fiction by Roger B. Rueda
The sea is flat today. It doesn’t
glisten or gesture, just lies there like something uncommitted. I sit at the
same bench I’ve sat on for years, watching its tired mimicry of movement. A boy
passes by on a bicycle with no shoes. A fisherman in the distance lifts a net,
looks into it, shrugs. Life continues, dull and exacting.
I adjust the necklace. The stone is
cold against my collarbone, heavier than it should be for its size. They say
moonstone is for intuition, clarity, protection. But I’ve worn it for years and
feel no wiser, no less vulnerable. It’s not clarity it gives me, but the burden
of remembering what others can’t.
Sometimes the scent of guava blossom
drifts through the salt air, and I think I’ll see him again. Julio. My memory
has reshaped him. Not softened. Reshaped. The way a river reshapes a stone, not
by smoothing it but by defining what’s missing.
It was a Thursday—of course it was a
Thursday—when I last saw him. He pressed the necklace into my hand and said, “You’ll
understand later.” But I already understood, in the way people do when
there’s no more time for anything but honesty. He was thin, his eyes yellow at
the edges. The other one—Elias—stood behind him, silent like a tree waiting to
fall.
I don’t tell the story often. Not
because I’m afraid of being doubted, but because I’m afraid of being believed
too easily. There’s something obscene in how quickly people want magic to make
sense. They nod too fast. They smile as if what I’m offering is entertainment.
But there are things that happened.
Things that can still be traced like bruises under the skin of this town. If I
were to go to the old woman who sells mangoes near the market and ask her about
the two men who once lived near the church, she’d frown, hesitate, and then
say, “Ay, may ginhalinan ina eh. Pero daw wala gid ya man sang tawo dira
subong.”
It begins with a fiesta. A woman. A
touch that wasn’t a touch.
And so I start there, because
stories always begin where forgetting tries to take root. And because Julio
deserves to be remembered by someone who loved him—imperfectly, briefly, but
without lies.
*****
It was the kind of fiesta that left
no room for introspection. Everything was noise—too much of it—and color so
aggressive it verged on the violent. The kind of event designed to make sure no
one sat with their thoughts for too long. The church bells clanged as if
announcing not faith but fatigue. Firecrackers cracked through the streets with
the chaotic precision of war. Children darted past with flags, half-dressed saints,
balloons tied to their wrists like afterthoughts. Pork fat sizzled in drums of
reused oil. Cheap gin flowed like forgiveness.
Julio was there. Of course he was.
The town never said his name without a small arch of the eyebrow, but no one
told him not to come. He was known—just enough to be tolerated, not enough to
be protected. He walked with that theatrical quiet some gay men develop in
small towns: his movements careful, precise, always on the edge of
disappearing.
He danced, not because the music
called to him, but because the body demands its own forgetting. The kind of
dancing you do to forget a birthday, or a face, or a phone left ringing for
hours with no reply. Julio didn’t smile much, but his hips moved like he’d
rehearsed.
That was when the woman appeared.
She wasn’t local. Or maybe she
was—towns like this are always populated with people no one can place
precisely. She wore a blouse that looked a generation out of fashion. Her face
had no age, only shadows. She moved close. Too close. But no one stopped her.
Their hands brushed once. Then
again. On the third pass, she leaned in and said something in Hiligaynon. Julio
heard only the vowels: long, wet, and curving. It could have been a curse or a
compliment. He didn’t ask.
That night, his mouth tasted of
rust.
He thought it was the tuba. Or the
heat. He spat once into the sink and frowned. The water ran pink.
By morning, the fever arrived. Not a
loud fever. One of those slow ones that convinces you it isn’t real. The kind
that makes you walk in circles thinking you’ve forgotten to do something
important, but you don’t know what. He lost track of how many cups of water he
drank. The fan stopped and started. Ants circled the sugar bowl with a
confidence that unnerved him.
The doctor called it dengue. Said
he’d seen three cases that week. Told Julio to rest, drink fluids, avoid pork
for now.
Julio nodded. Said thank you. Paid
in small bills.
But something else had entered him.
Not just a virus. Something slow and observant. Something that moved differently
inside the blood. He began to sense his dreams before he slept. The mirror
stopped showing him fully, as if withholding opinion. His skin felt like it was
listening.
He did not return to the fiesta the
next night. The noise felt dangerous now, not festive. He kept the curtains
drawn. The neighbors said nothing. They rarely did.
And so it began, not with a scream
or a thunderclap, but with a touch during a song, and blood that refused to
explain itself.
*****
Julio had never believed in healers.
He had laughed at them, in his younger years, the way city people laugh at
rural superstitions—politely, but with that slight upward curl at the lip that
says, this world does not frighten me. That was before the blood, before
the dreams, before the mirror began to hesitate in returning his image.
He didn’t know how he ended up in
Elias’s hut. Someone had whispered a name to him at the market. Another pointed
toward the hills. These were not recommendations, only faint suggestions
offered without ownership. He followed them because the fever didn’t lift, and
because the dog in the neighbor’s yard had begun to whimper when he passed.
The house was a rectangle of nipa
and rot, surrounded by overgrowth that had learned to keep still. It did not
pretend to be more than it was. A place where things lived and died without
much discussion. The smell was sharp—coconut oil, leaves, something faintly
metallic.
Elias answered the knock slowly. A
man not old, but made older by solitude. He did not greet Julio, only looked at
him for a long time, as though confirming something he had already known.
“You’re late,” Elias said—not as
reprimand, but as fact.
They did not speak much. Julio
stayed. He was offered ginger tea, warm and oversteeped. There were no beds,
just mats on the floor. Nights passed without ceremony. No explanations were
demanded, and that was a kind of mercy. The kind Julio had never learned to ask
for.
The ritual was repetition. Tea.
Leaves crushed with a rock. Hands on forehead. Silence. Days were marked not by
events but by whether the wind passed through the doorway or not.
Julio’s body began to change. It
started subtly: shadows clung too long, food lost its texture, and his skin
itched when he passed churches. He would wake in the early hours convinced he
had bitten down on something raw. Once, he looked at his fingernails and found
dirt beneath them though he had not left the hut all day.
One night, a stray dog came too
close. It bared its teeth but didn’t bark. Julio met its gaze and saw not fear,
but recognition. The dog backed away, slow, reverent. Elias said nothing. Only
poured more tea and added a leaf Julio couldn’t name.
He began seeing things. Not
hallucinations. Just slight deviations. The reflection in the basin looked back
at him too quickly. His shadow moved before he did. And when Elias touched his
wrist one morning to check his pulse, Julio felt nothing. No panic. No blood.
Just an awareness of absence.
“You’re changing,” Elias said, the
way one might remark on the weather. “But you’re not the first.”
Julio did not ask what he meant. He
had learned not to.
And in that small clearing, under
banana trees and indifferent stars, they became a unit. Not lovers, not quite.
Something else. Bound by hunger, by silence, by the slow realization that
neither of them would be going back to the life they’d once spoken about in
half-lies.
Craving arrived like a low
tide—predictable, and inescapable.
It no longer mattered what the
doctors had called it. Elias knew. Julio knew.
What was happening had nothing to do
with disease.
It had to do with a shift in the
blood. A leaving of the body from the rules of men.
And the healer, who spoke to plants,
did not resist it. He steeped the tea. He watched. He waited.
*****
Julio never spoke of it as a curse.
He understood the need people had to name things as evil when they were simply
unmanageable. But this—it was not punishment. It was just… what came next.
He did not resist it. He brushed his
teeth even when blood tasted sweet. He wrapped his limbs in fabric when his
skin became too pale for day. And when the need came, once a year and never
predictable, he would retreat far into the cane fields, trembling—not from
hunger but from shame’s ghost, which still lingered at the door.
Elias watched, measured, waited. He
was not a man who asked for reassurances. He had seen enough to know that most
love, if it is real, is made of quiet submission to change. One evening, he
sliced the pad of his finger with a bolo, pressed it to Julio’s cracked lip,
and said nothing. Julio didn’t resist. It was a gesture, not of desperation,
but of consent.
The transition took weeks, though
they never marked a single day.
When it was done, they shared a
rhythm not unlike sleepwalkers. They were careful. They were efficient. They
did not moralize. Elias walked with a steadier foot than Julio. Julio laughed
more than Elias. That was their balance.
They kept to themselves, slipping in
and out of landscapes like ghosts who knew better than to ask for recognition.
They became invisible—not through magic, but through the practiced art of not
being needed by anyone.
The silence of the rural life suited
them. No one asked questions they didn’t want to answer. The dogs stopped
barking at their scent. The trees seemed less suspicious. The world, when you
stopped touching it, often left you alone.
Every Holy Week, they climbed Mt.
Napulak.
At first, it had been a search for
reversal. A romantic idea—that some spiritual geography might undo what
biology, or fate, had done. But over time, the climb became its own kind of
rite. Not for healing, but for anchoring. For remembering they had chosen
something together, even if that thing was unclean by any known religion.
At the summit, where the wind curved
like something wild but rehearsed, they would rest. Sometimes they spoke.
Sometimes they didn’t.
It was there, on their third
pilgrimage, that they saw him.
Simón.
A boy—or rather, something shaped
like a boy. He had eyes like stagnant river water—beautiful until you looked
too long. His clothes were white, never wrinkled. His voice arrived before he
did, like humidity. He didn’t greet them. He only looked and smiled. The kind
of smile that assumed you’d already said yes.
“I’ve watched you,” he said, not
bothering to lie about it.
Julio said nothing. Elias’s hand
tightened slightly around the edge of the pack. They didn’t fear him, exactly,
but they recognized his type. The lonely ones. The ones who call attention
generosity.
Simón hovered. He never walked. He
reclined on air like it was a hammock. He hummed. He whistled. He asked too
many questions. He never waited for the answers.
“Three,” he said one evening, teeth
glowing like pearls soaked in dew. “Three is a stable shape. Two always
wobbles.”
He brought them wine that tasted of
rain. Leaves braided into necklaces. A flute made of something that shimmered
like fishbone. He never made threats. He made suggestions. Always smiling.
Julio looked away. Elias turned
cold.
They began planning their descent
earlier than usual.
Simón said, “You could be happier.”
He meant it. That was the terrible
part.
They left before the light changed.
The climb down was wordless, the air thick with the weight of a desire too long
unacknowledged.
*****
Simón returned, of course. Desire
always does—reconfigured, more polite, more persistent. He appeared on the path
back to the base of the mountain, arms crossed loosely behind his back as if
he'd simply materialized from boredom.
"You’re still leaving," he
said. Not a question. More a statement of confusion. "People don’t usually
walk away from an invitation like mine."
His beauty was harder to define in
the daylight. It thinned. Became something ornamental. There was an edge to it
now, like the gloss on a counterfeit coin. His shirt no longer glowed. His
voice no longer carried. He was trying.
He followed them—not walking, just there,
again and again, at the bend of a path, beside a tree, ahead on a ridge.
Offering things: laughter, metaphors, something called immortality but with
sweetness. He spoke of harmony. Of threes as stronger than twos. Of how
loneliness, when shared, becomes light.
Elias kept walking. Julio, once,
allowed himself a glance. Not out of weakness, but curiosity. There was a part
of him, once sharpened by rejection, that remembered the appeal of being
wanted.
But that was another version of
himself. One that had needed to be seen to feel real. Julio now lived in a
different kind of body. One that knew presence did not require permission.
“We’ve chosen already,” he said. The
first thing he’d spoken aloud to Simón. “That should be enough.”
Simón blinked. The wind stopped.
It was not rage that followed. That
would have been too clean.
What came instead was absence.
Not loss. Absence.
A prayer forgotten mid-recital. The
taste of Elias’s tea, once sharp with ginger, now bland. Julio forgot a date
once, then a name, then the rhythm of a song he used to hum while washing his
feet. Small vanishings. A piece of cloth missing. A dream receding before it
could begin. Not erasure. Just the dulling of color in the mind.
Elias began speaking slower. Words
took longer to find.
The dog near their hut—an old mutt
that had once barked at nothing in particular—stopped reacting to them at all.
As if they had become scenery.
Julio felt it first: the sense that
they were being slowly unscripted from the world.
Simón never returned in body. He no
longer needed to. He had withdrawn himself from them. And in doing so, he had
started pulling the world away with him.
They didn’t speak about it much. The
language around such things never feels useful. But both understood,
eventually, that the forgetting would grow.
And so they fled.
Not from danger, but from
evaporation.
They packed little. A bag. A jar of
vinegar. The moonstone, already dulled from too many sunless days. They took
the early boat out of Iloilo. No goodbyes. No note. The woman at the port
barely looked up from her newspaper.
It was raining lightly. Julio held
Elias’s hand the entire crossing. Neither spoke.
There is a kind of silence that
doesn't feel safe, but necessary.
They stepped onto the Guimaras dock
like men arriving not at safety, but at delay. At the one place left where
forgetting hadn't reached yet.
*****
Guimaras offered no promises. That
was its appeal.
They arrived on a Wednesday, just
before noon. The heat was unremarkable. The boat rocked gently, not as welcome
but as routine. On the dock, the vendors barely glanced at them—two quiet men
with thin bags and no past.
They rented a room above a woman who
sold banana cue and vinegar sachets. She never asked questions. She assumed
they were brothers. Or cousins. People preferred their stories neat when
possible. Julio let her keep the illusion.
They opened a small fruit stall on a
quiet road—mangoes, occasionally guavas. They priced modestly. Never haggled.
People liked them because they never insisted on being liked. That alone was
rare enough to warrant return customers.
They attended church, not for
prayer, but for the rhythm. They stood in the back, under the oscillating fan
that always wheezed once before it turned. They nodded at the priest. They did
not kneel. And they never took communion. The host would have stuck in their
mouths like a lie.
At first, things seemed stable. The
forgetting felt paused. But time has its own kind of erosion.
The world grew quieter.
Not with peace, but with
subtraction.
Birds no longer startled at sudden
movement. Dogs stared too long, then turned away, disinterested. Elias’s
reflection in the mirror began to delay. Julio once watched his own shadow
disappear while his body still stood still.
Elias started coughing. A dry, weak
sound. Not illness, but refusal. The body dimming itself, like a candle lowered
in stages. He tried herbs, but the leaves crumbled too easily. Nothing took
root anymore.
Julio noticed that strangers didn’t
remember their faces. A man who bought mangoes every Thursday asked if they
were new in town. Children pointed and said nothing. The stall’s sign faded,
though they had painted it only weeks before.
They began to understand: Simón had
not cursed them to die. He had done something worse.
He had ensured they would vanish while
living.
That is when they contacted me.
Not through drama. A letter,
hand-delivered. Brief, almost forgettable. It said only, “Maundy Thursday.
After Mass. Come alone.”
The house was simple. A folding
chair, a bamboo mat, a bowl of water that didn’t ripple.
Julio looked older. Not aged. Worn
down. Elias sat, already halfway absent, eyes unfocused as if trying to
remember something that no longer had a word.
They told me the story—not for
sympathy, but for record. Julio spoke in a hush, not because someone might
hear, but because he feared the words themselves might slip away before they
landed. Elias never interrupted. Occasionally, he nodded. Once, he smiled.
When it was done, Julio took
something from a tin box. The moonstone. Oval, smooth, milky, warm.
“It’s the only thing he gave us that
didn’t want us back,” he said.
He pressed it into my hand. Not with
ceremony. Just finality.
“It keeps them away. You’ll feel
it.”
I didn’t understand, not fully. But
I accepted. Some things you receive simply because someone needs to give
them away.
Their last words?
“Thank you for coming.”
Then, quieter: “Don’t stay long.”
And then, almost as an afterthought,
from Elias, his voice rough with the edges of forgetting:
“Don’t try to remember everything. It’s not yours to carry.”
I left that night.
By morning, the fruit stall was
closed. The door bolted. The neighbors said they had moved, but none remembered
when.
The moonstone still hums faintly
when I wear it. Sometimes, in mirrors, I don’t quite see myself.
But I remember them. Even now.
And perhaps that is what the stone
protects most.
*****
I live alone now. That isn’t
unusual. Many do. What’s different is the quiet I carry—something deeper than
solitude, more precise than loneliness. It’s not grief. I don’t think I was
permitted grief.
No one remembers their names
anymore. Not the priest who used to nod at them during Mass. Not the fruit
vendor who once shared ginger tea with Elias. Not even the landlady who lived
beneath them, who now insists the upstairs room has always been empty.
The world is efficient at forgetting
what doesn't flatter it.
But I remember.
The moonstone still sits on my collarbone, its weight subtle but
constant. At night, when the air thickens and the sea forgets to move, I feel
it pulse. Not rhythmically. Just once. A faint throb—enough to remind me that I
remain outside of something. Outside of reach.
I’ve stopped trying to explain. The
people who need explanations want tidy endings, and this story never offered
one. It resists closure. It wants only to be carried.
Sometimes, when the wind shifts from
the east, I wake in the middle of the night with the scent of roasting pork and
tuba in my nostrils. I hear music—not loud, not jubilant, but distant,
continuous. A fiesta that never packed up. The kind that loops behind the veil
of sleep like a radio playing from another room.
I do not follow it. I only listen.
In those moments, just before the
morning birds begin their scratchy rehearsals, I see them.
Julio and
Elias.
They are barefoot. Always barefoot.
The ground does not wound them anymore.
They are dancing—not in celebration,
not even in joy, but in affirmation.
That they chose. That they endured. That they remained visible to each other
when the rest of the world closed its eyes.
The moon is too full. It leaks onto
their shoulders, their hair, their open palms. Their bodies glow—not like
ghosts, but like riverlight: slow, trembling, impossibly alive.
And the place?
It’s not Guimaras. It’s not Mt.
Napulak. It’s nowhere on any map. A place they carved for themselves in
defiance.
I do not join them. That, too, was
never the point.
I wake, sit with my coffee, and face
the sea.
It has not remembered them either.
But I have.
And perhaps that is enough.
