A Jeepney

Tapestry
By: Charlotte Aninion-De
Guzman
And so it began with a scream. Queene
rolled over from the front of the jeepney to
its entire length all the way back. She was
going to make a run for it, picturing herself
like Katniss or some kick-ass action heroine
from a movie
She placed her bag between her and
the gun being wildly pointed at her
face. All her life, she struggled with
minimum wage as a waitress in a
posh Makati restaurant.
All her life, she struggled with
minimum wage as a waitress in a posh
Makati restaurant.
A only child supporting her mother who
was fighting against lungs cancer, she
was steeped in debt already, until her
new employer took a “liking” to her.
She can’t die now.
Not with her mother waiting for her.
Not with hope shining down on her.
But, the shot rang out.

Aling Nora screamed. She was having

one heck of a day already and her first
thought upon seeing the gunman was-
where will they get the money for my
funeral?
At 50 years old, a lifetime of cleaning
other people’s houses while supporting a
drunkard of a husband and 9 children
who never got to finish high school, but
instead decided that getting pregnant or
getting someone pregnant was more fun,
had left her bone-dead tired and spent.
Now, not only did she have to
support her husband and children,
but her ever-growing number of
grandchildren as well. Maybe, she
thought, before fainting, this was
for the best and she’ll finally get
her much deserved rest.
The gunman was momentarily
distracted by the old woman who
fainted. The young policeman, still
fresh and untainted by the system
he was serving, decided that it was
his sworn duty to protect the
passengers.
And so he seized that moment of
confusion, and bravely pulled his gun
out of his jacket’s inner pocket, and
with all of his training coming into
focus, he pulled the trigger.
Edrex, saw the flash of light and
suddenly felt the warm gush of
blood soaking through his favourite
Zara shirt and dripping on his
limited edition neon green Nike
shoes.
He dropped his gun, before turning to
the policeman to say, “What the freak
man? I wasn’t really going to shoot you
know.” Then his eyeballs rolled up,
and the world blurred before his eyes,
before he fell on the jeepney floor.
Poor middle class boy Edrex, who
came home every day from school
with only the maids to keep him
company.
He felt forgotten and sad, because his
parent were rarely home even during the
weekends. He did not understand that
they were moving heaven and earth so
they could buy a house for him to inherit
someday, and so that he could study in
the private school that charges at least
P100,000.00 per semester, and so that he
could, as well, have the latest fads and
go to Boracay whenever he wants.
Unfortunately, all he could see was
how they were too busy for him and
how they seem to take him for
granted. And so he got angry at
them, at himself and the world in
general. You see, anger tends to
breed, fester and consume.
Until one day, today to be exact, he
decided that he would make them listen
and pay attention to him. Poor poor
Edrex, if only he saw his parents
crawling home from work because they
were so tired, if only he heard them cry
after they were humiliated by their
bosses when they failed to deliver the
work that was expected from them,
and if only, he felt their joy each time
they know that all their hard work was
for the future security of their only
son.
No, he didn’t see, hear or felt any of
those. You see, Edrex was always too
busy staying “connected” via FB,
Twitter, Instagram and Tumbler, but he
didn’t have enough time to look up,
observe, see and hear things with his
heart.
But that’s too late now. His heart, it
seemed, had stopped beating.

And all this time, Mang Ando, the

jeepney driver who didn’t have his
lunch yet, kept on thinking-was his
wife able line up for the Mayor’s free
2 kilos of rice before heading to her
usual tongits spot? And how the heck
was he gonna get rid of the
bloodstains on the seats?
Five Brothers,
One Mother
By: Exie Abola
The Marikina house wasn’t finished
yet, but with an ultimatum hanging
over our heads, we had no choice but
to move in. Just how unfinished the
house became bruisingly clear on our
first night. There was no electricity
yet, and the windows didn’t have
screens.
There were mosquitoes. I couldn’t
sleep the whole night. My sister
slept on a cot out in the upstairs
hall instead of her room downstairs,
maybe because it was cooler here.
Every so often she would toss and
turn, waving bugs away with half-
asleep hands. I sat beside her and
fanned her. She had work the next
day. In the morning someone went
out and bought boxes and boxes of
Katol.
Work on the house would continue,
but it remains unfinished eight years
later. All the interiors, after a few
years of intermittent work, are done.
But the exterior remains unpainted,
still the same cement gray as the day
we moved in, though grimier now.
Marikina’s factories aren’t too far away.
The garden remains ungreened; earth,
stones, weeds, and leaves are where I
suppose bermuda grass will be put down
someday.

In my eyes the Marikina house is an

attempt to return to the successful
Greenmeadows plan, but with more
modest means at one’s disposal.
The living room of the Cinco Hermanos
house features much of the same
furniture, a similar look. The sofa and
wing chairs seem at ease again. My
mother’s growing collection of angel
figurines is the new twist. But there is
less space in this room, as in most of
the rooms in the Marikina house, since
it is a smaller house on a smaller lot.
The kitchen is carefully planned, as
was the earlier one, the cooking and
eating areas clearly demarcated. There
is again a formal dining room, and the
new one seems to have been designed
for the long narra dining table, a lovely
Designs Ligna item
perhaps the one most beautiful piece
of furniture we have, bought on the
cheap from relatives leaving the
country in a hurry when we still were
on Heron Street.
Upstairs are the boys’ rooms. The beds
were the ones custom-made for the
Greenmeadows house, the same ones
we’d slept in since then.
It was a loft or an attic, my mother
insisted, which is why the stairs had
such narrow steps. But this "attic,"
curiously enough, had two big
bedrooms as well as a wide hall. To
those of us who actually inhabited
these rooms, the curiosity was an
annoyance.
There was no bathroom, so if you
had to go to the toilet in the middle
of the night you had to go down the
stairs and come back up again, by
which time you were at least half
awake.
Perhaps there was no difference
between the two houses more basic,
and more dramatic, than their
location. This part of Marikina is not
quite the same as the swanky part of
Ortigas we inhabited for five years.
Cinco Hermanos is split by a road,
cutting it into two phases, that
leads on one end to Major Santos
Dizon, which connects Marcos
Highway with Katipunan Avenue.
The other end of the road stops at
Olandes, a dense community of
pedicabs, narrow streets, and
poverty. The noise – from the
tricycles, the chattering on the
street, the trucks hurtling down
Marcos Highway in the distance
, the blaring of the loudspeaker at
our street corner put there by
eager-beaver baranggay officials –
dispels any illusions one might
harbor of having returned to a state
of bliss.
The first floor is designed to create
a clear separation between the
family and guest areas, so one can
entertain outsiders without
disturbing the house’s inhabitants.
This principle owes probably more
to my mother than my father.
After all, she is the entertainer, the
host. The living room, patio, and
dining room – the places where guests
might be entertained – must be clean
and neat, things in their places. She
keeps the kitchen achingly well-
organized, which is why there are lots
of cabinets and a deep cupboard.
And she put them to good use.
According to Titus, the fourth, who
accompanied her recently while
grocery shopping, she buys groceries
as if all of us still lived there. I
don’t recall the cupboard ever being
empty.
That became her way of mothering. As
we grew older and drifted farther and
farther away from her grasp, defining
our own lives outside of the house, my
mother must have felt that she was
losing us to friends, jobs, loves – forces
beyond her control. Perhaps she figured
that food, and a clean place to stay,
was what we still needed from her.
So over the last ten years or so she has
become more involved in her cooking,
more attentive, better. She also
became fussier about meals, asking if
you’ll be there for lunch or dinner so
she knows how much to cook,
reprimanding the one who didn’t call
to say he wasn’t coming home for
dinner after all, or the person who
brought guests home without warning.
There was more to it than just
knowing how much rice to cook.

I know it gives her joy to have

relatives over during the regular
Christmas and New Year get-
togethers, which have been held in
our house for the past half-decade
or so.
She brings out the special dishes,
cups and saucers, platters, glasses,
bowls, coasters and doilies she
herself crocheted. Perhaps I
understand better why her
Christmas decor has grown more
lavish each year.
After seeing off the last guests after
the most recent gathering, she
sighed, "Ang kalat ng bahay!" I
didn’t see her face, but I could hear
her smiling. My father replied,
"Masaya ka naman." It wasn’t a
secret.
Sundays we come over to the house,
everyone who has moved out, and
have lunch together. Sunday lunches
were always differently esteemed in
our household.
Now that some of us have left, I
sense that my siblings try harder
than they ever did to be there. I
know I do. I try not to deprive my
mother the chance to do what she
does best.
Thank you for
Listening