Creation

             

            FIRST, draw a straight line. Pretend it is a snake lying on the ground.

 

            Mama looked at the “S” my stick left on the seabed. That is not a straight line.

 

            Yes, Mama, I said. The ground is crooked; the snake lying on it is crooked.

 

            It is perfect, my Moonling.

 

            That is a story the oldest of the Mothers does not grow tired retelling. It requires imagination—some of my fellow mothers say, a suspension of imagination is closer—to see her as being once a mother, spewing bubbles.

 

            We call her the One. A name no one remembers anyone giving. Then again, no one remembers the ones before her. The Mothers are Nameless. Birthing makes us thinner each time. In time, Mothers disappear.

 

            Or perhaps we just cannot see them and the Nameless are still among us. We see through the One, a colorless frond undulating in the current, more Sea than presence. Only the One’s voice is undiminished, naming, telling, humming.

 

            Or perhaps it is our own voices we hear in our heads.  The figure for “one” can stand for “I”. “I” can be the line drawn on the seabed that shimmies as I look at it. I.

 

            Few things in our world lie flat and straight, Moonling.

 

            Our Father, the sea, bends us.

 

            Our edges are soft. Our Father, the sea, bends us.

 

            Can you cut a circle, Mama?

 

            In her stories, the One cuts up the Planet Primus into two parts: us and the Others. The Others are dry mass and air and primitive life. To keep the Others from invading and colonizing us, the sea pays a tribute with his spawns, foam and waves creatures of the deep for food nearshore forests for their houses water corridors and bridges for their ships and, of course, the Moons, our sons, for light and time and sport.

 

            Time for the Others is reckoned by cycles of six moons, each rising from the Sea, each devoured by its successor. Supplying the arena entertained by the gross deaths of his sons has not made the sea saltier than it is. What are tears to the ocean?

 

            Beneath the sea, the bestiality pits Mother against Mother until the One penetrates their laments and cries for vengeance. Where do killers and victims come from? When the killer also becomes a victim, who mourns? Why kill?

 

            We looked at each other and saw ourselves bringing forth life, steering most of the bubbles away from the currents that whip them into sea foam, tickling telling teaching the Moonlings that later rise from the sea as Moons and never come back.

 

            Perhaps it is not birthing that makes us fade. Perhaps it is waiting for sons that never return that brings us closer to joining the Nameless.

 

            A line is perfect, seen from all sides.

 

            What is perfect, Mama?

 

            You are.

           

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

 

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 16, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

What Aesop skipped

SUMMER: when your kids are parked at home, think quickly to avert a situation.

Juan announced that by the end of March, he would be done with his final exam and scouting camp.

Replying to the unspoken but important implication—unlimited computer time—I started to mouth, “Wa ka kuyapi? Over my dead…”

But the nine-year-old beat me to the draw. “I know too much time playing computer games”—I looked at him with narrowed eyes—“will destroy my eyes and vocabulary”—I didn’t blink, didn’t look away, in case I missed a trick—“so I was thinking of raising a pet”—I relaxed, was about to smile—“can you afford a calf?”

I blinked. On the opposing wall, a pair of watercolor trees he painted years back when he still spelled, “Moomy,” resembled a meadow devoid of something.

“Calves”—I cleared my throat—“are drawn to greens”—like pastures, bank accounts, agribusiness fortunes—“why would a calf anyway want to live in our garden”—I look out of the window, for inspiration or in desperation—“when it smells of cats?”

Thankfully, my generation is a bit better read. So, before he suggested we trade in the cats for a chocolate milk-producing cow, I told him about a dude named Philip K. Dick who wrote about life after the war that ends all wars.

All the living things are dead, if not killed by the war then by the radioactive dust settling after the fallout. While technology can create the simulacra of any living thing—from humans to animals—the survivors covet what is nearly impossible to find: real pets.

In the radioactive shell that is San Francisco in the year 2021, most humans have fled to Mars (for new settlements like New New York). Among the stragglers living in nearly deserted buildings, there’s no need to compete for space. The new status symbol is a pet since, by definition, all animals are endangered.

According to the listing of “Sidney’s Animal & Fowl Catalogue,” anyone can buy a horse, theoretically. For instance, if a Percheron colt was listed in italics, this indicated that anyone with five thousand dollars could buy such an animal if three conditions were in place.

First condition: if, theoretically, a Percheron colt could be found. Second condition: if, theoretically, one had five thousand dollars to buy such a colt. And last condition: if, theoretically, one had money to spare since the italics indicated that five thousand dollars was the prevailing price then when a Percheron colt was still available and, were one to be found, a Percheron colt would no longer fetch only five thousand dollars.

That is the predicament of Rick Deckard in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Deckard abases himself when he has to confess to his neighbor, the exalted owner of a live horse, that his sheep is not really made of wool and guts.

“He wished to god he had a horse, in fact any animal. Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one.”

The neighbor assures Deckard that he will not tell his shameful secret to the others. He suggests the bounty hunter should bid for a cat, a cricket, or a mouse since this went for as low as twenty-five dollars in the Catalogue.

Deckard figures he’ll just earn the money to buy a horse, a cow or a sheep.

Quick to smell a coming moral—“to get what we want, we have to study and work”—Juan left my side to look for his brother.

Philip K. Dick was not yet done, but I didn’t call him back. The fable, which the classic movie, “Blade Runner,” is based on, is set in a future where humans have invented “andys,” or androids, to make life a little better.

When these human-looking robots rebel from serving mankind, they are hunted down and “retired.” Tests are later conducted to establish if it was indeed only machinery that was shut down or if a mistake had been made on a genuine article.

Theoretically, it did not matter, neither to the thing in its retirement nor to hunters like Deckard: “The bounty from retiring five andys would do it, he realized.”

mayette.tabada@ gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 30, 2008 issue

Right to kill

IRONY is a cultural trait that afflicts Filipinos.

It was just a Sunday ago that Catholics celebrated Easter and its message of the resurrected life.

Now the debate is focused on the right to take life.

But pare away all posturing. Reduce the arguments to how people really feel about the right to kill.

When President Gloria Arroyo commuted death sentences to life terms, not everyone was seized by a frisson of Lenten enlightenment.

Families of victims raged against the decision.

Some decried the miscarriage of justice: uphold the law sentencing to death those found to be guilty of heinous crimes.

Other family members were less pretentious: vengeance is ours—or at least, her rapist’s eye for my daughter’s eye, his killer’s tooth for my husband’s tooth.

I sided with the others. When the following days saw her first pushing the “urgency” of abolishing Republic Act 7659 (Death Penalty Law) and later backtracking behind a screen of “dim possibilities,” I agreed with the Easter skeptics.

Wooly moralizing can fleece bishops and the government of Spain.

But one grand schemer of a Filipina cannot all the time outscheme compatriots that now barely tolerate her.

Is Arroyo turning pro-life to court back her Church critics?

Is she playing footsie with the monsignors, over the corpses of crime victims and their families’ dashed hopes, so Catholics can forget what it is all about— legitimacy questions, call for resignation, rejection of Charter change and all that heresy?

Is Arroyo the Easter bunny we all deserve?

I would not want to think so, for the sake of innocent children who still believe that this creature hides nice surprises, not plots and Mike Arroyos.

Yet even for the higher good of ridding this world of pestilential bunnies, I do not believe that humans should exercise their right to kill.

Frustrated victims’ families threaten that the death penalty abolition will lead to a rise in vigilantism.

Is there anything less poisonous than hate? More treacherous than revenge?

If the cardinals do become the president’s strange bedfellows and frustrated Filipinos hire a mercenary or two to take out society’s garbage, I propose that:

If you believe in harvesting eyes and teeth, make this grim harvest yourself.

If you want to rid the world of a drug pusher, don’t shoot him while he’s sleeping or bending low to plot his billiard moves.

Befriend the man. Eat with his family. Sleep for a night under their roof. Shoot him the following day.

If you want to bring back a loved one, a peaceful past, the shadow-free innocence of a child before abuse, hunt down the offender.

While wringing his neck, tell him how beautiful she was as a child just learning to walk, or how folks once left their homes unlocked, or how this boy was sweeter on any grownup that offered him sweets.

In some of my bad dreams, there is a hairy creature with oversized front dentures filed to needle sharpness hopping madly in the moonlight.

In the cadence and pitch of a comedian, the nightmare squeaks out its Easter message: minimize harm, respect life, believe in second chances.

I blink and wake up. I shake off the night horror but can’t, its appeal for resurrection: how I hate these made-in-the-Philippines ironies.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com or 09173226131)