Survivor
By Jam Jovir

Our trip started smoothly — or so we thought … I remembered the last moment of that gruesome flight — the blinding white light and the deafening sonic boom that followed and then darkness …

It’s been three days since I was awakened by faint murmurs and Jenny’s painful slap on my face. It seems the three of us survived a dance with death just to wake up marooned in a small island which only God knows where.

Why did I drag myself and my Jenny into this mess? The picture of Macau and paradise just looks so vivid and promising that I did not hesitate to accept stupid Frank’s offer for free tickets and accommodation to Sinampeng. My God what have I done? If only I had cancelled this trip, we would have been better off at home with delicious food and a warm and cozy bed.

Food … that’s all there is to it. I can feel my body tremble just at the thought of it, but Frank ate up the last coconut two days ago. I cannot go fishing as the inlet is now lined up with hungry Tiger sharks spying for their next meal.

All that I can see on the horizon is just an endless sea and not even a speck of anything that can rescue us from this torture.

I think I’m hearing voices now, weird … they sound like voices off from a hotel commercial urging me to eat Frank to survive, but I think I’d rather die of hunger than to live with the thought that I ate my friend or my girlfriend just to survive.

Just then, I heard Jenny cursing Frank for eating up all the coconuts instead of sharing a ration for us to pull through until we get rescued, and Frank was aiming to hit my girl! Luckily, I managed to get in between the two and managed to jab Frank right in the face for him to realize what he has done.

I saw him walk away to the water’s edge and Jenny teary-eyed took a hard look at me and went away. I figured I’d doze off and erase the day’s tension away …

Is this a dream? Strange … I think I heard Jenny screamed or was it just the wind, but I can smell something cooking and man I woke up drooling.

I sat up to Frank’s calls for me to eat, but mindful as ever took it a notion to find Jenny and have her eat with us. I looked around the water’s edge but to no avail. I ran straight up to Frank and asked him but he only shrugged off and said that she’s maybe off swimming as the sharks have already left. He handed me a bowl which I think he got from the plane’s wreckage. I helped myself to that really wonderful stew, which tasted strangely but nevertheless wonderful. Somehow I can feel an eerie stillness in Frank which makes me uneasy. He took a few moments off to walk to and fro in my back and then he suddenly leaned to me and said in my ear, “Fred, I have a confession to make, I killed Jenny. She was a nuisance and I could not help my hunger so I thought it best to kill her for the two of us to survive. That delicious stew is her.”

I dropped my bowl, gave a deep sigh. With a sudden grasp, I grabbed Frank’s neck and muttered my last words, “You’ve really done it this time Frank, you’ll pay with your life! You’re wrong for only one of us will walk away and it is only me … me I tell you! Ha ha ha!”

Strange … I can feel cold tears falling.


The Hunger
By Monster Paperbag

I stood numb on the sand. I stared hard at Frank, probing his beautiful and tantalizing eyes for some trace of sense.

But he didn’t stare back for long but took a step back, turned around and collapsed slowly on the ground, facing the other way.

“Why?” I asked loudly, almost shouting. He made no reply and no movement. His back, deliciously tanned and bronzed and gracefully adorned with sensual and fully-developed trapezius and latissimus dorsi muscles, seemed to taunt me with a mysterious and seductive ambivalence.

“Why, Frank?” I shouted this time.

He turned his head sideways while his slender neck glinted as the sun slowly caressed its surface, reflecting fervent beads of sweat trickling down his smooth and elegant spine. His hair swayed with the ocean breeze, partially obscuring his delicate forehead where amorous strands of hair met and slapped his dainty brow.

“I was hungry,” he whispered, his voice trailing away. His lips danced when they moved and for a second, I caught a glimpse of his long and lovely tongue as he momentarily opened his mouth.

For a moment there, I wanted to refuse his explanation. I have lost the love of my life but the fleeting mourning gave in to fancy yearning. It has been so long since I’ve changed my old ways but Frank, that bastard Frank, that vile Frank, my buddy Frank, challenged all things that I have led myself to believe in.

I took one long stare at the murderer of my mate. This time he stood, faced towards me and stared back. “I need a dip,” he whispered as he took off everything.

It has been so long since I’ve changed my ways. But it was all coming back to me, now. It has been so long since the last time. I felt feverish as I continued to gaze at his bare torso, at his flawlessly defined six pack and navel, at his exposed thighs, at his curvy backside, at the way he carried his huge, and lusciously long … stride.

At that moment, I realized I was hungry, too. Forgive me, Jenny.


These connected short stories originally appeared in Paperbag Origami as a creative writing exercise done in tandem by Jam Jovir and Monster Paperbag.

It wasn’t what I expected.

The end came like a thief in the night. It bore through our mountain of trust and carved a valley of uncertainty amidst our seven-year-long union.

I couldn’t believe it. When I opened the discovered letters, my mind searched for substantiation even as it desperately issued denial at the merciless betrayal. Still, the words from the pages, they clawed at my mind: Does he suspect something? Are you sure you’ve kept my letters hidden from him? We’ve got to keep it secret from him for now. He mustn’t know.

The search for my lover ended in failure. Cold reality seeped in, haplessly aided by the sight of her empty closet and cabinet.

In subsequent nights, I howled to the winds at this tribulation. As the last speck of my dwindling hope trickled down the hourglass of nothingness, a new seed of optimism sprouted in my desert in the form of a message delivered frigidly to my lost world. She wanted to see me.

It’s not over yet. I gathered myself, mustered my remaining strength.

She came like she said she would. And so did her new consort. I stared daggers at him, murderous intent restrained only by confusion and what little sanity left. He nodded and quietly walked away.

I stared at her and the question leaped from my tongue even before I thought of it. It burst through — angry, demanding, pleading — “Why?”

She just stood — a ghost of my waking — silent, unmoving, unreal. “I’m sorry,” was all she said. And she, too, walked away.

For a moment, it seemed my heart had grasped everything. It seemed my heart knew what to do in order to survive. Not really.

Can I bear the sight of them grieving at my wake? I’ll never know.


This piece originally appeared in Paperbag Origami as a creative writing exercise.

 
From Notes From the Peanut Gallery: Open call for submissions for Philippine Speculative Fiction IV

1. Only works of speculative fiction will be considered for publication. As works of the imagination, the theme is open and free.

2. Stories must cater to an adult sensibility. However, if you have a Young Adult story that is particularly well-written, send it in.

3. Stories must be written in English.

4. Stories must be authored by Filipinos or those of Philippine ancestry.

5. Preference will be given to original unpublished stories, but previously published stories will also be considered. In the case of previously published material, kindly include the title of the publishing entity and the publication date. Kindly state also in your cover letter that you have the permission, if necessary, from the original publishing entity to republish your work.

6. First time authors are welcome to submit. In the first three volumes, there was a good mix of established and new authors. Good stories trump literary credentials anytime.

7. No multiple submissions. Each author may submit only one story for consideration.

8. Each story’s word count must be no fewer than 1,500 words and no more than 7,500 words.

9. All submissions must be in Rich Text Format (.rtf – save the document as .rft on your word processor) and attached to an email to this address: dean@kestrelddm.com. Submissions received in any other format will be deleted, unread.

10. The subject of your email must read: PSF4 Submission: (title) (word count); where (title) is replaced by the title of your short story, without the parentheses, and (word count) is the word count of your story, without the parentheses. For example - PSF4 Submission: Magdalena Brings Fire 3500.

11. All submissions must be accompanied by a cover letter that includes your name, brief bio, contact information, previous publications (if any). Introduce yourself.

12. Deadline for submissions is September 15, 2008. After that date, final choices will be made and letters of acceptance or regret sent out via email.

13. Target publishing date is December 2008/January 2009.

14. Compensation for selected stories will be 2 contributor’s copies of the published anthology as well as a share in aggregrate royalties.

 

Attention! Yo ladies, yo gents, come out!
The Barber of Junquera is in the house.
Come on now everybody, lend me your ears.
I got a nifty story that will live on for years.

My name is Kevin and you heard me right.
I run a pretty parlor that opens at night.
I'm good for nothing, except with scissors.
I'll shave your bony head with nothing but razors.

Why open at night? You ask me now.
I got no time for questions, leave them for now.
Just sit on my chair and don't you worry.
We got a lot of time, there's no need to hurry.

I once had a customer you've never even heard of.
His curls, like a girl's, he wanted to get rid of!
He told me to look. He's out of his mind!
I would if I could but I'm friggin' blind!

Well what could I do? It's what he wanted!
This freakin' wicked dude's wish must be granted.
So I told the guy, "Be bold and be brave."
I did away with all his hair in one swift shave!

Next was a Mom, she's 30 years old.
She wants her black hair to shimmy-shine like gold!
I said, "Say what?" "Like gold", she replied,
"Shimmy-shine, anytime, a source of pride!"

Oh heaven forbid! I'm stuck in a dilemma.
"What color did you holler? You tell me now, Mama."
The color of blonde was what she yearned.
But all I see is black, as far as I'm concerned.

I thought for a minute, maybe for three.
I looked up to the ceiling even though I can't see.
And then — whapack! The perfect idea!
I dowsed the lady's head with Agua Oxinada!

And now you're here, a word to the wise.
You look pretty dandy to my useless eyes.
I'll trim your hair, and your goatee!
I'll even shave your eye brows, I'll do it for free!

'Coz here I am, the one and only!
The Barber of Junquera, that's right you heard me!
Thanks y'all, for hearing my fable.
I'll see you later, though that's impossible!

Word! Break it down!


This piece originally appeared in Paperbag Origami as a creative writing exercise.

The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver. Murphy's Law + Chaos Theory + Run Lola Run. Surprisingly, it's very, very good.

Bonus — How to write a really cool autobiography in less than a thousand words:

Meet Lionel Shriver

AH WAN OW! It took a while for my mother to decode the first words from my crib as “I want out.” Since, Ah wan ow has become something of a running theme.

I wanted out of North Carolina, where I was born. I wanted out of my given name (“Margaret Ann” — the whole double-barrel; can you blame me?), and at fifteen chose another one. I wanted out of New York, where I went to university at Columbia. I wanted out of the United States.

In 1985, I cycled around Europe for six months; one hundred miles a day in wretched weather fortified a lifetime appetite for unnecessary suffering. The next year, I spent six months in Israel, including three on a kibbutz in the Galilee helping to manufacture waterproof plastic boots. Thereafter, I shifted “temporarily” to Belfast, where I remained based for twelve years. Within that time, I also spent a year in Nairobi, and several months in Bangkok. Yet only my partner’s getting a job in London in 1999 tore me decisively from Belfast, a town that in those days addictively commanded equal parts love and loathing. As We Need to Talk About Kevin attests, I’m a sucker for ambivalence.

Though returning regularly to New York, I’ve lived in London ever since. I’m not sure if I’ve chosen this city so much as run out of wanderlust here. London is conventional for me, and I’m a bit disappointed in myself. But I’ve less appetite for travel than I once did. I’m not sure if this is from some larger grasp that people are the same everywhere and so why not save the plane fare, or from having just gotten lazy. My bets are on the latter.

At least the novels are still thematically peripatetic. Their disparate subject matter lines up like the fruit on slot machines when you do not win the jackpot: anthropology and a May-December love affair (The Female of the Species), rock-and-roll drumming and jealousy (Checker and the Derailleurs), the Northern Irish troubles and my once dreadful taste in men (Ordinary Decent Criminals), demography and AIDS in Africa (Game Control), inheritance (A Perfectly Good Family), professional tennis and career competition in marriage (Double Fault), terrorism and cults of personality (The New Republic, my real seventh novel, which has never seen the light of day), and high school massacres and motherhood (We Need to Talk About Kevin). My latest, The Post-Birthday World, is a romance — about the trade-offs of one man versus another and snooker, believe it or not — whose nature seems in context almost alarmingly innocent.

For the nosey: I am married, to an accomplished jazz drummer from New York. Perhaps mercifully for any prospective progeny, I have no children. I am confessedly and unashamedly fifty years old, and never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.

Lesser known facts:

I have sometimes been labeled a “feminist” — a term that never sits well with me, If only because connotatively you have no sense of humor. Nevertheless, I am an excellent cook, if one inclined to lace every dish with such a malice of fresh chilis that nobody but I can eat it. Indeed, I have been told more than once that I am “extreme.” As I run through my preferences — for dark roast coffee, dark sesame oil, dark chicken meat, even dark chili beans — a pattern emerges that, while it may not put me on the outer edges of human experience, does exude a faint whiff of the unsavory.

Illustrating the old saw that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I cycle everywhere, though I expect that eventually this perverse Luddite habit will kill me, period. I am a deplorable tennis player, which doesn’t stop me from inflicting my crap net-game and cowardly refusal to play formal matches on anyone I can corner on a court.

I am a pedant. I insist that people pronounce “flaccid” flak-sid, which is dictionary-correct but defies onomatopoeic instinct; when I force them to look it up, they grow enraged and vow to keep saying flassid anyway. I never let anyone get away with using “enervated” to mean “energized,” when the word means without energy, thank you very much. Not only am I, apparently, the last remaining American citizen who knows the difference between “like” and “as,” but I freely alienate everyone in my surround by interrupting, “You mean, as I said.” Or, “You mean, you gave it to whom,” or, “You mean, that’s just between you and me.” I am a lone champion of the accusative case, and so — obviously — have no friends.

I ready every article I can find that commends the nutritional benefits of red wine; if they’re right, I will live to 110. Though raised by Adlai Stevenson Democrats, I have a violent, retrograde right-wing streak that alarms and horrifies my acquaintances in London and New York.

Those twelve years in Northern Ireland have left a peculiar residual warp in my accent — house = hyse, shower = shar, now = nye. Since an Ulster accent bears little relation to the more familiar mincing of a Dublin brogue, these aberrations are often misinterpreted as holdovers from my North Carolinian childhood. Because this handful of mangled vowels is one of the only souvenirs I took from Belfast, my wonky pronunciation is a point of pride (or, if you will, vanity), and when my “Hye nye brine cye” ( = how now brown cow) is mistaken for a bog-standard southern American drawl I get mad.

Faces in Places. A photographic collection of faces found in everyday places. Nifty.

Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. I saw the movie adaptation before I read the novel (I know, I know). I like the novel better. Now that is saying something.

It was seven minutes past three when he walked in. I greeted him with a quick “good afternoon”, making an effort not to sound spurious. He showed no sign of ever hearing my spiel. He glanced upward and scanned the items overhead, slowly turning his head left to right and back again. Unconsciously, he stroked his goatee while he considered his options. I couldn’t see his eyes — his wire-rimmed glasses reflected the fluorescent lamp from the ceiling. Occasionally, the light draft from the air conditioner ruffled his bangs, obscuring his view.

He was wearing a plain black shirt over black jeans. Over his shoulder, he slung a small dark blue backpack. He stood, still undecided, and let out a visible sigh at the same time slid both his thin, pale hands in his front pockets. In a quick moment, his right hand rose to adjust his spectacles while his left hand unceremoniously unfolded a crumpled mauve hundred bill into view. He bit his lower lip and stared at the piece of paper. His left hand went back to his pocket and he muttered something I couldn’t hear over the Sunset Daze song playing on the radio.

He took a step towards me and cleared his throat, “One tall cappuccino please.”


This piece originally appeared in Paperbag Origami as a creative writing exercise.

The March by E.L. Doctorow. War is hell. Poignant, too.

An alternate ending (in italics) to Neil Gaiman's Babycakes:

With the animals gone, what else could we do?

Some people complained, of course. But then, they always do.

And everything went back to normal.

But then the animals came back. All of them.

Dogs, cats, cows, birds, bears, snakes, fishes, lizards. All of them.

There was something different about them. They don’t scratch themselves. They looked clean. They don’t bark, purr, howl, hiss, croak or play chase. They made noises to each other as if they were saying things among themselves. And they walked upright.

They stared at us humans all day. They pointed at us with their paws, hooves and claws.

We didn’t know what to do.

A few of us locked ourselves inside our houses. Some of us shut our windows to avoid their stares. Many called the local veterinarian to do something. Anything.

Others got out with their shotguns to get rid of them beasts. They shot at the animals and burned their carcasses. They trampled on the little ones and built fences to ward off the large ones.

But the animals kept staring.

Autumn came. Golden leaves fell to the ground. Northern winds breathed a cold gale. The mist and fog pervaded the air.

Then the first of us began to disappear.



This piece originally appeared in Paperbag Origami as a creative writing exercise.