The Light Before It Turns to Salt

fiction by Roger B. Rueda

The morning unspooled like muslin—pale, tremulous, half-translucent—as the Iloilo-Guimaras Ferry Terminal stirred with the peculiar hush of travel before routine resumes. Time hung in steam: from the mouths of rice vendors; from the mouths of passengers who did not speak but shifted their weight, carrying children or woven baskets or griefs small enough to fold into their pockets. Sunlight, not yet cruel, pressed itself against the concrete with the softness of an apology.

Orlando stood beneath it, a man shaped by the habit of not being noticed. Sixty-two, though he rarely used the number—what use are numbers when they don’t subtract loneliness?—he moved as though each motion were a continuation of some unseen ritual: the ticket folded with precision, the canvas bag resting where knees would not knock it, the paperback novel opened but unread. The page held a sentence about summer somewhere in Provence. He stared at it without blinking, as if that sentence might forget its meaning and become something he could live inside.

Behind him: footsteps—hurried, uneven, barely apologetic. Youth, unmistakable. A murmur of a voice saying “Sorry, sorry po,” followed by the scratching of a pencil across a boarding stub, and the scent—fresh sweat, faint pomade, some citrusy deodorant from a bottle labeled cool ice or urban breeze. Elio. Twenty-four. Shirt loud with jungle leaves and irony. Hair still wet from the quick rinse of consequence. He had cried last night, though you wouldn’t guess it from his grin, or the way he walked like someone ready to re-enter the world with posture alone.

His sketchpad—battered, full of self-made saints and half-drawn men—was clutched like scripture. He wore his heartbreak the way some men wear cologne: as proof that they had loved, and that someone had not loved them back enough.

They boarded the boat together without knowing it. The hull bobbed slightly in the water like a thought that had not yet resolved into clarity. By happenstance or the minor miracle of the ordinary, they sat across from one another. Not directly, no—but diagonally, which is the shape of most fates.

Orlando lowered his gaze to the sea, though he could still see the edge of Elio’s knee, that flickering rhythm of movement that belongs only to the very young or the very restless. Elio, for his part, glanced up from his pad once, saw the older man’s face, and looked away quickly—as though it were a thing too complete to sketch without ruining it.

The boat trembled. The motor coughed to life. The pier receded. And in the space between departure and arrival, the air between them thickened—not with speech, not yet—but with the slow, strange music of recognition before words.

*****

The engine—old as some grudge never confessed—rumbled alive beneath them, coughing up its exhaustion in waves of sound that startled the sea birds but not the people. The ferry pulled itself away from the dock like a tired animal rising to its feet. Beneath them, the water sighed. The hull creaked in protest, or resignation—it was difficult to say which.

The spray kissed the side of the boat with the gentleness of one who has lost the strength to strike. The air—still cool, still bearing the scent of early salt and thin clouds—wove itself between them. There were other passengers: women with sleeping toddlers, a man in a camouflage jacket sipping lukewarm instant coffee, a pair of girls whispering in Taglish about someone’s cousin’s ex. All of them moved around time as if it were furniture they had long learned not to bump into.

Elio, knees close together now, had taken out his pencil. Not the charcoal one—that was for evening light. The 2B, with the tip slightly blunted, better for soft lines. His sketchpad rested on his thigh like a secret. He had begun, half-heartedly, to outline the jaw of the man opposite him, the portly one with the red ball cap, but it wasn’t right. None of them were right.

His eyes flicked—once, twice—toward Orlando, who sat, spine straight, gaze fastened to the sea but not seeing it. His face, Elio thought, was not dramatic. It was not angular or cinematic. It was simply there. Like rock formations in the background of a painting. Permanent.

He hesitated. The pencil hovered. Then, almost involuntarily, it moved. The arc of a brow, the soft fall of an eyelid, the tired downturn of a mouth that hadn’t smiled that morning. Lines forming not likeness, but language. A portrait not of beauty, but of stillness.

Orlando noticed. Not sharply. Not as a rebuke. Just the faintest twitch of an eyebrow, a slight turning of the head.

“You draw?” he said. A question flung gently, like a leaf on water.

“Only faces I don’t know yet,” Elio replied, then flushed. “I mean—I’m trying to get better at it.”

Orlando nodded once. “You’ll need more stillness than you’ll ever find in the world.”

A beat of silence passed. The sea shushed them like a lullaby unwilling to end.

“You from Guimaras?” Elio asked.

Orlando’s chin tilted, almost imperceptibly. “Born there. Then Manila. Then nowhere in particular. Now back again. Full circle, or something like it.”

Elio smiled—crooked, cautious. “I think I’m running away. Again.”

Orlando turned to him then, fully. His eyes were not unkind. “Some of us never stopped.”

It landed between them like a stone dropped into still water—soft, but altering. And in the echo that followed, no one spoke. The girls behind them laughed at something on a phone screen. The camouflage man coughed. The ferry edged closer to the halfway point, where sea and sky look like they could trade places and no one would notice.

And there, in that motion, that rocking, that flicker of shared breath, the sketchpad trembled slightly—just enough to blur the lines of the face Elio was drawing.

Still, he did not stop.

*****

The boat had slipped past the halfway mark. The buildings of the city behind them had folded themselves into the horizon like pages closed without ceremony. Guimaras ahead was still a blur—a green smudge trembling above the edge of seafoam.

It was here, in this indeterminate space between what was left and what was not yet, that their words began to soften, to deepen, as though the very water beneath them had made a pact with their voices to hold everything that might spill.

Elio spoke first—not carefully, but not rashly either. As though the truth had been kneeling patiently inside his chest, waiting for just such a moment to stand.

“I left him,” he said, not looking at Orlando now but instead at the boat’s wake—
a white line breaking the blue like a wound stitched clumsily through ocean.

“Two weeks ago. I caught him. In the kitchen, if you can believe that. It’s never the bedroom, is it?”

He gave a small laugh, but it rang with the thinness of something forced. “There was sinigang on the stove. He still finished cooking it. I suppose I should’ve admired the commitment.”

The boat rocked slightly, as if in response.

Orlando nodded, but did not rush to speak. He watched the clouds instead—low-hanging, soft as cotton that had once held glass. When he did speak, it was not with drama. No crescendo. Just the evenness of someone who had carried the weight so long it had become the shape of his spine.

“My partner died in 2010,” he said.

Elio turned.

“Eighteen years. Liver failure. The same year I started growing tomatoes again.”

This, too, was left to hover. And what a strange companion grief was—how it stood between them not as barrier, but as mirror.

“You grow them still?”

“In pots. They don’t always fruit, but I like watching the leaves fight their way up. You learn a lot about survival from things that grow in cans.”

They were quiet again. Not the silence of avoidance, but of sifting—that peculiar way stories pass through people, like light through moving water: slowed, bent, but visible.

Elio cleared his throat, the way one might before confessing a kindness.

“May I?” he said, holding the sketchpad up not as a request but a reverence. “Sketch you properly, I mean. Not just sneaking glances. If you’d let me.”

Orlando did not answer at once. His eyes flicked to the boy’s hands—slender, stained with graphite, knuckles pink from anxiety or sun or youth.

He nodded. “If you must.”

Elio began again. Slower this time. Not with the urgency of capturing a face but the care of mapping a landscape one has known only through distant books. He drew the slope of the cheek, the faint crease near the mouth, the way the skin at the temple held a kind of quiet light.

And while he drew, he asked—not softly, but with the vulnerability of someone not quite ready to be answered:

“Were you ever in love again? After?”

Orlando’s reply came like the low clang of a distant bell—measured, mournful, echoing:

“Once. Briefly. But I mistook kindness for permanence.”

And then he looked away, toward the sea again.

For a moment, the sound of water took over—lapping, insistent, almost tender. The wind shifted. A child at the back of the boat began to sing a lullaby under her breath.

And Elio drew still, now more carefully than ever, as if the lines themselves were what held the story together.

*****

The island rose gently from the horizon, not with grandeur but with the quiet insistence of memory surfacing. Guimaras—green and uneven, its coastline scalloped like a page torn from a map long folded and unfolded again in someone’s pocket. Palm trees, barely visible, leaned toward the water like eavesdroppers. It was the kind of arrival that did not trumpet itself—no fanfare, no sudden clarity—only the slow recognition that one is almost somewhere else.

And with it, a change. A subtle rearranging of breath.

Orlando shifted. Not dramatically, not even deliberately. But there was something in the way his fingers tugged the zipper of his canvas bag, in the way his posture withdrew slightly into itself—as though he were already stepping ashore while his body still sat anchored to the boat.

Elio noticed. The page of the sketchpad was now full: not just a face, but its silences, its folded regrets. He could not tell if he had captured Orlando or merely the version of him glimpsed between conversations—like an old photograph stained by humidity.

“I’d like to see you again,” Elio said, and the words came too easily, too honestly, like water poured without measuring.

Orlando did not meet his gaze. Instead, his eyes traced the approaching shore, where fisherman’s boats bobbed like commas on an unfinished sentence.

“Don’t make this something it isn’t,” he said, and the voice—gentle, unsparing—broke upon Elio’s chest like tide against driftwood.

“I didn’t,” Elio answered, the protest no louder than breath. “I just thought it could be.”

And there it was, the moment. The one that never arrives in time but always on time.

Orlando turned. Slowly. His hand moved—not impulsively, but with the grace of someone who knew what it meant to touch without promise. He laid his palm over Elio’s, not for long, not forcefully. Just enough.

“You’ll be fine,” he said.

His eyes softened—not with pity, not with apology—but with something far more dangerous: tenderness.

“You still look at the world like it can love you back.”

And in that moment, the world did. The wind lifted, tasting of salt and ripe mango. Somewhere, someone onshore was laughing.

And the boat kept moving, the engine humming like a lullaby out of tune.

*****

The engine exhaled its last breath of motion. The boat, as if relieved to surrender its burden, nudged gently against the dock. There was no announcement, no fanfare—only the slow rustle of limbs preparing for return, for resumption, for stepping back into the choreography of land. The passengers stirred like pages being turned, each to their own chapter.

Elio did not move.

He watched as Orlando stood—shoulders slightly hunched now, the curve of his spine seeming to pull him inward as though the air itself had grown heavier around him. He lifted his canvas bag without flourish. His face, unreadable, caught the light for a brief second and then turned away.

Elio waited. Perhaps for a glance back. A gesture. Even the soft betrayal of hesitation.

But Orlando walked with the certainty of someone who had practiced departure, who had long ago mastered the art of not returning. He stepped onto the dock and into the soft chaos of tricycles, porters, mango crates, and voices calling names that did not belong to either of them.

He was gone.

Elio remained in his seat, the wood beneath him warm now, holding the imprint of his wait. Around him, the boat emptied. Life flowed off in various directions—into markets, into errands, into families reunited with Tupperware.

Beyond the terminal, he could see the mango trees—rows of them, quiet and golden-green, as if they too were listening.

He opened his sketchpad.

The drawing stared back. Orlando, but not. Orlando, but stilled. His mouth was there, closed; his shoulders sloped gently in retreat. But the eyes—Elio had not finished them. Perhaps could not.

They remained blank, not with absence, but with too much. Too much to hold, to frame, to explain.

He closed the pad.

And for a moment longer, he stayed seated, not because he expected anything to change, but because sometimes the waiting itself is what carries you forward.

The boat rocked, emptied now of story. The sun climbed, unaware.

And somewhere on the island, footsteps receded—soft, deliberate, necessary.

*****

He rose at last, not abruptly, but as one does after prayer or forgetting—slowly, with something reverent still clinging to the skin. The planks of the boat creaked beneath his feet as if reluctant to let go.

Elio stepped onto the dock.

The light had shifted. It was later now, though how much later he could not say. Time on water folds in peculiar ways, as if memory had something to do with tide.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone. The screen blinked awake. No signal.

Not surprising. But still—he stared at the bars, empty as they were, for a beat too long. A signal, even now, would have meant... what, exactly? That something elsewhere could still tether him? That stories did not end just because feet found land?

He turned it off. Slipped it back inside the silence of his bag.

And then, with the sea at his back—the brine and the breath of it still clinging faintly to his clothes—he began to walk inland.

There was no map in his hands. No plan. Only the road ahead, curved like a question.

From a nearby house—whitewashed, half-shaded by guava trees—the scent of lauya floated through the air. Hog plum, steam, and the slow simmer of something that had been watched carefully. It smelled like comfort. Or history. Or both.

And he walked toward it—not because he expected to be fed, but because something in him still responded to warmth.

He didn’t know if they’d meet again.

But in that one hour, someone had seen him.

And somehow, that was enough.