The apartelle

(Fast Food Fiction Delivery, an anthology of sudden fiction edited by Noelle de Jesus and Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta, will be launched on Jan. 31, Saturday, 3 p.m. at Powerbooks, second floor, Greenbelt 4, Makati City. My super-short story, “The Apartelle,” is included in this newest book from Anvil Publishing.)

I once lived in an apartelle in Cubao. The first three floors were rented out to transients who would take the buses for the provinces. So you saw harassed mothers, indifferent fathers, and bawling children trudging up the floors, dragging their luggage.

Or you saw lovers, casting furtive glances, and then looking down at the peeling linoleum on the floor. Once, I chanced upon a pair while paying my monthly rent at the reception counter. They looked no older than 16 years.

They must have been scared by the sight of this tall, thin man wearing eyeglasses so thick they looked like goggles. And my goggles were trained on them. The young man with spiked hair paid the bill in a hurry, while the girl in a ponytail looked left, then right, moving her head like an electric fan. Then he grabbed her hand, she pushed open the glass door, and up they vanished into the first floor.

The studio that I rented was like a shoebox. On one side was the TV set on its black stand. Beside that was a wooden shelf that groaned with books. Pushed against the other wall was the red sofa bed, and the last wall made the kitchen. I had so many books and a series of earthquakes had just rocked the country then. I thought I would be buried alive, not by rubble, but by my books.

Those were the early days of cable television. And since my boyfriend lived on the other side of the city and rarely visited, I took a cable-TV subscription.  One show featured a Filipina based in Japan. Video camera in hand, she took footage of the country and gamely annotated it. Once she visited a zoo in Tokyo. She squealed into the mic:  “Look, I see one Bambis. Oh, now there are three Bambis!”

I looked up at the TV screen, and saw three deer.

One night, I was awakened from a deep sleep by the ringing of  my phone. It was 4 A.M.

It was my friend Pete, a classmate from college. He once drank a can of insecticide after he told his (straight) friend that he loved him. After his confession, the friend just ignored him. So Pete drank the can of insecticide. He survived.

“Please turn on your cable TV,” he said. His voice seemed so urgent, I had no choice but to turn on my set.

“Go to the Aquarium Channel.”

“Okay.”

“Do you see it?”

“See what?”

“The seaweed on the right side of the screen?”

I looked at the screen. There were tiny fish in all the colors of the rainbow, darting swiftly in and out of the screen. A patch of seaweed planted on a sand waved on the right side of the screen.

“They have already moved,” Pete said.

I turned my sleepy eyes at the screen, and then I asked, “What has moved. The fish?”

“No!” he said. “The seaweed. It has moved an inch to the right. Since 1 A.M.”

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