Mrs. Noriko never spoke. She answered the door in those outrageous runway outfits that aren’t meant for human consumption, and like most rich people, she gave shitty tips. Her building was one of those gleaming monstrosities in Forbes City, Manila’s ritzy oasis. The first time I met her, I delivered the coffee ground facial scrub…

When I drop out, I go where all the drop-outs go. The jungle is full of beasts with teeth, but at least there are no detentions, no pop quizzes, no ink smudges trailing down wrists, no teachers locking me in quiet rooms. My first night as a drop-out, I turn into a plague of toads.…

There are animals, heavy beasts that thump, thump, thump around the attic, and a family of swallows in the chimney that shit down and make a thick stew of white and black on the fireplace floor where the fire should go but doesn’t, and wind. Wind enters through large cracks and small pockets of confusion…

The voice hadn’t yet come out of the fireplace in Zoe Talancon’s new apartment when she moved in, unpacked her boxes, arranged her photos, knickknacks, and books just so. She was twenty-five, flush with a surprise monetary gift from Tita Luisa upon graduating with a master’s in mass communication. She was ready, long-ready, to leave…

As the children of single mothers, neither Miri nor I usually had big plans on Christmas. As soon as we could drive and Miri got a car, we started a tradition of going to the movies and then for a night swim at her grandfather’s place, which she called a house but was really a…

Tofu hot dogs grill up pretty good, I overheard a well-dressed man say to another on the metro yesterday. I was on my way home from work with a few sacks of groceries, feeling sad, as I’d just spied upon a form at work outlining cost-of-living increases for this and next year, and there was…

That Tuesday, the mediator dropped in to the support group half an hour early. It was an accident. She still hadn’t set the clocks in her apartment back for Daylight Saving Time, and somewhere between reruns of Friends and half-boiled egg noodles, she overlooked the mistake and left immediately. If she’d been right about the…

There were a few after there was you. Jill, her kisses tasted like kiwis. Not the green ones, but the sweet yellow kind, which she was allergic to, so maybe that’s why she tasted like them. When we kissed, I got itchy and thought it must be sympathy pain. Then it wasn’t just my skin,…

I leaned against the windowsill of our upstairs den and watched cedar waxwings attacking the berry tree in our yard, tipping their heads back in glee and gluttony with each thieved berry. Their shrieking had awakened me on my cot in my makeshift bedroom just as light was crawling over the dew. Now I slapped…

63 degrees: It is spring. We are languishing on the hoods of our cars in the school parking lot, that’s otherwise empty because it’s a Saturday. A Chrysler from the 80s, a Ford truck from the 70s, a Lexus from 1998, a newer model Corolla, and a shiny new Tesla. If it were October and…

Abraham Haglin came out west to save the Indians and the mountain men. He was a tall man, stooped, with a weak chin, and a nose wedged between his small eyes as hooked as a furrier’s knife. Munro hadn’t minded him so much. Not like some of the others. Not like Jimmy Jock Bird, who…

The voices of the new mothers gathered in the lobby carry to the examination room, where Carla waits for the midwife. Accompanied by the cries of their infants, the mothers in the mom-and-baby group talk mostly about breastfeeding — the tingling, often painful, sensation of letdown; the nuances of their infants’ suckles; breast milk’s sweet,…