farther away.

Run or die, the voice said. Run or die.

Again and again and again as Davo felt his strength begin to wane. As he tried his best to regain whatever wits he had before the bus ever made it out of the boondocks and into the verdant plains and killing fields.

Run. Or die.

The Boy in the Box

It was a sweltering Monday noon as Masto walked all the way to the church, only to find that all the doors to the church were shut. He had to knock on one of them to coax somebody from inside to open one for him. As he made his way inside after the perfunctory noonday greeting to an old lady whose face got obscured by a black mourning veil, so began his surreal noon. The pews inside the church were all gone; pushed aside to the dark corners where confessional booths used to sit like pretty maids all in a row; forming dark, hunched silhouettes crouched behind hushed maroon curtains.

In their place were rows and rows of caskets of various sizes and makes, and lit electric candelabras that flanked each one of the hundreds of them like lonely streetlamps that dotted some kind of makeshift indoor city of corpses lying in state. The place hummed the sickly hum of lethargic fluorescent light drowned out only by the occasional shriek and mischievous laughter of toddlers dressed up in angel costumes; the whiteness of which contrasted starkly with the children’s dirty faces. The haloes on their heads bore the messed up crookedness occasioned by their wanton ways, as they played about and around the casket rows and the black-veiled mourners that milled all around the church’s machuka floors.

As Masto made his way towards where an altar once stood and made his feet take the heavy somber steps that people take whenever they are made to take in funereal surroundings, he felt the gloom crescendo into something more sinister. Here it was before him, this smaller than usual casket, and inside this one was a boy with the eternal sleep in his eyes.

Dead for so long?

All the mystery gone now as the boy in the box lay quiet, unperturbed by the world that had gone awry outside.

Masto knew. It’s one of those weird dreams where you see yourself as a boy and find yourself lying dead as you wonder aloud how you could ever wake up from this one and ever be the same again.

Match Made in Heaven

There was something about weddings that made Regina wake up early mornings brighter and happier than anyone other than the bride-to-be or the smug groom. It had been her lifelong obsession to be at everyone’s wedding for this was, after all, a small town with one tiny little church atop a stony hill. She lived in a town where everyone knew everybody else.

The Saturday morning that she lit the candles right next to where a lovestruck couple had knelt as the bridesmaids smilingly drew the veil above them, Regina imagined how it could have been if she were the blushing bride. How she wished she had a way to imagine how any man would have felt beside her at such glorious ceremony.

As she drew away and sat back, her mind wandered through the past’s silken roads. How many years had it been since she first felt his hand holding hers. The many longed for evenings as they swore the love swept promises that lovers vowed to, but only to be sung undone in lonely love songs about where did we go wrong.

Venetio’s vows were much too strong to stand between whatever what they had between them. So now he stands before this lovestruck couple to give them his holy blessings. A sacrament everybody knew to be what it simply was. Another vow lovers always make to go against all odds, against all illusory pleasure, against all pain.

Regina had loved him and could might as well be carrying the old flame even as Venetio held his hands up high each time the cool shower of holy water blessings rained down on dreamy couples before that first matrimonial kiss. She knew what Father Venetio might never truly realize. That theirs is a match made in heaven.