An Excerpt from Waking the Dead

Posted by Jayvee at August 10th, 2009

Waking the Dead, Yvette Tan’s first collection of short ficton will be launched on August 15, 2009, 4pm at Powerbooks Megamall. The collection contains published short fiction, some of them award-winning. The book was illustrated by the great, the wonderful, the talented Andrew Drilon.

The Bridge

“It’s magnificent here.”

I could hear the Madame’s voice as I approached the balcony.

“You simply must come over,” she was saying. “I could throw a party and have the crème de la crème of society flown over. It will be magnificent.”

I could see her on the balcony, sitting prettily on one of the garden chairs, talking on a little white telephone with a red hand piece and a clown’s face in the middle where the numbers should be. There was no cord to be seen. It wasn’t connected to anything. My first thought was, has the Madame gone mad?

“I’ve brought him with me,” the Madame continued. “He’s such a dear to be around, though the locals are wary of him.” She paused, then continued, laughing, “But oh the money I save on phone bills!”

I laid out her food, my eyes on her hands, which cradled the phone as if it was a baby. If I could wish for anything in the world, it would be to have hands like hers, skin like hers. I found myself wondering what she would look like without her bouffant and her butterfly-sleeved dresses, without her armor. Would she be like Aling Gloria, at ease in whatever was handed to her, not letting anything, even good fortune, change her ways? Would she be like Nanay, a frail survivor who would do anything for the sake of her family? Or would she be like Ate, who wanted the world to love her, who believed that the key to a good life lay in the beauty she was blessed with, and unconsciously lorded it over everyone else?

“I have to go now,” the Madame was saying. “Talk to you soon.” She turned to me. “Ija,” she said. “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s a telephone, Madame,” I said.

“It’s a toy telephone,” the Madame said. “But I can use it as if it were a real one. It’s one of Ronnie’s powers.” She put the phone on the table and took my hand. I shivered as her hands closed over my own, reveling as their smoothness closed over my small rough one. “I can tell you’re like him. What can you do?”

I looked at her. She was staring intently at me, her lovely dark eyes trying to see what was behind mine. Even though all the adults treated me as if I was an older child, the Madame was the first one to talk to me as if I was an adult.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I see and hear things others don’t. I dream things, know things that I shouldn’t know. Sometimes, I know things even before they happen.” This wasn’t a boast. To boast would be to add that sometimes, Mang Ambo, the local albulario, came to me when he had a patient whose sickness was too stubborn to cure, or when he couldn’t reason with the entities that were causing trouble to some of the folks that sought his help. I never liked it when Mang Ambo asked me to talk to them; they were always asking me to go off with them, to travel to a place with no worries, no cares. A place not even the Madame has dreamed of. But even that would not be boasting, because it was all true.

“How do you know these things?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Sometimes, they tell me. Sometimes, I just know.”

“They?”

“Ate Tina and Kuya Chris,” I said. “They were supposed to be my brother and sister, except Ate Tina decided to leave early, and when Kuya Chris came along, he decided to join her. They asked me to come along but I said no, because I knew that Nanay would be sad.”

“I see,” she said absently, as if she already knew the answers but wanted to hear them from me. I remembered snatches of a conversation my parents had, something about the Madame and her husband knowing everything about everyone in the country. “So now you can read minds, predict the future.”

I looked down at my feet, dark from being under the sun and dirty from being in the dust all day. I’m dirtying the Madame’s floor, I thought.

The Madame squeezed my hand. I looked up at her again. She was smiling. “What am I thinking of right now?” she asked.

“The bridge,” I answered.

I felt a jolt, a current that ran through her, up her arms, to her hands and into mine, all crackly blue and green. And then it hit me. What the boy was saying, what he had been trying to tell me.

I pulled my hand away from hers and ran back down to the kitchen, forgetting to take the tray with me.