When Lina was nineteen, she loved the confidence in his laugh and the way he looked at her - fragile, precious. She hadn’t known some men collect breakable things just to crush them.
Now at twenty-seven, eight years of marriage had etched fine lines at her eyes and hollowed her collarbones. Ramon’s offshore engineer salary - fifty-five thousand a year - became his justification for her isolation and childlessness. While he called her clerical work at the health clinic “her little hobby,” those four thousand pesos weekly were hers alone. Ramon called it “her little hobby,” and every payday, he would pinch her chin and ask, “So how many pesos did you bring to Daddy this month?”
Her mouth would twitch in a smile. She had become very, very good at smiling.
Outside, noise swelled, light shifting from gold to feverish orange, painting laundry and walls with a sickly glow.
The first night, he would fuck her as if he were starving, hands everywhere, the heavy slap of skin and sweat until she could barely walk the next morning. If she bled, it was her fault for being “outof practice.” If she cried, he would whisper into her ear, low and saccharine, that he only wanted her, that he missed her, that she was the one thing in his world that made sense.
She would think: You have never known sense, only need. And she would swallow the words until they curdled into silence.
The room was growing darker. She turned on the light, a soft yellow glow that smoothed the edges of the apartment into something almost cozy. She’d chosen every stick of furniture herself - scavenged coffee table, bright cheap wall art, Monday’s fresh flowers, each a small rebellion against the drab and the routine. Even the rice cooker - a gift from Carmela, her only friend - was a small miracle, humming with a motherly patience as it steamed the day’s ration.
Lina perched on the sofa’s arm, pressing her thumb against the bruise just beginning to yellow at her forearm. Ramon’s last visit had been worse than most - a black mood from the start, the taste of cheap whiskey clinging to his tongue as he kissed her. He had accused her, as always, of hiding money, of seeing someone else, of plotting to leave. Each accusation was followed by an apology, and then another accusation, the cycle winding tighter and tighter until his hands left marks.
For fourteen nights, she’d slept in cotton that clung to her skin despite the heat. The yellow-green shadow beneath the fabric had almost vanished now - like the tender spot along her spine where the wall had caught her falling body. She found herself checking both marks daily, calculating their fade against his return, as if her skin were keeping its own desperate calendar.
She rose and went to the kitchen, feet bare and silent on the cold tile. The envelope waited for her, stubborn and loud in its crimson border.
She thought, briefly, about not telling Carmela. Her friend would only worry, would press her for details, would invite her for endless cups of sweet, milky coffee and listen with that sick animal empathy Lina could not bear. But there would be no hiding it, not in a barangay where every movement was witnessed, every absence noted, every bruise accounted for by a chorus of neighborly concern and whispered judgment.
Lina opened the fridge, stared at the modest rows of tupperware and beer cans, and planned her next three days: what she would cook, what she would say, how she would keep the walls from closing in before Ramon even crossed the threshold. She found herself humming, low and tuneless, as she assembled her defense.
For a moment, she let herself imagine the impossible. Not just leaving him - she had considered and rejected that fantasy a hundred times, for a hundred reasons - but obliterating him. A flash of forbidden violence: scissors buried to the hilt, a quick push from the balcony, the sweet, silent glide of pillow over face. The image thrilled and disgusted her. She choked on the laugh that threatened to rise, and instead reached for the carrots, the knife, the clean white cutting board.
She moved with the precision of a surgeon, slicing, arranging, cleaning as she went. The rhythms of domesticity soothed her, even as her mind raced. She would survive this next cycle, as she had survived all the others. She would smile, and she would serve, and she would let him believe that he had won. But beneath it all, something else grew: patient, hungry, as inevitable as the tide.
The sun had vanished entirely. In its place, the city glowed with a thousand small wounds of light, each one pulsing with its own secret, sick heat. Lina carried her dinner to the table, set the place for one, and ate with slow, deliberate bites. She chewed each mouthful to pulp,savoring the pain when a sliver of carrot cut the inside of her cheek. She tasted the iron and closed her eyes.
The letter lay on the floor, a promise and a threat. She left it untouched, a thin red line against the white of the laminate, and finished her meal in silence.
By seven the next morning, the air was already thick enough to drown in. Manila’s humid predawn was always like this, a velvet pressure on the lungs and skin. Lina emerged into it anyway, sandals slapping the cracked pavement as she made her way toward the talipapa, the neighborhood market still waking from the fugue of night.
Vendors unrolled tarps and beat at flies with flattened sections of broadsheet. The low, permanent roofs of plastic sheeting trapped the fug of last night’s catch and this morning’s sweat. A faint, sour miasma hung over everything, part ocean, part decay, part the nervous electricity of too many bodies packed into too little space. Lina threaded her way between the stalls, practiced and invisible, shoulders hunched against the world.
The market was an orchestra, each stallmaster a percussionist: the thud of cleavers on wet bone, the hiss of oil catching on battered woks, the metallic jangle of coins passing from hand to hand. Voices volleyed overhead - offers, insults, haggles, the rolling gossip that never slept. Lina heard her own name, distant and then close, as if conjured.
She found Carmela by the fruit carts, hands already sticky with the juice of mangoes too ripe for their own skins. Carmela looked up,smiled wide, and for a moment Lina let herself believe that the world could be safe.
“Linang,” Carmela said, swatting at a fruit fly with the back of her wrist. “You’re early today.” Her tone was gentle, musical, tuned to Lina’s secret frequency.
Lina nodded, busying herself with the selection of eggplants. “Couldn’t sleep. Too hot.”
Carmela’s brow knitted. “You okay?”
The question was a stone dropped into Lina’s chest, splashing up panic she barely managed to hide. “Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
Carmela’s eyes were honest, brown as river silt, and always searching. She let her gaze linger on Lina’s right forearm, where a faint shadow of bruise peeked below the rolled-up cuff. Carmela’s lips pressed into a worried line, but she said nothing. Instead, she weighed a mango in each hand, sniffed the stems, and chose the one Lina would have picked for herself.
They made the rest of their circuit in silence, Lina’s basket growing heavy with bitter gourd, green onions, and the raw, sandy weight of two perfect tilapia. When they reached the end of the produce stalls, Carmela paused, head tilted, as if hearing a far-off melody.
“Are you sure you’re all right,ate?“ Carmela asked, voice softer now, almost afraid of the answer.
Lina swallowed. The lie formed itself, smooth and cold as river stone. “I’m fine. Really. Just…thinking.”
But before Carmela could say more, the market’s equilibrium ruptured with the arrival of Tita Letty. Her voice announced itself ahead of her body, a blare of sound that parted the crowd and demanded attention.
“Ay, Linang!” Letty’s arms were loaded with bags of purple yam bread and a bag of crispy pork rinds, but she managed a stage-worthywave. “You’re shopping alone again, ha! I thought maybe today yourasawawould let you breathe.”
