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Usok Volume No. 1, Issue No. 1

Published by Rocket Kapre Books

an imprint of Eight Ray Sun Publishing Inc.

http://rocketkapre.com

Produced in the Republic of the Philippines

First Smashwords Edition: December 2009

All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

"The Child Abandoned"© 2006/2009 by Yvette Tan. First appeared in Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 2 edited by Dean Alfar (Kestrel IMC: Philippines). Subsequently published in Waking the Dead and Other Horror Stories (Anvil: Manila).

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

* Introduction *

* The Startbox by Crystal Koo *

* The Saint of Elsewhere: A Mystery by chiles samaniego *

* Mouths to Speak, Voices to Sing by Kenneth Yu *

* The Coming of the Anak-Araw by Celestine Trinidad *

* The Child Abandoned by Yvette Tan *

* Contributor Bios *

INTRODUCTION

When I was a child, short stories did not exist.

I don't mean that literally--short stories have probably been around as long as story-telling has (I doubt that the first spinner of tales concocted Iliad-length narratives from the get-go). What I mean is that when I was a voracious young reader growing up in suburban Manila, I rarely gave any story that was less than 300 pages the time of day--and then, only if it was part of a series. What I loved, what I needed, from my fiction was that it serve as a gateway to another world-- and at the time, the thicker the tome, the larger the gate.

When I was a child, I couldn't find a single modern-day work of Fantasy or Science Fiction by a Filipino.

This was not to say that they did not exist, but they were beyond the sphere of awareness of a ten year old boy of the pre-Internet age. If I wanted my fill of genre stories (I didn't hear of the "Speculative" umbrella until much later) then I had no recourse other than the SFF books that sold well in the West, which books were the only ones that made it to these shores, to our National Bookstores. Don't get me wrong--it's the work of Eddings and Card and Gemmell and Goodkind and the like that made me fall in love with Speculative Fiction, but I couldn't help thinking about why there were no stories about aliens landing in New Manila instead of New York.

Now? While I still devour novels and trilogies (and will eventually get around to whatever it is the Wheel of Time is now) there are few things which I admire more than a well made short story. There's something about the economy, the efficiency of a short story that makes it easier to identify and appreciate elements of good writing.

As for Philippine Speculative Fiction, works of the fantastic penned by Filipinos are making their way into local bookstores and international publications, and gaining accolades in the process. Online distribution (written and audio) also provides an opportunity for a story to reach a wider audience than has ever before been possible.

It's a good time to be a Filipino Spec Fic author... and that makes it a good time to start a Filipino Spec Fic Magazine.

Usok is my attempt to provide a home for quality short fiction, quality speculative fiction, quality Filipino fiction. Thank you for joining me for the beginning of what I hope will be a long, joyous, journey. That's also the loose theme of our first issue--beginnings.

New issues come out first on http://www.rocketkapre.com/usok/, and you can head over there to leave comments, and find supplemental content such as reader's guides and a larger, clean image of our cover. We'll also have interviews with some of our authors at http://www.rocketkapre.com

So without further ado: Kwentuhan na. - Paolo Gabriel V. Chikiamco

THE STARTBOX

by Crystal Koo

THE LAUS CLOSED DOWN their electronics shop and moved out of Nicanor Street one summer. Everyone was surprised. The shop had been doing so well there didn’t seem to be any reason to throw it all away. This was what everyone was thinking at the closing-down sale but no one asked the Laus. The family had hired people to look after the shop and never made much of an appearance, unlike all the other proprietors that ran the shops that lined Nicanor Street. When the Laus left, the speculation became rampant. A family emergency. They didn’t like the neighborhood. The balding man who owned the photocopying place on the next block said he had heard rumors that they were immigrating to Hong Kong, but he couldn’t be sure. With the Handover so close, it didn’t seem right. Why not, my father interrupted. There’d be business with the Chinese mainlanders, lots of them. No need to swim over the Shenzhen River now to start a new life.

No one could confirm or deny any of these. I was twelve years old at the time, only a boy that my father thought could still be distracted by the jingle of an ice cream cart. I didn’t have the courage to tell him what I knew about Ricky Lau.

The Laus had lived across from us, in an apartment above their electronics shop. A disused air shaft, where kids dropped candy wrappers between the grates, was all that separated them from my father’s turpentine-odored hardware store below our own apartment. Lau Electronics drew the younger crowd with the cellular phones and CD players they sold. We had mostly older men dropping by the hardware store, drinking tea and playing mahjong with my father while my mother bustled in and out with a kettle. During summers, when I had to look after the store with my father, I would watch the teenagers going into the Laus' air-conditioned shop and I’d try to make out the objects inside the pink plastic bags they carried when they returned to the street. Then my father would rap me on the knuckles for not paying attention to the pliers I was supposed to be counting and tell me to turn the fan a level lower to save electricity.

Ricky Lau and I went to the same class in school. He had a slightly oily face and a messy patch of hair, a reedy-looking kid who always disappeared quickly into his building after classes. Everyday, when I played with the neighborhood kids, I could see his face between the blinds of the window of his room on the second floor. The general consensus among us children was that Ricky Lau felt he was too good for us. Further conversation regarding Ricky Lau was usually cut short at that point by the beginning of our regular water-gun game.

We didn't have much to do with Ricky in school either. He got good grades seemingly without effort and his self-sufficiency simply smacked of snobbery as far as we were concerned. While everyone else stalled as long as possible when the teachers, before giving out our exam papers, ordered us to lay our notebooks on the floor, all he did was click his pen again and again, which made everyone even more nervous.
The teachers started off liking him because he scored very well, but Ricky never raised his hand when the teachers asked questions, although we were sure he knew what the answer was. In our more ungenerous moments, we played dumb with the teacher just to see if Ricky would rise to the occasion for us, but he never took the bait.

So when Ms. Rafael paired me with Ricky for the science project, I had very mixed feelings. Ricky was a charmed creature when it came to schoolwork and I planned to let him do nearly all of it by himself. On the other hand, I knew I was going to get flak for being stuck with him, a ritual which began immediately after science class when Ricky came to my desk just as I was about to head to the cafeteria with my friends. Alvin and Carl muttered something about waiting for me outside and left, slapping each other's shoulders in exaggeratedly-restrained laughter on their way to the door.

Hi Jameson, Ricky said, looking at me straight in the eye. I have an idea for the project.

I answered, Yeah, OK, what is it? Through the jalousies, Alvin was making circles with his hands and putting them around his eyes, the traditional sign made to symbolize a nerd, except Ricky didn't wear glasses.

Ricky said it was too complicated to explain without the thing itself. I asked what the “thing” was and Ricky timidly said that the project was already done so I didn't have to worry about it because it was going to knock the socks off Ms. Rafael anyway. This irritated me, more so because Alvin and Carl had gotten tired of waiting and had left without me, and I asked him when I could see it.

Ricky gave me a beatific smile. You can take a look at it at my place after dinner, he said.

I found Alvin and Carl afterward lounging by the water fountain, sharing a pack of french fries. They nudged me and asked how it had gone. I told them that Ricky and I were making a mouse maze.

That night, my father drew the aluminum roll-up gate halfway down to let some of the night air in, then he sat on a small stool, printing figures on a ledger and eating from the plate of steaming pork-and-chives dumplings my mother had set on the table. The night was warm. My father had both electric fans at their highest speeds but from my position near the tool racks I could still see the sheen of sweat on his caterpillar moustache.

My father was an aggressive salesman who got his customers to laugh and drink tea before eventually buying a bucket of paint that he’d recommended without much talk about the paint itself. There was only: Your family was from Guangdong too? That calls for a special price then! We could have been living in neighboring villages! If the customer was Filipino, my father would bring out his makeshift Tagalog to rattle off comradely complaints about gas prices. All that exuberance would disappear when he started doing his numbers in the evening, only returning the next day when his first customer walked in.

My mother was watching a Taiwanese soap opera that evening, the TV producing screams and bombastic musical cues every ten minutes. When I finished locking the glass rack holding the screwdrivers and was about to sit down next to my father, he tapped the little teacup next to the dumplings with the end of his chopsticks and asked for more soy sauce. After I went to the kitchen and returned with a full teacup, I told my father I was going to Ricky Lau's house after dinner.

He frowned. What for? What about your homework?

I told him it was for homework. I was about to explain how Ms. Rafael had paired Ricky and me together but my father stood up and went to the altarpieces nailed to the wall. He lit the candles before the statuettes of red-faced Guan-yu with his sword and helmet and the curly-haired Santo Niño. Don't break anything while you're there, he said. I don't want to have to pay for something that we would never buy anyway.

I nodded but he didn’t see me, so I started on the dumplings alone. My father was muttering prayers to the altarpieces and as always I could never tell his prayers apart. They made up a wall of droning little noises, repetitive like Ricky's pen-clicking, and I always felt awkward whenever he started. I was never sure if it was supposed to be a private moment between him and his gods, or some kind of business routine that I would one day have to mimic. I had learned to drown it out, and that night I listened to someone nearby practicing The Entertainer on the piano, the melody surfacing in between the sputters and whines of the pedicabs.

Ricky himself, dressed in pajamas, opened the door for me, saying he had seen me cross over from his window.

The Laus’s living room was filled with huge, packaging boxes exploding with bubblewrap, although I could see a few faux-leather sofas and chairs peeking behind them. Ricky told me that his parents liked collecting strange electronics from all over the world. They bought the occasional antique too, but it seemed like electronic golems and chakras could be worth more in the long run because they were harder to find. I didn't know what Ricky was talking about so I assumed he was making them up.

Ricky went to the refrigerator for a carton of orange juice and asked if I wanted to play video games on his PlayStation. His father was busy in his workshop building a home-made PC and his mother was out for dinner, so Ricky said we could play as long as we wanted.

The strangeness of everything surrounding Ricky, his family, and even his house had begun to make me feel out of place, so I said no, thanks. He shrugged and drank from the carton and led me to his room. On our way there, I looked out the window from which I had so often seen Ricky watching us, and saw that my father had already locked down the roll-up gate.

I remember going into Ricky’s room and paying more attention to the fact that the air-conditioning had been left running with no one around rather than to the startbox on his desk. The box didn’t look like it was capable of much. It was half the size of a regular shoebox, made of dark, olive-green turtleshell, and I thought it was the sort of lacquered thing that girls used to put their little trinkets in.

Then Ricky opened the lid.

Inside was an exact miniature replica of Ricky’s room - the wardrobe, the bed, the desk, his swivel chair, the shelves, all in position. But what sent a frisson up and down my spine were the people in it. Frozen in the box was me, sitting on the bed, and Ricky standing next me with a small box in his hands. I looked closer at the figurines, stunned. My head was a little too big and the colors were somewhat faded, but it had a look of wariness on its face that mirrored my own, and Ricky’s figure had that same expression of excitement, as if about to divulge a secret. Ricky—the real one—still had that expression when he covered the box again with the lid.

I suddenly had an image of Ricky spending the afternoons after school watching us from the window and making little miniature houses and people to play with afterward.

That's not a science project, I said, the fear making my throat dry.

He laughed. Wait, you haven't seen the whole thing yet. My parents bought this from Hong Kong. Watch this.

He took the lid off again and moved the miniature swivel chair to the door. When he returned the lid, the chair behind us began rolling across the floor towards the door on its tiny plastic wheels.

I looked at Ricky, my skin covered with goose bumps, and he grinned at me, enjoying my incomprehension. It works wherever you are, he said. You just need four AA batteries and it lasts longer than a Game Boy. It's all wireless too.

Then he fished out a piece of paper that looked like a one-page manual on how to operate a cheap clock, one side in English and the other in Chinese. Ricky started reading it aloud in very ungrammatical English, informing me about the butterfly effect and chaos theory.

I interrupted him. You can move stuff around with it?

He didn't look very pleased with the crudeness of my remark. It's a startbox, he said. Like if you change the things around you, you can make a new starting point in your life. The carton said something like that. I bet they don't sell this anywhere in the Philippines, so we can just memorize all the science stuff about butterflies and tornadoes and Ms. Rafael won't know.

He put the startbox away after that, in a drawer under his desk, and started talking about the PlayStation games he had. We ended up playing a fighting game with bobbing, trash-talking 3D characters, until I realized that it was nearly ten and had to dash out and bang on our roll-up until a neighbor started yelling at me to shut up.

After that night, I couldn't stop thinking about the startbox. I knew if my friends got their hands on it they’d want to pry off the head of a figurine or something equally random just to see what would happen, but that wasn’t what fascinated me; it was how everything in the startbox was built for the purpose of deliberate control. I wanted to see more of that, but Ricky seemed more concerned with trying to hang out with me than doing anything related to the "project." Whenever Ms. Rafael would remind the class about our projects, Ricky would pull out the startbox's one-page manual from his breast pocket and wave it from across the room with a meaningful grin. He had given me a photocopy the day after he had shown me the startbox. It was as if the startbox was his attempt to show that Ricky Lau too had the guts to fudge schoolwork, and waving the manual was his way of reminding me about this.

One day after classes, I told Ricky that it would be easier for me to memorize the manual if I could see the startbox again. And to ensure that his quota of fun with me would be filled, I asked him if he would like to join me and my friends that afternoon for water-gun wars. Ricky’s face lit up brilliantly.

Ricky owned a water blaster with a large reservoir and air pressure chambers, and when he brought it out I felt more than a few glares sent in my direction. That afternoon’s game, however, became a firm lesson in how fantastic weaponry could backfire. It was bad enough that Ricky could never get a clean shot, that it took him too long to refuel his huge reservoir and to pump enough air to be compressed, but Ricky was also unaware that showing off an almighty piece of hardware like that to machismo-saddled, twelve-year-old boys was simply daring them to prove that they would not be cowed. By the time the sun had set and everyone was leaning in exhaustion against the cars parked along the street, there wasn't a dry patch on Ricky's school uniform. One of his ears was red from a direct hit, his shoes squelched as he walked, and his neck itched from the torn bits of leaves that Carl had added to his gun to turn the water itchy.

For a moment I regretted bringing Ricky, who had started to look like a drowned chick. But he beamed at me and half-raised his unwieldy water blaster, as if he had forgotten that our team had lost abysmally because of him, and my regret left quickly.

He was too tired to do anything else after we had changed into fresh sets of clothes and gone into his room. He lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, while I put the startbox on his desk and opened the lid with my sweaty hands.

As I stared into the box, I began to realize how beautiful the miniatures were. Everything was replicated to the smallest detail, from the continents and the oceans on the map of the world on Ricky's wall to the little spikes that formed on my hair when it was damp. Looking at the miniatures filled me with a childishly happy emotion. The startbox was a thing primed for action, like a freshly-refueled water-pistol, and as I felt the heaviness of the box against my palm, I longed to see what other miniatures the startbox could create outside Ricky's room.

Can I play with you guys again tomorrow? Ricky asked.

I didn't answer him. Using my little finger, I edged the miniature bed against the wall of the box, making the tiny varnished headboard shudder. When I returned the lid, Ricky's bed mimicked the movement with a loud groan, bumping against the wall hard enough that Ricky fell off from the impact.

I laughed. It was only when Ricky picked himself up that he began to laugh along with me. He sat on the corner of the bed, one hand clutching the edge in case I did something with the bed again, and with the other hand he rubbed his nose. So can I? he asked again, smiling feebly.

I wanted to tell him that if I hadn't talked to the boys before the game, they would have ripped both his ears off. Instead I opened the box again and gazed at the calming beauty of the miniatures. How long have you had this? I asked.

About a month. My parents found it in a small, crowded building where people sold pirated CDs and computer stuff really cheap. My dad said if they couldn’t find a fake there, it didn’t exist. Cool, right?

I thought it was a coolness that was wasted on someone like Ricky in the same way that the startbox was horribly underused in his care. All he seemed to want to do with it was play house.

I have an idea, I said. Let's bring this to my place.

Okay, he answered uncertainly. What's wrong with here?

Nothing. I just want to see what it looks like in a different place.

When we arrived at the hardware store, my father looked at the clock and then at me and Ricky, asking, What about your homework?

I waved the startbox at him. Then I went to the corner of the shop and plunked it on the table, while Ricky followed, looking at the screwdrivers.

It's really warm here, he said.

I told him to sit down. I opened the lid, and sure enough, there was the hardware store, from the cabinets where the ledgers were kept down to my father's caterpillar moustache. The roof shingles my father had on display made the replica even more intricate and my fingers tingled. Really nice, I said. The folds of Guan-yu’s tunic looked like melting trails of multicolored ice cream and the lips of the Santo Niño were delicately turned up in emphasized blessedness.
I slipped my hand into the box, and with my fingernail I tipped Guan-yu from the altar, followed by his Christian counterpart.

Ricky was about to say something as I returned the lid, but he was interrupted by the crash of the statuettes. My father jumped up in alarm and gave a yelp when he saw what had made the noise. Guan-yu and the Santo Niño were on our green linoleum floor.

As my father rushed over to them, Ricky looked at me, wide-eyed, whatever it was he was going to say forgotten. I felt a sharp sensation in the bottom of my stomach, as if someone had curled a fist in it, before I realized that I was trembling a little. The sound of the crash had been louder than I had thought.

The Santo Niño was made of plastic so it was only a bit scuffed, but Guan-yu was porcelain and his face was smashed. My father swore, setting the Santo Niño aside face down on a glass rack while looking for a box to put Guan-yu’s body in. He barely glanced at us.

I waited for my heart to slow down as Ricky gazed mutely at me like a stray dog caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. My father was grumbling about buying new statuettes. When my mother came out, apron around her waist, asking what the noise was about, my father waved Guan-yu at her. She gasped and asked how it had happened. My father shrugged irritably. The wind. Rats. Or maybe ghosts.

Don't say ghosts in this house! she said. How can you be so careless?

I didn't knock them over!

My father’s voice was raised, poised for defense. Aware of Ricky, my mother stared helplessly at the pieces of Guan-yu’s face on the floor as my father bent to pick them up. The fist in my stomach began to relax and I watched my parents and the statuettes, chess pieces that had been moved around with one flick of a finger. There would be no prayers that night. I imagined the places I could bring the startbox to. The kitchen, the living room, the bedrooms. I turned to Ricky, who was squeezing himself further and further into the corner of the shop, and asked, What do you think would happen if we brought this to school?

Ricky's forehead instantly wrinkled. What was that for? he asked nervously, his eyes darting between my parents and me.

I shrugged. Just a test. You said the startbox could change stuff. Start all over or something, right? I want to see how much. I don't know what all that stuff about the butterflies is about anyway. This is a kind of experiment.

Did it work?

I shrugged again, concealing my triumph, and said, Maybe.

My mother had returned to the kitchen and my father was pulling the roll-up gate down. Guan-yu was safe in an old hammer carton case. Do you want to stay for dinner? my father asked Ricky flatly.

Ricky looked at me and I gave him a blank stare. I think I should leave now, he said. He was about to reach for the startbox when I took it away and told him I’d walk him home.

Outside, we could hear the amateur pianist still practicing the last part of The Entertainer, hitting the wrong keys, and stopping every three seconds to change them. The sound of the keys made me think of a person going down a hill sitting down, his legs trying to slow his descent and making clods of soil tumble and fall, and I realized I wanted to push that person off the hill. There was a pause when the song finally ended, then the piano started from the beginning again. The humidity of the night crept into my lungs, damp and oppressive.

Did you ever use this? I asked Ricky, extending my arm and hitting him with the startbox.

Ricky looked like he didn't know if he should take the startbox or not. Of course, he answered, his eyes flicking around my face. I showed you how.
You mean roll the chair around, clean your room with it? Fun stuff like that?

He didn't answer but his eyes crinkled the way a baby’s eyes would when it’s about to get upset.

You said it's supposed to give you a new starting point, I told him. Supposed to change things. If you’d done it, you wouldn't keep watching us from up in your room. You’re not following instructions.

I drew the startbox back to me and rested it against my stomach. Though the cotton fabric of my Power Rangers T-shirt, I could feel the smooth coldness of the turtleshell. The sensation was like relief, like an ice cream on a hot summer night.

I'm going to do more experiments with it, I announced.

Ricky was hugging himself, twisting his waist, and biting his lower lip. I thought he looked like he needed to go to the bathroom. What are you gonna do? he mumbled, as if his mouth was full of peanut butter. You shouldn't break your parents' stuff.

Experiments, I repeated a little loudly. I don't want to memorize a bunch of stuff on a piece of paper. I want to understand how to make it work the way it's supposed to because you don’t. You have to break stuff sometimes.

Ricky pursed his lips and shifted his weight from one foot to another. I'll let you take it home if we can play water-guns again tomorrow.

I let my fingers glide over the gleaming olive-green turtleshell, feeling the startbox nestle in my palm like a living thing, and I knew that I needed it far more than Ricky ever would.

I'm going to take this and I'll give it back to you soon, okay?

It was the quickest I had ever seen him move. When he dove at me, I nearly lost my balance. Ricky’s one hand was on the soft part between my chin and my throat, the other hand reaching for the startbox. But I beat his arms away and yanked myself out of his reach, shoving him with my entire weight. Ricky tottered a few steps before he fell.

In the air around us, the Entertainer stumbled desperately towards the end with bleeding feet. Standing above the air shaft, I grabbed the lid off the startbox to see our part of Nicanor Street mirrored within it - my father's store, the electronics shop, the streetlights, the sidewalk where Ricky had fallen.

Wheezing loudly, Ricky got back to his feet.

I picked his miniature up from the box. When I held it above my head, Ricky lunged at me.

I suppose I can just tell you that it was all his fault, that he knocked it out of my hand; it’s the only way I can save myself in this story. The truth is I’ve never been sure. At that point, with the startbox in my hand, I could have done anything. I could have been thinking of threatening him. I could have been thinking of dropping it.

I could have done anything.

That’s why I never told anyone how the miniature fell into the air shaft and disappeared into the gloom of candy wrappers and lost coins and keys and was it triumph or horror or a little bit of both that made me grasp the box so tightly I could have snapped it into pieces? I can never remember clearly, except that the fist in my stomach had returned and I was shaking because the lid gripped under my armpit was too close to the rim of the box I held.

It was Ricky who had to take them away from me with his clammy palms. He did it silently, without looking at me, sliding the startbox out of my arms with the ease of a surgeon who knew exactly what to do with a tumor. Somewhere in an apartment near us, the piano player had stopped. Then Ricky held out his hand to me for the lid.

DAYS LATER, WHEN WE DECIDED to do a mouse maze instead, I worked up enough courage to ask Ricky what he had done with the startbox but he pretended not to hear me. That was our last conversation and it didn’t last for more than five minutes. He said he would build the maze himself and I could bring the mice and the pellets on the day the project itself was due. I couldn’t have said no even if I had wanted to.

Ms. Rafael gave us a ninety-two for the project. The maze was a rickety affair made of cardboard and felt paper held together with hot melt glue, and the mice climbed over the walls a few times but Ricky made a brilliant report on the things he said we had done together: how we built the maze, how we ran experiments to gauge the time it would take for a mouse to escape the maze without bait, how we arrived at the conclusion that any organism would respond better to a task if there was an incentive. There was only a smattering of applause--most of it had gone over everyone’s heads--but it was the most self-assured I had ever seen Ricky in front of a crowd.

School ended soon afterward, and Alvin and Carl were too excited about moving on to high school the next year to remember that I had ever been paired with Ricky. When summer came, the Laus moved out.

I still live in Nicanor Street. I have a degree in business from the local university and I’m partners with my father in the hardware store. Carl, who’s in a programming firm, drops by once in a while for coffee; Alvin has left to find work and girls in Singapore. Another family has taken over the Laus’ apartment and the electronics shop is now a fastfood restaurant.

Sometimes, when my father begins his prayers, I step out and look for Ricky through the second floor window of the apartment across the way. I imagine how, on that last day, he would have carefully bubblewrapped his PlayStation before placing it in the packing box. I imagine how he would have taken the startbox from his drawer, its batteries pulled out, its turtleshell lid long thrown into his wastebasket and buried in the landfills. Inside the box would have been Nicanor Street, frozen in the sleepiness of dusk, with me standing over the air shaft, my face painted livid, and Ricky nowhere to be found.

THE SAINT OF ELSEWHERE: A MYSTERY

by chiles samaniego

You can, in fact, swim the same river twice.

- overheard

I MET A GIRL FROM ANOTHER LAND who told me of a place like no other I knew. The old man, he came later, though he was the one who taught me how to get there.

The people, they define the place, the girl said. You can’t imagine how warm it is.

We spoke to each other in a common language, the girl and I, native to neither of us but which, were I to be honest, felt more natural to me than the one I was born to. Her speech was as strongly accented as I imagine she thought mine was, and our conversation was broken by stuttering pauses as we stopped to make out what the other had said. But in the end, I think, we understood each other. We understood each other perfectly.

So warm, she said. You could walk around forever, naked, she said; unarmed, she said. It all feels so welcoming, so safe. I had heard those exact same words repeated so many times about the place. Repeated again and again by so many people who didn’t know any better. People just like her. No, that can’t be right: how could anyone be just like her?

I could have listened to her forever. I could have watched her animate those same words over and over with her pale, gentle lips, even as I tried to persuade her otherwise: no, I said, nowhere’s that safe.

Nowhere at all.

Her words broke in abrasive shards of crystalline sugar, and I lapped it all up. I could taste her sweetness melting on my tongue, and it could have gone on forever if my mouth had not gone so quickly and suddenly dry. I heard myself drone on in dull counterpoint to the ringing chime of her words. Whatever I said was inadequate, inappropriate. All wrong. She sang; I croaked:

Let the days pass. Let all my yesterdays and tomorrows become the brief moments between the parting of her lips and their coming back together over her closed teeth. Let my now forever be their dance...

Hours later, I woke alone in the darkness before dawn, sweating beneath the sheets despite the cold, dead air of the hotel room.

By then she had disappeared.

She left the hotel that very night and did not return. The concierge and certain members of the hotel staff swore this to me in their mundane, mannered politeness when I asked them the next day. The previous night our words had danced between us in the darkness: I could still feel them lingering in the air when I came to visit the spot where we had talked. But no, how could they still be there, her words? The shore by daylight was just a beach, white sand, brine, and pallid, lifeless heat. No mystery, no romance. The radiance was just radiation from a sun too far to be relevant.

Still, I persisted in my search, drawing my toes heavily through the sand. Perhaps I had the wrong place? Maybe there, between the twining palm trees, or somewhere beneath the shadows of the white parasols that bloomed profusely like paradoxical mushrooms with the sunrise?

The chatter of the tiresomely exuberant tourists—broken by sharp, graceless laughter—reminded me of her, recalled to my mind the sheer energy and naive sincerity of her stilted, sing-song speech; but they were not her. They were nothing like her.

I kept walking until I felt the sea lapping at my trouser legs. The sandy bottom sucked at my feet, threatening to swallow, digest, absorb me. They worked in concert, the sand and the waves: the waves reached up by inches to pull me down, the sand clambered over my naked feet, grain by precious grain, until it had buried them up to my ankles.

A dead jellyfish baked in the sand, strangled by seaweed, lying just beyond the reach of the water.

No, there was not a trace left of her here. Her words would not have suffered such banality for long.

I, on the other hand, suffered one more night alone in the cold of my hotel room, and flew home the next day, not bothering to ask after her again, certain I would receive nothing more than a polite shake of the head behind a wide, long-toothed smile.

Every year since then (it could have been five, ten, or even a thousand years for all that it mattered to me) I returned to that place, the place where I met her, the girl, looking for her, the girl I never forgot.

Perhaps it was on my third visit, perhaps earlier, perhaps later (it is difficult now to mark out chronology in my memories of the time), that I started truly seeing the rest of the island. I went to all the places I imagined she would have wanted to go, all the beaches, and hilltops, and strange towns (there were three, in addition to the city); always it seemed I would catch the faintest trace of her in the air, an effervescent and no doubt coincidental collision of memory and sensation.

But she was never there. She wasn’t anywhere there.

Later, I stopped rummaging through the countryside and started instead to ramble aimlessly through the City.

The City, it is true, was not all that different from the metropolis I was born in, the one where I lived: the same oppressive amber sunlight; the same air, thick and heavy enough to give a syrupy impression of time’s passage, so that the petrol-powered rectangular steel boxes, the jiffies that were common to both this place and home seemed to judder along the streets as though captured on a fractured reel of film; the same rain, pouring in hesitant bursts of passion, drowning the world briefly in a morass of indifferent mildew and wetness, only to recede and be replaced again at the earliest possible opportunity by that oppressive amber heat...

Always, however, in that place, it was the people I met who lingered in my mind, though even now I lack the vocabulary to describe them: the street vendors selling sweet cakes like the brightly hued caps of giant mushrooms, or jewelry made from the shards of oyster shells, or small vials of fragrant sand, cork-stoppered bottles of sea salt and all sorts of questionable merchandise; the barkers, belting out strange destinations to fill those hungry, smoke-belching steel boxes, directing the people who pile mechanically in through the posterior orifice of each jiffy and who clamber over each other indifferent to the stick of sweat, polite indignity, and motor-oil slick exhaust fumes; the tourists, their voices always exuberant, always grating like the rubbing together of two coins; the girls, who only seem to join the City at night...

At first, I admit, I refused to see it. Upon their open-faced greetings and characteristic raising of eyebrows, my mind imposed an element of facetiousness: I had convinced myself that behind their brief, unthinking courtesies was a knowledge that I, a stranger to that place, could never know.

How it happened that I began to feel a more sincere warmth in their constant smiles and easy laughter, I cannot say. But I never lost a certain degree of skepticism, a suspicion about the place, the sense of being a stranger there. If I was in any way comfortable, it was only because, at last, I felt not the inquisitiveness behind their courtesy, but saw through to their polite and sincere indifference.

At last, I thought, they’ve learned to leave me alone.

Every visit I made to the place, whether it lasted one, two or three but never more than five days (and then only because a summer storm had closed the island’s only port, stranding all visitors who wished to depart by ship or plane), I would spend one night with a stranger to remember the girl I met, so long ago now, it seemed.

I was a God of Love, I thought, repeating, bestowing with benevolence upon a fortunate City girl the one act that marked my life forever.

For a time, I only chose girls who I believed most reminded me of her, but in the end, I learned none of them could ever be her. No matter that this one had her dark, oriental eyes, that one her skin, like porcelain or fragrant soap; what little difference it made that this one shared her fractured accent, that one her guileless yet graceful laughter. None of them were really anything like her. No, nothing like her at all.

And every morning that followed I would wake again alone, and remember the way the sweat evaporated off my skin into the cold, dead hotel room air that night.

I never stayed much longer after that; after all, that was all I ever came for, the only pretense behind my visits to the City.

It was on my last visit to that place that I met the old man.

It was the morning after what ought to have been my last night in the City: another City girl (not her) come and gone. I drifted out of sleep, opened my eyes to the empty ceiling, and simply stared up at the blankness above me, thinking of her, the original, the first girl who’d ever come and gone for me, the first to have disappeared the way she had from my life, and the only one who has ever remained.

I realized then I could no longer remember her face. I had, in fact, stopped remembering a long time ago. I was no longer even certain I remembered her words correctly.

I was surprised by the calm this realization brought me, even as I wondered what she’d actually said: Warmth? Safety? What was it she found in that place that I, for one, at the time, had never seen for myself?

I called my agent and had her re-book my flight for some time later that day.

I’d like to take a stroll through the City, I said. Maybe the beach, just once more before I go.

Well, that’s a surprise. Are you alright?

Yes. I don’t expect I’ll be coming back.

I rang off, putting the receiver back on the cradle. The numbers leaped off the dial on the telephone and began to swim, to swarm meaninglessly in a warm fuzzy puddle around my head.

I don’t know what it was that made me choose the hotel’s beachfront over the City. Perhaps it was the pure solitude the calm susurrus that mingled breeze and sea offered, untainted by the jabber of tourists and other visitors who had by then vacated the premises at the end of summer. Perhaps it was the pleasant memory of the way the waves had worked with the sand to swallow my feet, the day after she disappeared.

Perhaps it was because, apart from the people of that place, she loved this beach most of all.

I stopped beside a dead jellyfish in the sand, wrapped like a gift-package with seaweed, baking in the sun just beyond the reach of the waves...But the scene would not last: the sun had begun to set, and the tide was rising.

Find what you were looking for?

The old man, intruding on my solitude as though he’d materialized from thin air. Past the old man’s wide, toothless grin, I followed with my eyes the curving trail of his footprints to the other end of the beach, already broken in places where the sea’s reach had risen high enough to wipe the impressions away.

You have the look of someone who’s leaving, he said. Someone who’s saying goodbye.

The sunset confused me; I peered intently at the fading orange glow. Here, in this City, he said, “goodbye” means one of two things: you’ve found what you’re looking for, or you’ve decided you never will.

The old man seemed made of an unusual number of odd joints that creaked constantly like the wooden beams of a ship, even when he was still. He was a ragged, jagged, fractured thing against the milky smoothness of the purpling sky, a smattering of countless limbs upon the otherwise unblemished skin of the beach, as though someone had stepped on an albino cockroach on a white marble floor. He wore clothes you could tell were once white linen, but were now the texture of crumpled vellum parchment.

He smelled of cheese and almonds, the mildew of old books. His voice, however, had the immediacy, the impetuousness of a young man, or of an old man who had only just discovered his youth. You couldn’t find it could you?

No one can find what I’m looking for. I made a mistake, I admit it. I had driven her away so that she would remain hidden forever, when all I wanted was to keep her with me, never have to lose her, forever.

His grin widened, and I felt suddenly embarrassed by my dismissive tone. I looked away, back to the sliver that was all that remained of the setting sun. The first stars had begun to shine, but what did it matter if I made a wish?

Something shifted, I could sense it: the wind, the tide, the angle of the light, all of them changed; but it was something else; something more.

Have you ever considered your potential in the material universe?

I sighed, again dismissive: I’d met my fair share of philosophical old men in my time, old men far too ready to share the so-called wisdom they believed they’d accumulated over a lifetime that had gone on far too long, and I was about to interrupt—

I hesitated. I don’t know why. Into my hesitation, he continued:

Imagine a circle.

No, imagine a sphere.

Imagine a sphere around yourself.

(What are you talking about? But I did not say this out loud. Instead I listened, followed his instructions. I don’t know why.)

Imagine a sphere the radius of which is the absolute limit, the absolute furthest you could travel at the speed of light within the span of your life, if you’d started traveling in all directions from the moment you were conceived.

Most people, that’s about, what, 70, 80, maybe a hundred light years.

(For most people, far too long. But I kept my silence.)

So: a sphere about two hundred light years in diameter, centered on the bed where your dad came inside your mom—accidentally or on purpose, what’s the difference—where and when you were conceived.

(A blackness before me, before I was me: even my thoughts were silenced.)

In Einstein’s universe, a universe necessarily limited by the speed of light, this is your sphere of influence, established before you were even born, like destiny, at the moment you were conceived—at least in potential terms; in practical, material terms, the sphere means shit, but in reality, in your reality, you’ll only ever be able to exercise influence—material influence—over the smallest fraction of the volume of that sphere—a speck really, is all it is—and it gets exponentially smaller with every infinitesimal increment of time you creep closer to death.

(Another blackness, this one coming after.)

Everything you will never physically touch, never have material influence over, everything else, to you, is Elsewhere.

Blackness, everywhere. He was losing me, and losing me fast: my mind slipped beyond my power to control it, to keep it in place, and it began to wander back over my life, all my visits to the City; and yet, somehow, even as my mind slipped from me, the old man held me, he held me fixed to that point on that beach, fixed me with his breathless exposition.

The problem, such as it is, he continued, is biology.

Biologically, we’ve evolved perfectly for filling that tiny fractional niche of each of our potential spheres of influence, so that we can’t even imagine what we could do with things that are Elsewhere—our minds are trapped in our brains, and our brains have evolved into a design that is restricted to the material, a design focused on translating or generating thought in order to exert a purely material influence on the universe. But the potential—the mind’s potential, or the potential that is the mind—is there.

(My mind raced back in time, sifting through faces, one after the other; some I recognized, most I did not.)

But, here’s the thing:

The boundary of your sphere is permeable: as we stand here, your Elsewhere aggregates with mine, our aggregate Elsewhere aggregates with the Elsewheres of everyone living, dying, being born and even failing to be born today; now, move forward and backward in time, because Elsewheres incorporate the temporal as well as the spatial: imagine the aggregate Elsewhere of over 400,000 years of humanity—and that’s only considering conventional, four-dimensional spacetime; still just a blip, sure, compared to the breadth of the entire universe, but still: far more than you could possibly manage on your own, yeah?

All at once, all the faces grew still, and there, in the distance, in the distant depths of time or memory or wherever it was my mind was, I found myself homing in on a single face, set apart from the others, and I began to race faster and faster towards it, even as I stood still on the beach, listening to the old man as he continued:

When all that can be is said and done, you see, the Elsewhere, it’s all that’s left.

The Elsewhere is potential.

But what does that mean, that word, potential?

What is potential if there’s no way for it to be realized?

There must be some way, mustn't there, don’t you think?

And what does that mean, realizing a potential?

What is realization but an act of mind?

So imagine: If you could peer into the Elsewhere, if you could walk into it, what would you find there?

What would you see?

Just think about it.

Imagine.

I found her.

I remembered her face.

My mind slipped, broke; shattered into an infinite number of infinitesimal pieces, scattered like a fine dust over the beach, spread like numbers, ideas in the wind, permeated the air, the sea, the night, the world. Maybe the universe, too, eventually; but someday: not yet.

The old man stopped, interrupting my flight, and his breathing became labored. For a moment, I was afraid he would collapse, fall into an even more chaotic tangle of clothes and limbs that I could not possibly hope to reconstruct into its original old-man shape. But after a fit of coughing, he straightened his spine and fixed my eyes with his. He seemed to have grown taller; he seemed to loom over me, his head reaching up into the overcast night. But his face again broke in a line below his nose, and I remembered the first, candid, toothless grin he had greeted me with.

He shrank, and seemed to retreat.

Here is somewhere else, he said, and somewhere else is always here. Ask yourself: where have you been looking for this thing that you’ve been looking for?

The old man turned: Look Elsewhere.

As he walked away, retracing the line his footprints made some time ago, the trail now washed away by the sea, I remembered her words: The people define that place; you can’t imagine how warm it is.

It all feels so welcoming, so safe.

I never felt welcome. I never felt safe.

Where had I been looking? I laughed: You fool. All this time you never realized: you only thought you were in the same time, the same place; the spatial and temporal geography you thought you shared, in truth you never did, who does? All this time, you kept returning to the same place, over and over; the City, you called it, but it was only ever your City.

It was never where she was; she simply wasn’t there.

She wasn’t ever anywhere there.

I laughed.

I laughed defiantly into the breeze, and it turned, as if it were my breath and not the earth’s, slowly building into a stiff wind, swirling before me, whipping spray into my eyes, brine into my mouth; I was filled with a joy so immense, a joy you could not possibly imagine. I laughed at the thick, endless blanket of clouds that had started to creep from the far horizon, looming over me, extinguishing the stars and threatening to smother the island.

I laughed and stretched my hands out before me, flexing my fingers as though reaching for her, reaching for her face; already I could see her, could feel her, smell her, taste her; I could feel her lips, her cheek, her delicate throat once more at the tips of my fingers.

I would find her and, for as long as I wanted her, she would be mine, when I returned—

And then I realized: Why wait for next year?

POSTSCRIPT: The body of an unidentified young woman of indeterminate race in her early to mid twenties, brown eyes, black hair, fair skin, 172 cm. height, 52 kg. weight, designated Victim Zero, was discovered in an undisclosed location on the outskirts of _____ City in the latter half of the last century. Though exposed to the elements and with no signs of embalmment, the body was astonishingly well-preserved upon discovery and, it is said, remains so to this day. Though kept from the public eye, members of various religious sects, most of which surfaced within a year of Victim Zero’s discovery, claim it, the body, to be miraculous: though varying widely in their Christianity-based beliefs, devout from these different sects all agree that, every day, the body exhibits “new signs of stigmata”, and that daily examination (by whom, they never say) of the body reveals new patterns of injuries, the only constants being a broken hyoid bone with a shifting pattern of bruises around the neck indicating manual strangulation and signs of forced anal intercourse without any injury, direct or incidental, to the sexual organs, as though the organs had been carefully preserved, serving some unknown occult or ritualistic purpose. Authorities refuse to comment, and all official records pertaining to Victim Zero have been removed from the public record.

MOUTHS TO SPEAK, VOICES TO SING

by Kenneth Yu

MR. HARRY LIU HUI CHIU WAS AT THE BANK when he experienced for the first time—as with a kiss, or a fresh dream—the splendorous wonder of hearing his first vase.

That morning, smiling smugly to himself and thinking of the ten million pesos in his account—not bad at all for a man barely past his thirty-fifth birthday—he had been sauntering to the bank's exit when he heard an unfamiliar voice, one so soft as to be a whisper.

He paused and looked about but he could not ascertain the voice's source. Everyone around him proceeded to move along with their business, unmindful as he stood stock still amid a blur of constant human motion that seemed to move in rhythm to the staccato ruckus of ringing phones and beeping computers.

The voice whispered again; he heard it over the din even if no one else seemed to: a caress along his outer ears, a tickle to his earlobes, a soft penetration of his eardrums. He could not understand the words, but the tone was clear: dulcet, with a hint of music behind it, and not at all unpleasant. His curiosity, now aroused, could not be suppressed, and he began to trace the voice to its source.

He followed the whisper, tracking it by its volume while weaving his way around the bank’s patrons, who walked about with serious eyes. “Work! Always work!” their demeanors seemed to say. He wondered if he'd carried that same expression himself all his life. He shook off this momentary bout of reflection and resumed his search, his steps leading him to a corner of the bank where, between two couches set for customers, a one-and-a-half-foot tall vase stood in ornamental splendor upon a darkly varnished table of glinting, reddish rosewood. The image that adorned it was a nature scene, a pond with lilies and other decorative water flora, with colorful fowl abounding, a picture straight out of a well-tended garden.

The vase before him was a phoenix’s tail jar—although Mr. Liu did not know it then. It was shaped with a flared mouth that was wider at the rim than a standard vase, bearing a design in the style of the Qing Dynasty during the reign of the Emperor Kangxi, and thus dating back to the l7th or l8th century. Mr. Liu would learn all this after years of reading and time-consuming research, but at the moment his knowledge of this branch of Asian antiquities—any branch of Asian antiquities—was still non-existent.

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