Till K do us part

NOTHING like a pandemic to shake up the marital tree. 

During enhanced community quarantine (ECQ), the husband unexpectedly returned home for his forgotten pass. He rushed inside our home, only to stop abruptly and sniff the air.

What have you been up to? His slitted eyes already condemned me even before I could cover up my mistake.

The man I married has a nose that any K-9 species would envy. If anyone can smell illicit love in the air, that’s the husband. This department, though, skipped me in their recruitment.  

Did I fart? Married this long, we are intimate with each other’s odors. 

Did I eat kimchi directly from the jar again? Without taking my eyes off the husband as I’ve seen Indiana Jones freeze in a pit full of rattlers spitting with anger, I returned the lid and closed the jar.  Tightly. Grimly.

Marriage IS enhanced couple quarantine, without presidential extensions and absolutions. Close friends still wonder what the husband saw in me, or I in him, given our swerving passions. 

We managed to sleep in the same bed for 29 years because it is too narrow for us to bring baggage. I don’t sleep with books; he doesn’t bring in power tools. 

ECQ put our complacency to a test. Our half-a-duplex home became suddenly too small for personal space.

We step gingerly around the marital minefield of enforced togetherness. We appreciate the bubbles of domestic quiet and placidity, rewards of long-time companionship. We know, too, how bubbles work. 

The Great Puncture came with kimchi. Tolerant of the health benefits from this side dish of fermented vegetables, the husband bought a jar for a wife who eats anything she does not have to cook.

Love, even one that comes with a contract witnessed by God and family, has limits called the Chinese cabbage or the Korean radish. Or the cabbage AND radish.

Instigated by a third party—say, fish sauce or shrimp paste—an innocuous vegetable can engage with another plain green leafy creature to release a reek of unholy pungency.

To keep olfactory peace, I promised to finish the kimchi while keeping the lid always in place and sealing the bottle in a zipped bag.

And then the day our home smelled familiarly like a sewer. How did we reconcile the irreconcilable? 

Kimchi bombs pale to the time I chose our budget date on the strength of this restaurant’s wall-sized TV playing “Train to Busan” (our pork steaks were anorexic compared to the flaps of skin hanging from the zombies trying to nibble at Gong Yoo), and the unmentionable period I aspired to imitate the NoKor women collectively making kimchi in giant basins on “Crash Landing on You”.

In marriage, the poison becomes the glue. Or exchange the partner.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 8, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Dictator’s goodbyes

THE DICTATOR knew he was dying. 

He calculated that before the six moons rose from the choked sea of the planet Primus, he still had time to say his goodbyes. 

He was, by Primate reckoning, relatively young but he acquired power early and the power had swallowed him whole. As he lay on his deathbed, the Dictator plotted how to overpower Death. He was certain that even before the death rattle sounded in his throat, his most trusted would throw out his not-even-dead-yet body and fight, down to the last standing ape, for power. 

So after the first moon rose wetly from the sea, he invited all the Premium Primates of Planet Primus to see him personally for his goodbye gifts. The line stretched beyond the Palace. 

First to bend an ear to hear the Dictator’s whisper was his personal doctor. The Dictator knew the fool had at least an excellent talent for his own survival. He gave the quack a paper appointing him the Most Official Physician (MOP), with power over all healers. 

Fearing that he would be blamed for misdiagnosing the Dictator, the MOP’s first act was to wipe out every healer. When the second moon rose and gobbled the first, it would have wrinkled its nose (if it had a nose) at the stench rising from the diseased and the dead strewn all over the planet. 

The Dictator enjoyed saying goodbye. To the Chief Orangutan of Palace (COP), he gave a blank check for intelligence funds after whispering he was weary of listening to the birds’ intrigues. 

In Primus, communication, from announcements to intrigues, was coursed through the birds. They were the only ones whose tongues were not tampered with (birds’ ears are covered by feathers but the COP, who swapped Science for Obedience remedial, was not even curious to Google this). 

So the birds followed the healers. By the time the third moon cornered and gulped down the second moon, such a din rose from the planet, where the survivors gabbled without cease after forgetting, in the absence of messengers, how to listen. 

Fast forward to the gorging by the sixth ravenous moon. There are just two visitors now waiting outside the Dictator’s room (actually in the entire decimated planet). 

The Dictator did not recognize the girl at first. He lost count of the moons since he last saw his subjects. 

But he always distrusted the female ones. Rightly so as, without waiting for his goodbye, the girl gave him hers: she took out a quill and with its sharpened end, slashed her throat so a bright, red smile widened and glinted back at the Dictator. 

Death then stepped inside the room and gently cradling the girl, walked away. Halt! cried the Dictator. What about me? 

No one was left to answer the Dictator. 

(mqtabada1@up.edu.ph/ 09173226131) 

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 2, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

K

BEDTIMES are best. At midday, all four puppies and three cats are sleeping in the outdoor kitchen. For the first time in 24 hours, our home is sane.

Though the husband made a shed for the K-zoo, this tiny kitchen is the paws-down favorite for R&R. Cool tiles, shade, and access from the garden must be the attractions in these hot times, with summer, coronavirus disease (Covid-19), and enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) showing no let-up.

A zoo, a godson calls the K-company. K stands for “kinit-an (abandoned),” with the cats walking in from unknown streets and a basin of puppies waiting to be lifted off the street.

K also stands for “kauban (companion),” which I prefer over “pet”. The latter means affection bestowed on the other, a backhanded way of social distancing.

Traced to the Old French “compaignon”— meaning “one who breaks bread with another”—a kauban involves an exchange of choices: to approach, to adjust, to stay perhaps.

Kitkat, purring louder than seemingly possible from such a small frame, appeared while I was washing plates. Feral veterans often slip in when there is no human around. Kitkat wanted to feed but she did not want to steal. After a few more meals, she returned with two kittens, then with her tomcat of the moment.

When Kitkat is in heat, several toms hang around. Perhaps misnamed, Big Tom is not a Romeo or a Kitkat groupie. He is an old gentleman with a luxuriant but bedraggled marmalade coat and a touching weakness for strokes and chin-rubs.

A slim princeling, Tigr, from Kitkat’s first kindle, tolerates Big Tom but keeps his distance from the K-pups. Cats greet each other by touching and sniffing noses. No such delicacy for the savage K-pups, who chomp on tails and sniff butts, imperial or not.

Unexpectedly, it is Big Tom who submits, even grudgingly, to the puppies’ eternally optimistic view that even for those who are locked down and forced to live together against their will, the sum of what we have in common is greater than the difference remaining from our idiosyncrasies and divergences.

Midday finds Tigr napping on the highest shelf, hidden except for pink paw pads hanging over the edge. Heavy with her latest kindle, Kitkat looks down from the counter on the barbarians sprawled on the floor.

Napping in the middle of this circle of yipyipping puppy dreams and hedonistic limb-stretching is Big Tom. The indignity of being assaulted by a butt-sniffing juvenile or the substitution of his tail for a chewtoy merits only the lazy swatting of a paw minus drawn claws.

In the age of incivility, Buddha is a patriarch sleeping with the enemy.



Siesta. Noki and Big Tom, Silang, 18 April 2020




(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 19, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”