Feelings
What if?
By Emmanuelle
Truth may be as clear as the sun that blinds us on the bluest of blue sky. Truth, too, may be as false as the fog that drifts in whiffs from dry ice.
Nina and Nick’s families were friends and neighbors before they were all happily united into one gregarious clan by virtue of Nina and Nick’s matrimony. Marry me, marry my family. A typically Filipino story turns out not.
In the beginning, all was well and swell. With just one or two years in college, the handsome couple managed on short-termed contracts as promo or sales representatives. If there were none available, they went through short stints as domestic help or construction worker. Their share of harvest from their share of the farm and their backyard garden served them their daily rice and viand. For more, they had to make do with less or none at all.
Until the children came. And came and came. Nina had to stay home.
Their barangay is a throughway towards a known tourist destination. A foot trail to it meanders by not too far from their small wooden house. Nina opens a sari-sari store to offer the basic amenities to local and foreign tourists hiking through the cogon-choked but view-worthy longcut. Brewed native coffee, cold coke and tetrapak juices, cookies and candies, fruits of the land.
One afternoon, this slim, blond, fair-skinned foreigner plods by, sees the store, stops, and decides to relieve herself of her heavy backpack for a while. She buys from Nina a pack of menthol cigarette, a fistful of hard candies, monay bread, and a bottle of coke. During their transaction, Nick arrives from the farm, and deposits his implements by the store. Nick is more outgoing than Nina, and more confident with his command of the English language. He is also slim of hips, wideof chest and firm of muscles where they mattered. He greets the stranger, she greets back. He smiles, she smiles back. And somehow they get to talk. Of the weather, of the view. They go on further to discuss how life is here, of how life is there over the rainbow.
Meanwhile, Nina huffs and puffs beyond the wooden grills that divide sari-sari store owner from buyer. She turns to walk away, she glimpses herself in the mirror. She sees this wife, this mother, wearing faded too-loose duster, hair clipped untidily to the top of her head, worry frowns ageing prematurely a still-young face. She looks to the outside of the grills, she sees her husband exchanging pleasantries with the dusty but pretty stranger, long straight tanned legs showing between short khaki shorts and the socks of her brown hiking shoes, hair in disarray but glowing blindingly gold in the bright sunlight.
Something unhinges somewhere in Nina’s head. She grasps a thick piece of four-by-four in both hands. She runs out the door. She raises her arms and brings down the wood hard on the gold. The gold sprouts a crack, the crack springs a leak. Red bursts and sprays the ground all around. The stranger still stands though her life has gone, her face towards the frozen smile and the shocked eyes on Nick’s face.
It would be a blank to Nick and Nina from thereon. The news would carry the information of the days of investigation, of searches, and of the ultimate confession of the crime by the killer. Cameras would follow the bent figure surrendering to the police, and finally being locked behind bars. Nick would keep repeating he was sorry. He did not mean to kill the woman.
Meanwhile, Nina was shown in a follow-up story on TV. The killer’s wife was beating a path with a broom through a crowd of media people and curious onlookers. A broom? I think that was a stick. A very thin harmless piece of stick.
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