TINIKLING—DOUBLE DUTCH FILIPINX STYLE

Don’t believe anyone who tells you that death comes quick and painless. That’s bullshit. Dying hurts like fuck-all everything; you can feel all the pains, the hurts, the joys, the cries of all the world. There’s no numbing dope, no dick wows, no kitty kitty yum yum, just a floodlight on all the world’s needs. Death is a dump. You see it all: kids, parents, teachers, the rats under the street that run through the sewers, suck suck squeak squeak, the pigeons that shit everywhere, the throwaways nobody else wants, the thugs, the queers, the hoes, the junkies, the brats, the fuck-ups, the killers. Let me get this straight, the way I’m telling you any of this: I’m Aswang. And I know about the slow agonies of death because this body belonged to one of the throwaways—an eighteen-year-old girl named Marina—who wound up murdered on a pig farm in a place called Port Coquitlam.

* * *

Before I finished the tinikling, before I jumped into her body, before Marina found Willie on the corner of Main and Hastings, before the track marks on the insides of her knees and elbows, she lived a cleaner life. Before the late-night diner trips, where she saw, before falling into sleep, her mother’s face (a face took up with large dark eyes reflecting the suspicion of others), she still hoped to be a pure spirit. Marina used to be twelve; she used to live in a group home named for trees. Five in a cottage, out in the Valley, she had the bottom bunk, and Alex on top—too close to the popcorn ceiling plastered with CK One ads torn out of fashion magazines. She used to look into people’s dining rooms as she walked down the street. She put herself at one of those tables, with roasted chicken and vegetables picked from a garden, not mashed potatoes poured, flakey, out of a box, like her ma used to make, not Carnation powdered milk mixed with water (though she did like to pick out the congealed lumps and feel them separate like pudding on her tongue). She used to do graffiti on government-issued desks, waiting for her name to be called. Marina used to stand around with teenage boys on the street corner, waiting for the light to change. She used to hitch rides through the Valley and give strange men hand jobs for twenty bucks. Marina used to worry about gonorrhea and feel like she was the worst piece of living pakshet. And before all that, Marina used to be five. She used to lie on her tummy, a thumb plunked in her mouth, index finger curled around her nose, and sometimes Mutya would come in and rub her back and tell her a story of a time long long before. Marina used to leave a small music box outside in the rain, hoping to attract fairies. She used to practice kissing girls on the back of her hand or her own shoulder just to see what her skin tasted like. She used to get all squirmy and thrilled watching whodunits with her ma. She used to long for the ordinary.

She used to live with just Ma, and they might’ve been poor, but they had a good time. Their homemade games were sometimes Reena running out to the garage behind the apartment building and picking up the water hose. She’d learned how to spray the water so it swooshed up toward the sky and back down like her own private waterfall. Then she ran around the apartment shouting bam be bi bo bu. A pillowcase, her white wings, tied around her neck. Her childlike chatter so candid and fresh, and right then, she figured she was the luckiest girl alive.

* * *

This man who strangled Marina was a pakshet trick who didn’t know how to be a trick—always fell in love with the wrong girl. Pure PoCo trash, drove around Vancouver in his van loaded with possibilities. To him, women like Marina were nothing but a reminder of all his failings.

There in that room, leaning above her, his closed smile turned into a full-on cheese. There were his rotted teeth, his puffy gray gums. And for a split moment, for the final time in her throwaway life, she felt her mithiin. That exquisite pain of Want. Desire. But Want is for the living, and by that dark barely morning hour, Marina was already near dead.

As he throttled her, she felt her own muffled sounds push into the part of her that had been sleeping, cut off a long time ago. Her screams clung to that hollowed-out part, to her guts, to the trailer walls, then zipped along the hot gas of the cosmos as the dark stone sky settled over the farm.

The moment she was dying, Marina prayed. First, she prayed an invocation. Something she’d heard her lola say over and over again. Let light stream forth into the minds of men. Let love stream forth into the hearts of men. Let purpose guide the little wills of men. Let the Plan of Love and Light work out. And may it seal the door where evil dwells.

She thought of her lola’s cool hands on her burning forehead when she was stuck home sick.

Mounted on the wall above them was the head of a golden horse. Marina stared deep into the dark nostrils of the horse. Her murderer straddled her on top of the bed, his hands clasped around her neck. The face he showed her, the face that was breathing hard, placed no more than a foot from her own, was stuck in a tight grin. The face of an oink-oink baboy. The pigs he farmed. Both of them drenched in the toxic effect of all the sorrow coursing from his hands to her neck. From her neck to his hands.

The smudges of smoke on the walls, the dark corners of the ceiling. A wisp of spider’s web in the corner. Of the nostril. Of the head. Of the horse.

Her lola’s prayer wasn’t working. Lola belonged to a generation of obedience and atonement; Marina’s was a generation of don’t-give-a-fucks. So she made a special kind of prayer: Marina imagined hipon wrapped in taro leaves, stewed in chilés and coconut milk. She imagined a small loaf of sticky rice with mango. Flyswatters, brown rubber discs used to open jars, large wooden utensils hanging from a kitchen wall, bamboo mats painted with anthuriums. The mats that she slept on in her lola’s ranch house in Seaside, California. She thought of Alex, the love of her life, and her perfect eyeliner, how it made her look elegant, like the flawless face of a calculating wife.

This prayer didn’t work either, if working means saving her from death. But the prayer did work, if working means turning her into me, into something powerful, into Aswang. The truth in the prayer summons the aswang first by bringing up her ancestral bloodline. And then the key, to tying me to her? Unfinished business. Marina was murdered midquest. She chanted this mantra in her mind over and over, pulling me out of the ether and down into her body. Merging with the powers that carry me across time into generations of her family. The words spread out around her, invaded her ears, her mouth, until the sound of her scream became me.

* * *

A parade of poplar fluff floats by, silent and weightless as air. The light weaves its way through the branches, makes the shape of a small bird, then an owl, then a crane, and then comes apart again. The trees against the dark sky look like veins.

Marina fell through the crack between the world you know and the worlds you do not know. Then it became my turn to tinikling. I dove in, skimmed across the bottom surface, the moon making a diamond-shaped pattern that danced across the floor, I pushed up and permeated Marina’s howl. The noise of our scream so thick in what were newly my ears that I couldn’t even hear it. The scream started in my stomach, and then rose up to my chest, throat, banged against my teeth, the trees, and tops of buildings. It grew louder and flew into the atmosphere. It grew and grew and grew, the intensity bursting like a dark shrill rainbow. Other cries joined mine—an orchestra of screams—until I no longer felt like a dying person. I was beside a plane in the sky. The moon above, then vultures, then sky. It felt like erupting from a safe, dark place into the unknown. Leaving a matinee, the anonymous dark comfort of the sinehan on a summer afternoon, unclasping a lola’s hand at the gates of school, the cloth book offered by the social worker at the county hospital being torn away. Booted out of a mother’s womb—the source of nourishment and life, buhay, a soft string of molecules, the final small cord that keeps you tethered and rooted to the only other world you knew. The scraping on my now skin, like a thousand angry gnats.

I passed through the doorway and stepped into Marina’s life.

* * *

The body of a woman Marina saw a half a dozen times walking the ho-track had been thrown across what was formerly Marina’s back, now mine, facedown, the woman’s head resting on my shoulder. Another woman’s body was across my legs, her breast pushing into my feet—I felt someone’s thick Tootsie Roll nipple against my toes. Worms sliding beside my cheeks, my mouth, my legs, my hair. Darkness closed around us; nearby, I heard pig snorts.


Copyright © 2022 by Melissa Chadburn