Mongrel City
BY ANDY LOPEZ
This is more or less how the story goes: once an engkanto owed my great-great grandmother a blood debt. When asked what she wanted to be most in the world, she’d pointed at a nameless stray dog pissing on the base of a utility pole and said, what about that.
Why not, she laughed, pistoning her hips with the credence of a bonafide drunkard wandering the streets at 4 PM, fly open; this, too, I would inherit, down to the blind rage and blackouts I’d find sheathed inside me the way a blade belonged inside a body. Those mutts, they were survivors; they could fuck and multiply sans religious guilt, terrorizing the streets with a plague of shit and bloody fur. They had no gods, no roots. They would outlive us all. Even the posh pedigree breeds who ate artisanal kibble out of stainless steel bowls. There was a time this story haunted me, until I walked out of it—280 miles and sixteen years later, just me and my little artist Suki, and I don’t think about home, not for a long time.
Pet-friendly as it is, you won’t find strays running around sunny, urban-planned BGC. Cats, sure. Not aspins, those poor wild things. And if you did, you wouldn’t see them again the next day. Would you miss one, really? Think about it.
My ex, a jilted writer, called what I could do an abomination of two worlds. There are no abominations here, not in this global city, this shining shimmering splendid. I greet the days on my duplex’s modest veranda, pull scalding mouthfuls from my De’Longhi espresso machine before heading out to my sales job pushing health insurance to folks who stumble over the potholes in my accent but tack on a gracious facade. Sundays, I take Suki out for deep-fried mini donuts and let her stage a wedding at the park with her Barbies. People coo at our matching pastel blouses—baby pink and white trim, and I smile back because we’re fucking santan flowers that sprouted from the concrete, and we have a right to be here, I promise, if you give us a chance.
This is more or less what nobody tells you next: you’ll fail to outrun it, that sly dog. The one that still thinks it’s being hunted, scrabbling at the door with its simple need and simple hunger. And around the corner: always another territory to mark, another bigger bitch with a meaner bite.
Even when you’ve paid up, you’re still on the hook. Even when you get out, you ain’t out.
Only three days in and Nanay has already decided that the Ocampos who moved in next door to start a small Born Again church are in fact pompous, stuck-up sons of bitches who need a proper welcome. “Who the hell goes jogging at 7 AM, while we good hardworking folk get ready for work?” she demands. “What they running from? I’ll give them a real reason to run.”
Yesterday, Nay had been drinking gin with her goons, blasting the kind of filthy, skull-pounding budots music only a certain kind of will could withstand when Mr. Ocampo crossed the street, cashmere coat over his shoulders, and asked if they could turn the music down, just a little bit, it was Sunday, the Lord’s Day, you understand? And it was the careful, strained way he’d smiled at them, a passer-by sticking a hand into a gamefowl’s pen, that I saw made Nay pause. “Who am I to say no to a holy man?” Her smile glinting like Mr. Ocampo’s watch, the kind only a few could read. When he’d disappeared into his home, she’d jerked her chin up: permission to turn the volume to its most dreadful lever. In the morning, two police officers at our gates. They looked sheepish delivering the notice—a verbal warning for now, small indulgences we afforded only because Dad himself used to be a cop, a decent one, but now he’s six feet under, and not even his shitty life insurance was enough to feed Nay’s growing appetite.
Despite the rough housewarming, the Ocampos start a garden. I know at least one of them flowers are gumamelas because they spill through the fences like gaudy sores, and Momo Ocampo, my classmate, draws every single possible shade with her multicolor pencils. She slides the yellow one my way when she catches me looking during GICP. “Gumamela!” Nay roars.
“Gumamela in our barrio! The only things that grow in this shithole are drugs and erections.” I hide the pencil in my pocket, its yellow rare sunshine in August, the gold pot at the end of a rainbow.
4 AM the next day, Nay sends me to their gumamela-clotted gate. “We’ll show ‘em,” she says. “You scared?”
“No,” I say, but my voice catches. I promised Momo we’d draw animals today. She’d show me her encyclopedia: over 270 species!
Nay regards me once. The slap that comes next is almost clinical. Stunned, I stagger to the concrete. First comes the shock; then second, always, comes the fury. “What about now,” she says, in the rasped two-toned voice of the Hound.
My fear has slipped out, and in its place is the other me: four-legged, round-eyed, many-toothed. I don’t remember what happens next—I rarely do—only the reek of upturned earth while my paws scythe the ground open, the jet of my piss darkening the scene, marking it mine, all mine.
I come to with my dry mouth on the bottom of the crate. My body coiled like a fist. Through the fence, Goldie reaches out to tuck a withered gumamela behind my ear, playing with my stubborn tail that refuses to graft itself back to my spine. In the morning the Ocampos leave, spit at the ground, promise the police will hear about this madness, and back out with their Subaru the same way they came, Nay’s rhythmic music poisoning the air. Momo stares from the back window. A vinyl sticker frames her sallow face: LOVE LIKE JESUS. When she doesn’t return my wave, I cuss at her, bristling and betrayed in the wake of her limited love.
“Let them go,” Nay hushes, gathering me when I’m all gangly and teenage again, my tail a gone memory. Her sour breath on my cheek. “It’ll be fine. We have each other, don’t we, ‘nak?”
Across the street, the garden defiled. My hands shake from an invisible current. I did that?
“No one will find out,” Nay says. “Listen, baby.” Though calloused, the hands on my cheeks are gentle. “All your life people will think they’re better than you. But you and I, we’re special. That’s why you have to show ‘em. Even if you’re scared, never let ‘em see. You get me? You’re my daughter. Are you scared?”
Always, that same question. When the barrio police booted us out from our homes—first by the train tracks, second by the river. When our second life began, with the pot-bellied Mayor Montemayor who promised us better days. When we learned to eat from his hand the way Nay said good girls like us should. Or later, at the beginning of his fear campaign when Nay took up the task, calling my name in the middle of the night after every damn hunt, her jaw dripping something vile—the dark shape of a thing that matched all the stories: this thing, it has hate in its eyes, and it eats bad kids, so don’t be bad; when I learned those eyes could be mine, too.
I think of the way Momo all but shoved the colored pencils I returned in her bag, the way Nay threw out cigarettes. How, that same morning I’d ironed my uniform until the collar was a blade, and I’d inspected those pencils over and over, making sure there were no blemishes, that I was spotless and beyond reproach.
Behind Nay three cops step out of a wailing patrol car. They navigate the debris of glass and gumamela. One of them lets out a long, impressed whistle. Another yells, LINTIK NA—and, stumbling, falls on a turd. Something inside me lengthens its spine.
Up close Nay’s eyes are ringed yellow.
“Do I look afraid,” I say.
The first week of freedom, baby! I am more dog than girl than I’ve ever been. Nanay never let us outside of shit-pilled San Roque, so I hand over the last of my dirty pesos and get off the bus to the first sun-blasted skyline that fills the window. My whole life in a PVC bag slung over my shoulder like some severed limb. I chase down birds to bloody my mouth with, wink at kids who see my mutt-head, and stick out my tongue to flaunt the feather I’d licked clean, every bristle sharpened with need. Come night, I prowl the bars, soaking up neon until my hunger glows.
Eleven months before I turn sixteen, I win ten hands of blackjack and use the money on a room above a blind massage clinic. I learn all about pressure points, how to dig the cold out of a body, how even hands like mine be a salve, a magic trick, a knife.
When rent money runs out, I meet a shrink who rattles off my symptoms while I learn the currency of my mouth in an alley. I’m grieving, he diagnoses, and I hallucinate Goldie’s reflection in the dark window across me. You’ll be fine, I think crossly at my younger sister’s expression. Me? I was Nanay’s little champion. But Goldie, she loved. I consider telling this stranger more of my juicy lore, but I’m busy trying not to choke on my inexperience. After, he buys me 1-piece chicken with plain rice and complains about being passed for promotion in favor of some rosy-cheeked fresh grad who can use Excel. I stare hard at his half-eaten Yumburger; he never offers. The city’s first lesson: cash first.
Three weeks before my birthday; the day I would’ve been fit to carry Nay’s gift. I watch spit-roasted chickens at a roadside kiosk and suck on a five-peso coin to stave off my thirst. The flavor profile stirs up memories: the rain, the rust, and the good ‘ol wire crate. Nay made me sleep in it when I couldn’t completely shift back to my body, some sad thing stuck between animal and man. Nay embarrassed easily, even this. After all I’ve done in her name, the small kingdom we’d built in our barangay that made us untouchable, I was still proving my worth. While she and my sisters slept in our cramped room, my howls wandered the night, a freakish mongrel-mix with no true origin.
Two weeks before my birthday, I’m doing very well, thank you very much. New slip-on shoes. Couple pesos in my pocket, grimy but mine. I play nice with the weekend crowd and stare at the fine dresses on display until someone elbow-checks me. “Accidentally”, my ass. The retail worker pales when I snap but gives me a once-over that lingers too long. And I know, Christ, the shoes are a cheap plastic mess, but don’t you know who I am, what I can do? When she turns, I send a pile of perfectly stacked summer shirts cascading to the floor and book it, my head a triumphant, pus-filled weight.
One week. I’m in the arms of a man who never asks where I’m from; they all assume nowhere good. In this way I learn most men are the same. But Kev’s okay. Stops when I tell him to. Doesn’t stare like the rest when I clear my plate too fast, muscle memory. Name’s Prin, I tell him, short for Pringles, because Nay was craving cheddar when she had me. That’s the fun party version. Truth is, Nay wanted something that sounded vaguely imported, like the chichirya backpacking white girls always looked for when stopping by her sari-sari store, never in stock. So there we were, my baby sisters and I: Goldiluxe, Lakandula Pearl, Gracieferlyn, Ashleymaya. There must be more of them now; Nay always liked to keep herself busy.
Two days. My body wages a war with itself. Curled under Kev’s sheets, my gums break and swell, my shirt goes translucent with sick-sweat, and I dream of girl-headed dogs or dog-headed girls, all leaving eternal trails of steaming shit like those soft-serve swirls that come out watery at first and, uy, lookie—Goldie’s back. Her odd eyes, the coldest shade of blue on the planet, stare at me accusingly from the foot of the bed. I lurch off the pillows and lose my breakfast into a bucket.
“Time of the month,” I explain to Kev weakly. He buys it, the sweet thing, and doesn’t touch me again. He orders us greasy comfort burgers and I start a fight with our foodpanda boy for bringing me regular watered-down iced tea instead of apple Sola, calling him the-world’s-dumbest-piece-of-shit-did-mama-drop-you-on-the-fucking-head-when-you-were-born or something like that, can’t recall. I’m a mouthful of glass. Head’s all soupy static. Kev sends the delivery boy off with a violet bill, then turns to me, face ashen like I’m a trespasser in his house, and for a second I tip completely to the other place, where I’m not Prin anymore but something else, something older with no name.
Swim back, dog-brain. Goldie waves me over her side of the room. Her nails a teenage nightmare of purple highlighter. PSPSPSPSPS. Back to me, stupid Ate.
I grope for my body, as if through amniotic fluid. “Sorry, Kev. I didn’t mean–you know I didn’t mean to.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“M’sorry, I just–I don’t feel like myself lately. Lot on my mind.”
He’s bugging out. “Like what?”
“Family stuff. It’s stupid.”
Moments pass, then Kev reaches out to squeeze my hand. “Look at me.” I look. They all think I’m sweet under the surface, some impossible flower that unfurls in the right hand. “Family’s tricky,” he says, mollified, and cups my jaw with fingers laced in burger grease. Then he jerks back. “Babe, what happened?”
“Angry dog,” I say, covering the scar hidden in the shadow of my right jaw. “Can I get some air, by myself?”
“Sure, but not too far, okay babe? It’s dangerous out there this late. Get yourself ice cream while you’re at it. Condoms, too.” I duck out from his under his stubbled chin and Wendy’s breath and the single ceiling light that keeps flatlining every three minutes, stumbling out the apartment door with a wad of cash he slips into my hands, and I loathe that I pocket it instead of throwing it in his face. Outside, a new September wind picks up. The sidewalk goes on and on. Strange, how my footfalls keep disappearing into it. I realize I’ve passed the convenience store about ten minutes too late, but I keep walking until I run out of pavement, out of shop windows for Goldie’s teenage phantom to come and gloat. I walk until I’m squeezing through wire fences and alleyway gaps, pausing only once as a frantic motorcycle blurs past, darkness again, before continuing my slog; until all lights erode, here where the wild taint of the streets washes me again, teaching me.
Like this: I cross the street and slip into a storm drain gurgling with another city’s name. By then I have learned its second lesson. Let the damn dogs come. Didn’t I leave so I wouldn’t be in anyone’s debt ever again? Didn’t I learn, after all these years, that the only true way out is severance?
I’m buying a fresh set of colored pencils when I get the call. “Pardon?” I swim through the words, arrive on the other side of the same bleached shore: it’s Suki. She’s in the school clinic after nearly biting some poor kid’s finger off.
Fingers, plural. Caught another kid’s thumb in her incisor and locked her jaw. Jesus.
Only a week since I got her the Limited Edition World Tour Barbie cast—Mermaid Barbie, Hollywood Barbie, Korean Barbie, Asian Barbie from the Global South—one for each color of the rainbow, because I’m bad at saying no. Suki makes-believe a happy nuclear family (I’d shorn Blonde Barbie’s braids so we could have a father figure) complete with dinner scenes, weekend gateways, the whole shebang.
But Suki knows the rule. Whatever she owns, she takes care of, or God will take them away. She helps me unclasp my freshwater pearl necklaces each night, watching me put each accessory back in its foam case with bright-eyed devotion. Later, I’ll find her arranging her dolls on the lowest shelf, counting all seven plastic heads, and only then can the day begin.
Suki knows it’s human nature to be careless with good things. There’s no trusting them; not even yourself.
A shameful flicker of pride burns in my gut when I see Suki sitting stiffly in the guidance office, her gaze assured. No one has offered a napkin for her bloodied mouth. “He played with them too hard Mommy,” she explains, and her fury is so potent now it makes her stutter, small fists bunched on her lap. “He wasn’t even th-thinking about it, he’s broken her!”
Ms. Vangie, the big-boned homeroom teacher, shows me the evidence: 1) Crimpy, Princess Barbie, looking for all the world like a victim of a road rage accident, and 2) a picture of the kid’s hand, imprinted with Suki’s milk teeth.
“Kid’s keeping the finger then?” I ask, grinning, because Suki looks like she’s going to have a panic attack or that’s just me projecting. But then Ms. Vangie shoots me a look I haven’t seen in a while—that slow traveling glance from my blouse, last season’s, to the dirty outsole of my thrifted sneakers, the suede scuffed and cruddy from the years—and my tongue stills.
At home, I tuck Suki in with kisses. By the door, I promise a full recovery for Crimpy after some good ol’ superglue. The kitchen’s next. I hunt down white vinegar, baking soda, and an old toothbrush. Barefoot, I dip my sneakers in a bucket, scrub the tongue of the shoe until the foam darkens, until the dirt loosens into grimy bubbles. I think of the poor kid’s mother, older, maybe. Better haircut. Now scrubbing blood off her son’s sleeves. Now back to me. What kind of mother does that, passing on a poison like that? I scrub until the suds spill over, until my shoe gleams, my fingers aching pink and I go to bed and I’m still scrubbing, all the way into my dreams where I leave a viscous trail of correction fluid or day-old oil or the secret shiny insides of someone I must have loved, only I can’t remember the words, can’t be anything other than the knife Nay taught me to be; until the full potential of my name poured directly into my ear shatters the daydream, and I’m ripped back—
“What,” I say, or snap, or howl. Suki flinches anyway.
I jump out of my chair and pull my kid close. I apologize, over and over, but already I can see it settle over her like cloth—the look of a child seeing their parent with new eyes.
“Are you mad at me?”
“Not mad. Can’t ever be mad, baby.”
She wriggles around like a worm in my arms. That’s when I see the paper in her hands. “You drew this? For me?”
Shy, my daughter nods into my neck. When we pull apart, she shoves it in my hands and lets her gaze linger. Waiting, I realize. I smile slowly—not telling her she’s drawn my nightmare, the four-legged mongrel itself, down to the black fur, scraggly, sore-eaten ears, its tail twisted like a cruel joke.
“You don’t like it.” Suki’s face shunts.
“Oh, sweetheart. My little artist. How can I not love it?” I lift the portrait to the light. It will go on the fridge, next to her other drawings of the two of us and her Barbies. It’s my fault, I want to say. My curse. Your stupid mommy got herself knocked up when she knew the dog was still out there. Now it’s here, invading our home, our blood. Tracking our trail while I scoop tinola into dinner bowls, its eyes the wrong shade of gold.
Someone’s perched on the kitchen tabletop studying the portraits on the fridge when I get home. Down the hall, Elmo trickles out of Suki’s room, carrying along with it her singing, sweet and off-key. It’s a rare school holiday. I toe off my pumps, slough off my blazer, drop my laptop bag by the door, taking my time with it. Only when the trespasser shifts its coltish limbs do I turn.
The lopsided twist of her mouth is new, but those eyes. Big alien blues, those things. For years I’d find them hidden under hoodies, sweat-clotted bangs, so no one could trace her back to the AFAM Nay fucked in one of the homestays for a ticket outside of Third World Landia. Would worked, too, had daddy dearest not developed a messianic complex the size of Davao and disappeared into the arms of the Peace Corps. Now baby sister’s all flightless like me. Now she’s in my kitchen, one of her legs tucked under her chin, the other dangling lazily off the edge, the red Converse streaked with mud.
“Tao po,” Goldiluxe greets. She’d bleached her hair bombshell-blonde, but the job’s shoddy; dark frizzy roots curl outward at the edge of her heart-shaped face, framing the devastating dimple in her chin. How many nights I’d imagined her here. How I rehearsed the words.
In the end, they fail me. “Your hair.”
She shrugs, tugging at the tips. “Thought I’d lean into it, you know.” Her gaze catalogues the kitchen and her smile widens, cutting. I catch a glimpse of the bite scar on her neck, matching mine. “Wooow, look at all this, ate Pringles.” She steals an apple, buries her teeth in it. Juice dribbles down her chin. “Ew, why is that bitter?” It’s left unfinished on the table. Then she turns her blue-eyed attention to the small jars of condiments on the kitchen island. Namprik, bagoong, hummus. Before I realize it, she’s unscrewing one of the jars and sticking her entire finger in it. I’m frozen in my own apartment. I’m bleeding out in San Roque. I’m running like hell.
“Spicy.” Goldie makes a gagging noise and lets the namprik jar drop to the floor. She tuts at the glass and the spreading mess, as if disappointed by it. “Got anything sweet?”
In all my memories Goldie is a tiny, soft-spoken thing, perpetually pressed against my side, that I almost forget the adolescent years that soured us, about Nay’s drinking, and the job—always, the damn job—how it touched her in a bad way. While I despised the Hound, how it twisted my mother, she revered it. The power it afforded us. The slight fear in Montemayor’s eyes, even as he barked orders. And there were always orders: new rival politicians, competing businesses, mouthy activists that needed to be brutally and swiftly ripped apart in the dark. You can be their good little pet or their bitch; only one of them knows it can bite back.
I breathe in through my nose. “What do you want? Need some money?”
She laughs, a brittle sound, and I’m sixteen again, pooching cigs off the street with my sister. I’m fourteen, watching her stick her greedy little fingers in the pages of my diary, offering up as a truce Nay’s porno stash, SIX SPICY NEW POSITIONS TO PLEASE YOUR MAN. I’m ten, I have defiled a garden; Goldie tucks a gumamela in my ear like I am not made of broken glass.
I’m six, and Nay drops another sticky, smelly bundle in my arms while she goes off to play guard dog to a shabu warehouse, and I hold the alien-eyed kid close all through the things that go thump in the night and do not let go until morning, her stink becoming my stink, biting at anyone who dares come close.
“No, I don’t want your money, ate.” The word is a barb.
“Clearly, you’re here for something.” How did you find me, I want to ask. “Medicine, clothes, what, you need a car?”
Goldie scoffs, something old and knowing cracking the cruel marble of her face. I’m sixteen, I’ll be back, okay? I promise, plucking the cig she’d been chain-smoking throughout Nay’s 36th birthday party, before I turn around and don’t look back. I don’t look back in eight years.
“Maybe I just wanted to see my favorite ate.” She licks under the lid of a vegan pandan Kaya jar. I plead with her with my eyes; I don’t want to be angry today. I haven’t been angry in years. Her gaze lands on the jar of blueberry jam. She reaches over, fingering the edge of the rim like a cat. Considering.
“Then put that back,” I say calmly, I am so calm, I am the picture of Zen, and the whole world is a cloud beneath me.
Fucked up lineage aside, I remember what else my sister and I share; we both hate being told what to do.
“Put that back please,” Goldie corrects.
“Fuck off—”
With a grin, she sends the jar toppling from the edge. Before it hits the ground, we’ve launched at one another, aiming for the jugular—
—no sound when my sister yanks my hair—white devil—catch her in the middle—a flash of teeth—carotid, jugular, femoral—predictable, all of Goldie’s movies—doesn’t she remember who taught her how to move like this?—hands up, block the face, good girl—laugh like dark syrup—we stumble down the hallway—trample over a bed of glass—that was Suki, second grade in the picture frame—another blur of sun-blasted blonde—breathe in the sewer in her hair—race down the stairs, winding around tables—I’m on her in seconds—I was always fast, the fastest—anticipation fluttering like a maya bird between my teeth—we leap out the open window, wild daughters of this city again—the night rowed with black teeth—WAIT—piss slowly at the base of an electric pole—black puddle gone gold—us streaking under bridges—concrete below swelling into a kind of sea—bad, this is really bad—years since I’ve swam this far, sunk this deep—Goldie looks back and her grin is a pocketknife catching light—how did I ever go without this—how could I forget—how good it is, so good to be me—
I land hard on my hands as I stumble out of the vortex. Muscle, tendon, skin—they all graft themselves back. I push myself up on two standing legs, stumbling on gravity. I taste the tart journey on my tongue and find we’ve circled back home. The front door is wide open, slightly off its hinges. The clock above the sink sways from a loose nail: 2PM. Merienda time. Suki will want white bread with coco jam and cheese slices, the edges culled.
Suki’s singing still wafts in from the hallway. NA-NA-NA-NA, Elmo’s world!
Goldie watches me in all her mangy askal glory. Dirty blonde fur. Ears nicked from the years, tail long and bushy. Only her blue eyes give her away. Suki shrieks in delight, and Goldie’s ears twitch towards the sound. We watch each other watch each other. My heart slams against its cage.
Goldie blurs into the room. A second later, a shriek.
In the span of two breaths, I conjure the image of Goldie ripping my daughter’s song out her red, wet throat.
My human legs barely make it. By the time I storm the room, Goldie has already darted past me, into the hallway and past the kitchen. Between her teeth: Korean Barbie, its pink micro-skirt dripping with dog-saliva. Suki wails, “EUNJI?” grief-stricken, but thankfully unharmed.
“Please, Dee, she’s limited edition,” I beg. “First and last of its kind—” but her tail is already flickering out the door.
“How long have you been spying on my family?” Goldie doesn’t answer as I chase her through the outskirts of Taguig. Which is a bitch to deal with because now she has lured me to my office, and the person reflected in the glass facade of our building looks like a crazy person. Goldie squirrels in through the revolving doors, disappearing in the afternoon 3PM coffee exodus like a sleight of hand.
My coworker Carmela spots me. “Ms. Prin! I thought you were working remotely today?”
I smooth the hair back in my crumbling low bun and wipe my upper lip sweat. “I forgot my charger.”
Goldie watches me watch her gobble up the receptionist’s unattended Starbucks sandwich, then defecates in the giant pothos plant. I promised Suki I’d get Eunji back, no matter what. She was inconsolable when I dropped her off at the neighbor’s. My eyes flick to the security guard studying me. The handgun on his hip. I nod and smile while Carmela talks and talks, the new diet she’s trying, no rice, no love, no mercy. “But it’s good for you,” she says, “you know what carbs does to your body?” I say, “Tell me.” Goldie picks up poor half-chewed Eunji and looks back at me with laughing eyes, half-jogging to the rear exit, where I can’t follow. Belatedly, the guard wrinkles his nose and whips his head around, searching for the stink. “It’s all about mastering your cravings, before it can bite,” Carmela says, then folds her hand into a gun. “Like BANG. Just, totally like killing it, you know?”
Goldie doesn’t get far. We’re still in Taguig, but far enough that the residential areas are less sleek, grand displays of contemporary architecture, more industrial, all concrete and budget barbed wire from beer bottles. I used to work here before the owner went out of business. How many mornings had I taken a tricycle through this eskinita, not knowing Goldie was in a nearby storm drain, watching?
“You always were terrible with that,” Goldie observes, stopping mercifully to watch me fight off another half-transformation. My spine twists to accommodate a tail. My left iris keeps contracting, becoming a pinprick of itself. Always half-done, half-dog. Never wholly here or there. “I never did understand why Nay kept insisting it had to be you, when you never wanted it. I thought it was such a waste.”
Her fur ripples. Bones popping, shifting. SSHHK-CLICK. The sound of a card deck reshuffling. My teenage sister stands, looking down at me. She palms the indent of Eunji sticking out of her jean pocket like some strange appendage.
For hours I’ve been trying to look away from it—how Goldie now has what I always thought would be mine, one day. My curse. Something inside me blackens completely.
“Oh, don’t look so upset.” Goldie grimaces. Girl head, dog teeth. “Our dear panganay left, so Nay gave it to me. It’s mine now.” She pats my cheek with Eunji’s tiny hand twice. “Mine.”
Something in her breath makes me recoil, so I grab her by the scruff and pull her down behind a beat-up Subaru like we’re children again. Predictably, she tries to claw my face off.
“Show me.” Up close I can see what’s gotten Goldie in such a pissy mood. The inside of her left incisor is rotten, pus and blood leaking from two pits. “Dee, I said show me.” When she makes a fuss, I grab her jaw tight. “Remember Fiona? All that junk, made her teeth fall out. Wanna be like Fiona, huh? Stop fucking biting.”
“You kiss your little girl with that mouth?” But she opens her jaw anyway. Oh, it is rank.
“On three,” I command, pressing my thumb on the base of her swollen gum.
Goldie rolls her eyes so far back she almost loses it in her skull. “One—“
She howls as the tooth pops cleanly out the root. I toss it over my shoulder. Goldie calls me a whore and a horse’s testicle and a whore again. Original. “It’s gotta get worse before it gets better,” I tell her, and she starts to laugh—the new sound, less barbed.
She spits a glob of blood on the ground. “You are the worst.”
“So I’ve heard.” I offer my hand. “Let’s just go back to my condo, and I’ll clean you up. I’ve got painkillers, mouthwash. Air-con…”
She quirks her lips, considering; a new habit. I’m struck, unspeakably, by the years between us, all the ways it stitched us into something different. Once, I knew my sister more than the inside of my own bones. “What do you say?” Goldie asks Eunji. “Her place, or mine?” She puts the Barbie’s face to her own ear. “Sorry, ate. My place it is!” Then she darts around the corner, and I almost laugh, too.
It takes a half-hour on taxi back to Rizal. Less on four feet. Goldie is waiting for me, deathly bored, at the front of the warehouse. She’s perched Eunji on her shoulder. When she notices me limping and heaving from the road, she ducks into a passageway by the side hidden in overgrown kamias trees. “Dee,” I snarl; every step frays the edge of my patience. My sight is fully feral, my rage a lodestar. I make it to the lip of the facility, the floor beyond descending as it was built on the back of a hill. Mangy dogs scatter. Inside, young girls—my half-sisters, I realize—are sitting on crates, braiding each others’ hair, blaring TikTok dances on their phones. Most are involved in a mini-factory line: packing t-shirts with Paul Montemayor’s face—Mayor Kiko’s eldest son, fresh from Spain—feeding paper into printing machines, packing mugs and various campaigning paraphernalia, all in Paul’s signature red and blue. AYOKO SA SIKIP, SA PUTIK! a shirt reads. And another: PAUL, ANG ILAW NG PANGARAP!
I smell her before I see her—there, over the railing. Nay. The same big, towering shape from all the stories. The big black Hound—smaller, than I remember, and graying. Once she had been all presence. All bottomless gullet. She’s on her side now, nursing four pups with pink newborn dog-heads, while their mouths bite her teats bloody. Even in sleep, her face is bereft of fear.
I was ready never to see Nay again. “Why’d you bring me here.”
Goldie appears at my side. “Nay didn’t want to talk about it. About you. Made my sissies—” she gestures at the girls shooting brief, shy glances their way, “—think you were just a story. That I invented you.”
“Maybe that would’ve been best.”
“Maybe.” Goldie makes Eunji walk the railing like a tightrope. “I mean, you went to some stuck-up city where we couldn’t visit. You never were going to come back, were you?”
Here it is, the finger twisting the exit wound. The raw, ugly heart of it. What words would be enough? I left my baby sister behind. I left her all alone with the beast. Once, that beast had been more ferocious than life itself. But that thing, sleeping on the cold concrete floor—it must be a joke. My memory is full of holes.
“There are rules, you know.” Goldie dangles Eunji over the railing. When it hits the floor, waking Nanay, I know I won’t be able to walk out a second time again. “You can’t just leave.”
“Please, I say.” The metal creaks under the weight of my hand. “You don’t want to do this.”
“What do you fucking know about what I want?”
“A lot,” I say. “I’m your ate. I’ll come home.”
Paul Montemayor is his father’s son through and through. The Beautifier. Said we all deserved clean, deserved beautiful. Only a few years since I’ve left and the backdrop of my early childhood is near-unrecognizable; Paul has rolled a subdivision over it, Verdant Vista. The unruly kamias trees thick with red ants, the lone stubborn cement square where we played basketball, the twist of cracker plants and their rare purple flowers, the grassy slopes where we all ran all through the night until our lungs crinkled like foil—all cored out. A concrete border separates the private subdivision like a fort. But it does nothing to block the salt of the bay, or the deep mournful red of the sun, bathing our skin.
Goldie scales the wall with ease. I have to climb, my blouse catching on the barbed wire.
“Do you remember what Nay said? When she got the bite from her mom on her 16th birthday… it was like she was made whole.” Like being slotted into a network of lives; you can’t see where exactly you ended and another began. I nod while Goldie talks, our shoulders almost brushing. The grass under us is coarse and warm. ”I feel them sometimes; like, if I called on them now, they would come.”
The Monteymors have outdone themselves yet again: the roads are smooth, no trace of the wild mountain beneath. Dozens of pastel-roofed houses—most under construction—disappear in the green, thick, large trees I don’t know the name.
“I called for you,” Goldie confesses. Her voice is a thin fog. “But all I felt was nothing… this time, maybe, I thought, you were gone for good.”
“Why’d you look for me? Why now?” I reach for her hand, think twice. “I have nothing for you that Nay can’t give. Dee, I’m—I have nothing you want. I mean, I left you. You must hate me.”
“You really don’t remember.” She’s touching her neck; under her small palm I know I’ll find the scar, the exact shape of my canines. ”That day, you told me you didn’t want to grow up to be someone like the Hound; that it scared you. I think it scared me too.” A smile slants her lips, and the memory returns: the blood-red afternoon we were born not to this world, but to each other. Gifting the bite to a sister: a child’s wish. “You said our blood was cursed. But we could end it, if we marked each other before Nay could. We could make our own lineage.”
She traces the ridges of her scar. I lift to feel my own. I close my eyes and hear it: two children raucously laughing, their sandals slapping the concrete as they disappear around the corner. The sound slips farther and farther away.
“Dee,” I try; even now, words are flimsy.
“Is it better for you, now?”
I shut my eyes. “Yes.”
She nods. “You are eating well.”
“Mostly.”
“And the father…”
“Out of the picture.”
She’s nodding, pulling handfuls of grass by the roots. “Nay and I need to move. The warehouse is getting too small for all of us, and the boss doesn’t want us around. No askals in pretty perfect Verdant Vista. It’s whatever. We’ll find a bigger place. Bigger than your bougie-ass apartment. A penthouse. Somewhere we can put down roots, you know? I thought, maybe, you and I could…”
Her smile falters, and for the first time I catch a glimmer of the grief and hurt in my sister’s eyes. She unearths Eunji from her pocket, wiping the grime from her cheek, and hands it to me.
“Nevermind. I’ll figure it out.”
My heart is a pit. “What if you come with—”
A whistle blows. A security guard is jogging up the field, anger darkening his face. I realize how we must look: grimy, bloody, with a near-naked Barbie in my hand. The guard looks put-off by Goldie’s blonde head, so directs the full force of his ire at me. Goldie talks over him anyway. “I thought you were Kano,” he says, eyes widening. “But you’re Tagalog’s better than mine. Anyway, are you lost, darling? This is a private subdivision, yeah?” He gestures magnanimously around him. Then he sits in front of Goldie and pats her cheek. “No squatting.”
Goldie strikes him. Later, when asked, I’ll tell people I don’t know what possessed me in the next moment—that in those three succeeding seconds that the guard stumbles back, his hand curling around his gun, I think only of the flinch cutting Goldie’s face. That it all came back like acid up my throat: I am firstborn, I am all of my mother’s rage and then some, and none of my sisters, spoiled by their tiny new kingdom, have ever seen Nay when she was younger, scrappier, when she was kicked out for daring to be hungry in the streets she was shat out in; they don’t remember when we used to fight.
A meaty CRUNCH. Something warm explodes on my tongue. Then, a BANG.
In the distance, red and blue lights twinkle over the hill. The cops will be here to make it all disappear, I think. The dogs, our homes, the blood and shit on the walls, so that San Roque, Antipolo will never look like a place once overrun by scavenging mangy dog-women for the next batch of city folk dreaming about perfect pastoral suburbia. Goldie cradles my face. Goldie is draping herself over me, flickering in and out like a fever dream. Goldie is crying—stop crying, it makes you look fat—siren, louder now—warm rain on my cheeks—”Stop, it’s just scared, can’t you see it’s just scared?!”—Dee should stop shouting—can’t she see they’re coming—feel the many hands reaching out—the thousand yellow eyes in the dark—open—