When it rains, it pours! By Emmanuelle AND how it poured these many a day! In June and July, the farmers welcomed the grace of rain as it poured, cool and pure, from the skies. Our patch of earth in this part of the world wallowed in the wet, gurgling…

The late Mr. Juan dela Cruz By Emmanuelle RARE and admirable are those people who are up and away from their bed even before the sun does. Those early birds chirpily breeze through their morning rituals without much fussy feet-dragging, including doing death-defying acts like flipping an egg its sunny…

Love is dear! By Emmanuelle HE was from this island paradise, where one is forever a child running fast and furious through its flats and hills and mountains high. It was a running as a prelude to, later in his young life like most others of his ilk, a running…

Breaking up! By Emmanuelle I SUBTITLED this true story The Would House and you would soon see why. Ah, so soon, you saw why. I have this friend, so hard to find therefore so precious, who is, almost always, unbelievably on the verge or in the middle of, or just…

Pearls By Emmanuelle IF there were five hundred Feelings stories, this true story would be among the first ten or twenty ever written. The subject was told of the publication of her life story by a friend; the subject never got to read it in print. Thus, this story, retold,…

High spirits! By Emmanuelle              AND, suddenly, there she was, walking past my sprawled self, like she had never left us! Forty-eight days after she died, eight days after we gave her a fairly decent send-off to heaven on her body’s fortieth day on earth. Suddenly, there she was! Previous to…

Too much love! By Emmanuelle SOMETIMES, not always, I go through a story in my mind with a psychologist friend before I write it and submit said story to the editors. Our talk will go like this (my friend is forever in italics; she is curvy, curly and crunchily opinionated,…

Small talks! By Emmanuelle THE first thing I do the first time I meet a kid two years of age or less not more, I bend my knees and kneel to its height, like how we kneel to the gods. Then I smile, look straight its eyes, and call on…

How many deaths one must die before one breathes one’s last? (Part 2) By Emmanuelle ONE can’t have too much . . . of runways. Especially a runway that was wide, and white and sun-washed, a tall lanky figure standing at the foreground, hair tousled by a gusty wind. Hands…

How many deaths one must die before one breathes one’s last? By Emmanuelle SOMETIMES life can be so cruel that the only way to survive its sting is to grit your teeth, plug your tear ducts . . . and walk valiantly on. Allow me to retell a series of…