The forty-fifth apartment Mae lived in had one bedroom with low white ceilings and dingy splotches from unrepaired leaks seeping through the insulation. Her apartment complex was across the community college and adjacent to a daycare center, replete with frolicking children and ringing laughter. When the children went home, the playground stilled, a shroud of dust settling into every crevice of the slide and every chain link hinging the swing to the pole that occluded the sky overhead.  

Mae lay supine on the bus stop bench in front of the daycare, the wood slightly damp from the muggy air. A box of bangos is tucked underneath the bench, fresh blood lining its vertices. Mae had been idling by the bus stop for a few hours, as if waiting for someone's arrival. 

Of course, no one ever came–just an erratic blur of silhouettes oscillating to and fro. 

Passerbys furrowed their lips and wrinkled their noses, the aminic stench of sitting fish wafting off the box. They gaped at the pooling blood, inky like the streaks of yesterday's night sky. 

At seven years old, Mae stowed her childhood in a suitcase and fled the Philippines with her mother to the States. Neighbors of their shanty crooned gilded reveries of a distant land. Grinning portraits glinting on green cards, and billboards of Hollywood girls with porcelain skin and flushed lips lining highways and interstates. Mae eyed the billboards, wishing the beaming congruities onto her own face; but the skin around her lips become puckered and purple at the edges from the cold, her mouth etched into a frown. 

Here, the heavy hiss of the bus tugs Mae away from the Philippines' incessant honks and jeepneys rushing along with streams of smog eddying like clouds. The roads here have an unfamiliar symmetry. No stray dogs dawdle in the streets, heads bowed downward. Here, it's Mae's head craned towards the corrugated asphalt. 

The toothy smiles of neighbors dissipate, drooping into steely glares and averted gazes. Her neighbors had warned her of mga Amerikano. There, people would push buttons and anything they desired would appear before them. There, they gorged in gluttony, adipose hemming in skeletage, until you couldn't make out the contours of their ribs. They said that in the States, people lived in sprawling estates with winding driveways and variegated mosaics. The absence of oranges here was a far cry from the heaps of oranges they had over there. 

Mae's aunt once peeled oranges  by the pith, hewed them by the grooves and arranged them on a ceramic plate in a carnation. Mae would lock her fingers around the carpel, whispering her aunt's promise–that oranges would make her the brightest girl around–under her breath. 

A woman in Mae's neighborhood began to blubber, wailing a hollow plea to be taken into the sky to a faraway land. Her husband struck her, hushing her delusions in a language that now feels like metal shrapnel on Mae's tongue. She prods at sausages slick with grease, drinks coffee blackened into acid that bleeds into her stomach lining. 

In the Philippines, Mae hid under the car seats of a Volkswagen Beetle while her mother meandered through alleyways for a new relationship. This was the only way to survive. Every morning, her mother draped herself in sheer clothing, lipstick smudged around her mouth, clutching pesos in her hand–another stretch of ashen asphalt, another night of solitude. Each morning, a new man would slink out of her room. 

Mae would shrink her body against the carpeted floor, where singed cigarette stubs and lozenges lay strewn around her frame. Sometimes, she would clamber out of the car for a stroll through Rizal Park. She crouched along the sidewalks, pinching roly polys between her fingers as they crawled around the cosmos of her hand, not knowing the end from beginning. They would laze beneath the underbelly of rocks, wallowing in the dampened earth.

When Mae was young, she learned that roly polys furled into helpless spheres out of fear. Back home, the roly polys were plump and satiny. When Mae hangs her body off the bench to peer at the creatures below, they are slight and lethargic from the glaring sun. 

On the bus stop bench, Mae wills herself to curl up into a ball with them, her only friends seas away–together, they hide, modeling their bodies into zeros as they recede away from reality. On the concrete floor, Mae's tears pool with dried blood. 

 

In a moment before she forgets to live, Mae remembers what her mother had said before they left for the States, "I never knew that one day I would be drifting so far away. You are more sensible. You know how things must be, and what we must lose along the way."

 

*bangos: milkfish 

*mga Amerikano: Americans 

*pesos: Filipino currency