TYBS#4 (DEC 2006)
Storm season is frightening. In a good way, though, it’s both scary and exciting. The suspicion that something severe is going to happen gets me too amped. So there’s little else to do but peruse old memories when the wind howls, the lights are out and you can’t sleep.
That last big storm, Milenyo, had me commuting to work dodging tree branches like missiles and one particularly ill-timed street bulb that decided to loose itself from its post as I came near.
It landed a meter away and the explosive impact made me freeze, close my eyes and look away. My back was to the wind (at 150kph it’s real hard to lean against it) so most of the shards rolled quickly away. Another pedestrian coming the other way did the same stop and duck routine, but had to cover his face with his hands and arms to ward off the incoming shrapnel. I wanted to pick up the remaining bulb coil as a memento but I just walked faster.
As I write this a bigger storm is on the way and its approach is undeniable. The language of an impending storm is a subtle but tangible one: the floorboards creak like a burglar taking his first steps into a house he’s going to case, a drizzle falls that’s as cold as arctic frost, there’s a sigh in the wind that mimics the nativity of the newly risen dead who’ve come back to seek the perfection they couldn’t find beyond the grave.
You remember stuff as you anticipate a storm. Like elementary school. The fish balls I ate like caviar during recess, those Sticky Fingers that collected dust too fast, and Teacher Mylene’s taut, supple hamstrings as she walked clickety clack down the corridor in her black stilettos -- on display with a blue skirt only on Thursdays.
Stuff like a ghost story. This one is true. I was in it. Listen: I forget the names of my buddies, but there were four of us that night. As far as I can remember we were fulfilling a dare. Not from outside pressure, no. We considered that stupid. Instead we had dared each other until all of us agreed to go that night before we chickened out. In retrospect this was equally as idiotic.
Back then we were enrolled in the UP Integrated School (UPIS), Kinder to Grade Six Division. You probably know UP’s campus grounds are suffused from end to end with vegetation. Our school was tucked away beside the squat red building of the College of Home Economics. In front of it the elementary school’s modest soccer field and about five classrooms formed an annex apart from the main building.
Beside this is a heavily foliaged area (fenced off as well) filled with thin, crooked trees plus scores of bushes and undergrowth that hid a small, flowing creek (we could hear the water but couldn’t see it). And snakes. We saw them wrapped on the trees, we saw their mottled hide on the roof of a nearby tool shed where the caretaker -- who came once a week to tend the grass of the soccer field -- sometimes killed and skinned them.
We all called this place The Forest. When night came it was very, very dark there. The road was closed with two long sawhorses, the height of a 10 year old, put on each side.
So there we were climbing the short fence with two penlights between us, jogging to the other side that led to The Forest.
We climbed the next fence and landed on wet soil. It squished our shoes. We formed a single file and decided to make our way to the tool shed, which lay just a few meters away -- probably to find out what secrets he kept (it was rumored that he also had boy’s hearts preserved apart from bottles of snake poison).
The biggest boy walked point. I think I was in the middle. We hadn’t gotten far when the guy in the front yelled that he was sinking. Looking down, we saw this was true – we had taken a wrong path and were too near the creek, thus the mud and the quicksand-like bog. Checking for another route we found none.
We turned back, then up over the fence and across the field towards the other side, disappointed, upset about the TV shows we’d missed for this shit, the ruckus our mothers would raise at our muddy shoes, socks and pants. It happened when the last of us climbed down the fence.
The guy beside me, named D___, was talking with the Big Guy who had walked point. They were staring at The Forest as they discussed the merits of whether it was better to make up some lame excuse or telling the whole truth. Big Guy was saying that it didn’t matter, since either explanation would get him sent to bed without TV anwyay. D___ was about to reply when he stopped and just stared. His mouth was open, his eyes wide.
Before we could point our lights to his line of sight he gave out a true scared s*&^less shriek and ran past us. We all looked at each other and wasted no time following suit, squealing like girls. There was light enough to see that D___ had just about reached the high metal sawhorse that bordered the road. We thought he would duck like all of us did since it was too high to jump for even the tallest jock. We were wrong.
D___ did not slow his hellish pace, did not even blink, as he hurdled that sawhorse with inches to spare as if his legs had springs.
When we caught up to him at the waiting shed we asked him what he saw. He just kept on mumbling: the shadow, the shadow. Then Big Guy announced that he thought he saw something too. We turned to Big Guy and grilled him. It looked like a man on a tree, he said, a very thin man made of shadow that he wasn’t even sure he was seeing right. Until this darker, liquid shadow moved and looked directly at them. Or rather at D___.
The next day we asked Big Guy to sketch what he’d seen. Then we went to D___ and forced him to sketch what had suddenly made into an Olympic jumper that night.
We compared notes. Big Guy’s heavy hand and stick figure was less proficient than D___’s practiced crosshatch and shading, but they had drawn the same thing: a rake thin man with a knob for a head, his arms and legs clasped around a tree, his body made of darkness.
Storm season is frightening. In a good way, though, it’s both scary and exciting. The suspicion that something severe is going to happen gets me too amped. So there’s little else to do but peruse old memories when the wind howls, the lights are out and you can’t sleep.
That last big storm, Milenyo, had me commuting to work dodging tree branches like missiles and one particularly ill-timed street bulb that decided to loose itself from its post as I came near.
It landed a meter away and the explosive impact made me freeze, close my eyes and look away. My back was to the wind (at 150kph it’s real hard to lean against it) so most of the shards rolled quickly away. Another pedestrian coming the other way did the same stop and duck routine, but had to cover his face with his hands and arms to ward off the incoming shrapnel. I wanted to pick up the remaining bulb coil as a memento but I just walked faster.
As I write this a bigger storm is on the way and its approach is undeniable. The language of an impending storm is a subtle but tangible one: the floorboards creak like a burglar taking his first steps into a house he’s going to case, a drizzle falls that’s as cold as arctic frost, there’s a sigh in the wind that mimics the nativity of the newly risen dead who’ve come back to seek the perfection they couldn’t find beyond the grave.
You remember stuff as you anticipate a storm. Like elementary school. The fish balls I ate like caviar during recess, those Sticky Fingers that collected dust too fast, and Teacher Mylene’s taut, supple hamstrings as she walked clickety clack down the corridor in her black stilettos -- on display with a blue skirt only on Thursdays.
Stuff like a ghost story. This one is true. I was in it. Listen: I forget the names of my buddies, but there were four of us that night. As far as I can remember we were fulfilling a dare. Not from outside pressure, no. We considered that stupid. Instead we had dared each other until all of us agreed to go that night before we chickened out. In retrospect this was equally as idiotic.
Back then we were enrolled in the UP Integrated School (UPIS), Kinder to Grade Six Division. You probably know UP’s campus grounds are suffused from end to end with vegetation. Our school was tucked away beside the squat red building of the College of Home Economics. In front of it the elementary school’s modest soccer field and about five classrooms formed an annex apart from the main building.
Beside this is a heavily foliaged area (fenced off as well) filled with thin, crooked trees plus scores of bushes and undergrowth that hid a small, flowing creek (we could hear the water but couldn’t see it). And snakes. We saw them wrapped on the trees, we saw their mottled hide on the roof of a nearby tool shed where the caretaker -- who came once a week to tend the grass of the soccer field -- sometimes killed and skinned them.
We all called this place The Forest. When night came it was very, very dark there. The road was closed with two long sawhorses, the height of a 10 year old, put on each side.
So there we were climbing the short fence with two penlights between us, jogging to the other side that led to The Forest.
We climbed the next fence and landed on wet soil. It squished our shoes. We formed a single file and decided to make our way to the tool shed, which lay just a few meters away -- probably to find out what secrets he kept (it was rumored that he also had boy’s hearts preserved apart from bottles of snake poison).
The biggest boy walked point. I think I was in the middle. We hadn’t gotten far when the guy in the front yelled that he was sinking. Looking down, we saw this was true – we had taken a wrong path and were too near the creek, thus the mud and the quicksand-like bog. Checking for another route we found none.
We turned back, then up over the fence and across the field towards the other side, disappointed, upset about the TV shows we’d missed for this shit, the ruckus our mothers would raise at our muddy shoes, socks and pants. It happened when the last of us climbed down the fence.
The guy beside me, named D___, was talking with the Big Guy who had walked point. They were staring at The Forest as they discussed the merits of whether it was better to make up some lame excuse or telling the whole truth. Big Guy was saying that it didn’t matter, since either explanation would get him sent to bed without TV anwyay. D___ was about to reply when he stopped and just stared. His mouth was open, his eyes wide.
Before we could point our lights to his line of sight he gave out a true scared s*&^less shriek and ran past us. We all looked at each other and wasted no time following suit, squealing like girls. There was light enough to see that D___ had just about reached the high metal sawhorse that bordered the road. We thought he would duck like all of us did since it was too high to jump for even the tallest jock. We were wrong.
D___ did not slow his hellish pace, did not even blink, as he hurdled that sawhorse with inches to spare as if his legs had springs.
When we caught up to him at the waiting shed we asked him what he saw. He just kept on mumbling: the shadow, the shadow. Then Big Guy announced that he thought he saw something too. We turned to Big Guy and grilled him. It looked like a man on a tree, he said, a very thin man made of shadow that he wasn’t even sure he was seeing right. Until this darker, liquid shadow moved and looked directly at them. Or rather at D___.
The next day we asked Big Guy to sketch what he’d seen. Then we went to D___ and forced him to sketch what had suddenly made into an Olympic jumper that night.
We compared notes. Big Guy’s heavy hand and stick figure was less proficient than D___’s practiced crosshatch and shading, but they had drawn the same thing: a rake thin man with a knob for a head, his arms and legs clasped around a tree, his body made of darkness.
1 comment:
Well said.
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