Moonstone in the Mouth

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.