Laurehl Onyx B. Cabiles
Riding four borrowed habal-habal, high school boys skipped class
one sunny afternoon, traversing the outskirts of their town, passing
old trees, rough roads, and lonely houses before reaching Manili:
people were circling around the drivers even the women
wearing hijabs were present. They stopped
on a hundred-meter-long concrete road, hearing
the roar of the engines from the modified motorcycles.
The street was filled with exclamations of the crowd, joined
by the teenagers, when the motors dashed
to the finish line. They went home right after, driving
as fast as the racers, bringing this story home
Inside a cramped-up room with three double-deck beds, during
the beginning of the presidency of Marcos Jr., a boy
from that Manili trip will be a bed-spacer in that rented
space in his college years at USM, accompanied
by his Maguindanaon friends. Some nights, when the schedule chooses
to be kind, at a dinner table, little gatherings will arise:
from asking about the Quran to bartering half-truths
and inherited beliefs, stepping into each other’s world, bridging
the gap, then the topic will sway to the horrors they heard
and saw, moving from local to foreign, spanning
through the present and the past, from Kabacan to Gaza
to Congo, zooming back in Palimbang
In Manili, on June 19, 1971, when our country was still
in the grip of Marcos Sr., a meeting should have happened,
but the Ilaga threw grenades inside a mosque, slaughtering
more than seventy innocent people, turning
the place for showering of blessings into a bloodbath.
And even when they buried the dead on the next day
for the ones who will carry the memory, after
those gruesome hours, scenes of body parts sticking
to the ceiling and fellow survivors wading along
through knee-deep of warm blood to find pieces
of their loved ones among the submerged will be engraved
in their minds. The place and their memories wait for the boy
But right now, the boy is with his friends in front
of the store where they always hang out, obliged
to listen to his buddy’s stories, who is painting
his grandfather as a mythical figure, whose skin
cannot be penetrated by bullets, or guns would not even fire
at him because of his anting-anting, and using only a sundang
to eliminate his targets. As the clouds eat the moon, the friend’s
tales continue like the telenovela Ang Probinsyano while
the boy is still glued to his spot
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