Sleep was finally beginning to visit the insomniacs and drinkers of T—in central Manila when a commotion louder than the usual domestic squabbles erupted from the room above Mang Calixto’s bakery. One after the other: footfalls on crunchy GI sheets, objects falling on hardwood, a loud crash, a female screech. And when it was over, out came, through the side door below, the dazed, emaciated figure of the retired general. Dazed but also smiling,
the remnant no doubt of a megalomania that ran unchallenged for too long. Escorted by soldiers in full battle gear, the decorated butcher of peasants and activists looked jolted from sleep, hair long and gray, a shadow of his former self.
From across the street, Yñiga’s view grew increasingly obstructed, first by an ambulance, then a parade of menacing black SUVs, and finally a van that disgorged a reporter and a yawning cameraman. She felt an urge to rubberneck—quickly chased off by the usual resignation. It was done, it was done. She took a drag on her cigarette as the scene was engulfed in layers of bodies. Among the early birds: the workers from the plastic factory plucked from their post-shift meal at the lugawan (she gave them a weary wave), the street gangs looking oddly behaved with their Styrofoam cups from Dikoy’s wake down the road, the high-school theater group fresh off a late rehearsal in the covered court. Then the dogs, the cats, the children who must have been awoken by the blare of the siren, followed by their mothers, who quickly found one another amid a volley of conjectures.
All over T—, the bright glare of fluorescent lights traced the outlines of shut windows. The glow of ten-watt bulbs peeked from behind the patchworks of plywood and concrete. A street away the psychedelic sounds of a videoke machine stopped. Above the roofs, like an alien protrusion, the lights on a faraway derrick flickered. A rooster crowed hours ahead of schedule. The colossal balete next to the chapel and barangay hall appeared to lean closer to the site of the capture, the shivering of leaves and roots and branches registering in the air as vague applause.
Who’s that, asked a kid, trying to see from behind the forest of bodies.
His mother shushed him. Basta, she said. Masama.
Yñiga shook off the catatonia. She had stepped out curious about the commotion, her reluctant handiwork. Maybe to catch a glimpse of the fugitive’s face and look for any satisfying hint of regret or grief or terror. To make up for the subterranean vacuum in her chest. But unable to see a thing she found herself drawn to her neighbors’ reactions instead, the gradations of nonchalance and confusion and delight. She crouched to pet the furry insistence on her legs: Jestoni, roused by the ruckus, by the faint alarm in the air not unlike oncoming rain. Light sleepers, she and the cat, unlike Diego, the house’s third occupant until a few days ago, until the series of events that led to his departure and this man’s capture, until things went from good to bad to beyond her control, the pattern that seemed to hold together her life.
A sneer curled at one corner of the handcuffed general’s thin lips.
From the corner of her eye Yñiga saw the usurer Love Joy step out of her bungalow, known in the neighborhood simply as the Big House (not to be mistaken for the Bahay Kastila, out by the main road, its first floor converted into a barbershop and a notary public). Love Joy’s was the only one that resembled the kind of proper house drawn by all school-age children the world over, with proper walls and a roof that properly tapered. She was tailed by her American lover Brad, who proceeded, as was his wont, to narrate the scene in singsong English. Next to them was old Mang Polly, the sidelined owner of the computer shop next to the bakery. Someone alighted from a pedicab and winced in pain—Mel, in the pointy heels and bright orange vest that were part of her uniform at the motel where she worked as a receptionist. Lourdes, who collected the street’s garbage, arrived with her cart, loaded as usual with wooden planks and plastic bottles and discarded furniture, the pile twice as tall as her. She and Yñiga
caught each other’s eyes and exchanged almost imperceptible nods, the barest recognition of a conspiracy.
More dogs. More cats.
People shaken from their houses, their sheer density always surprising out in the open.
Most of it would be ablaze the following week, five days later. A stubby candle, some said, that Lourdes swore she had blown out before leaving the house for her nightly round. A tiny dancing flame so at home among the towers of cardboard and newspapers and clutter.
A hundred charred houses in two hours. One corpse burned beyond identification.
Ganti raw, people whispered.
It would explain the like-minded tardiness of the fire trucks.
Yñiga’s thoughts were drowned out by the crowd-parting blare of the ambulance, which must have carried the general, and the baleful beeps of the SUVs; in the backseat sat the baker Mang Calixto and his wife, handcuffed hands covered in all-purpose flour. The vehicles sped off in the direction of the main road, the van on their trail. In the fresh silence: the slow, disappointed slapping of rubber slippers on pavement, the murmured summary of what had just taken place, the first notes of a videoke machine being restarted.
She watched the crowd recede. Poor bakery, just that morning the site of furious, wholesome communal activity, for decades the source of warm pandesal for everyone within a five-hundred-meter radius. Now condemned and boarded up, cordoned off by sagging tape, dirty roll-up door set to adorn the front pages of tomorrow’s papers.
She gave Jestoni, asleep on her feet, a wake-up scratch behind the ears. Let’s go in? she whispered, not moving. Minutes later she felt a party of mosquitoes feasting on her bare legs; she had been staring into space again. Her chronic inattention, one day she would pay for
it, she thought. She noticed that her cat, ever the sovereign, had gone ahead without her. Back in the house she reclaimed her spot in front of the computer.
The cushioned seat, warm with the untold number of hours she had spent sitting on it, writing papers and reports and theses for lazy American undergraduates.
Poetry in between. Hurried, sequestered verses.
The swivel chair came from Lourdes, who had found it during one of her rounds, on a sidewalk along the main road, near the row of computer shops. Looked serviceable, except for a giant water stain on the backrest, some loose screws in the base, a busted caster wheel
or two. How many times did she rotate on it, drained and yearning for bed, thinking of the English word for suya or pungas or nangangapa, wondering why a thought so clear in her head was so difficult to phrase in the alien but lucrative language.
She tried to get back to work but her mind refused to settle down. Darwinian even in enervation, it habitually returned to moments when things could have been salvaged. The brink of disaster, the breath before the jump. Making that phone call yesterday, for instance. Or saying yes to the man who said he was writing the biography of her late father. Quitting that teaching job at the university. Then further afield. To the river in M—where Ramona died. To Elvie’s, the dive bar in Cubao where she and Diego met. To that night months ago when she stepped out of the house for a smoke and saw it. A garbage collector jumping off the back of a truck and handing the baker and general-coddler a package wrapped in taut, orange plastic. She should have ignored it. Should have charged it to the universe’s appetite for curiosities. But accursed by the need to know, to put two and two together, she didn’t.
Or, Jestoni’s purr interjected from his favorite spot next to the mattress, could it have been your insatiable need to feel special?
Or just feel, Yñiga told the empty house. She turned to the cat, who had gone to sleep.
Haven’t we had this conversation before?
Her cell phone rang, the call was expected, but she was still surprised. A long exhale, then she picked up.
The mangy lavender towel where Jestoni liked to sleep was among the few things she instinctively grabbed when the first shouts of Fire! Fire! rang in the air. That and a pack of cigarettes and a notebook. She saw the cat make a run for it and knew that he would be safe, that they’d find each other, but she figured he would be too rattled to sleep on anything else. The pack she took because it was only halfway finished. The notebook because a blank page always soothed her. A last look at the house, the books, the computer, the mattress, her cocoon.
And then she ran like the wind.
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From Yñiga by Glenn Diaz. Used with permission of the publisher, Coffee House Press. Copyright © 2026 by Glenn Diaz.
