Lina shrank a fraction, her spine compressing under the woman’s gaze. Letty drew up beside them, close enough to share a heartbeat, and peered into Lina’s basket as if divining her future from vegetables.
Carmela bristled, sliding a protective half-step closer to Lina. But Letty was undeterred, a battleship in floral polyester. “You know what I heard,‘day?“ Letty said, eyes gleaming with unspent malice. “I heard the Mariposa is due in port this weekend - your Ramon might be on that one, Lina! Have you prepared the good sheets? He’s not the type to like the old ones, not with the skin he has, so sensitive.” Her eyebrows leaped upward, a pantomime of dirty implication.
Lina managed a polite smile. “Thank you, Tita. I’m ready for him.”
Letty leaned in, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper that could be heard by half the market. “Some men, they have a hard time on the ships, no? All those months, nothing but beer and other men. When they get home, sometimes they want to celebrate a little too hard. My cousin’s neighbor, her husband broke her wrist! She had to cookadobowith one hand.“ Letty shook her head, pursed her lips. “You must be careful, Linang. Sometimes, the men come back changed.”
Lina’s throat closed. She felt her hands go numb, the basket’s handle digging into her palm. She nodded, teeth fixed in a smile.
Carmela cleared her throat, gentle but insistent. “Lina knows how to take care of herself, Tita. Maybe we should let her finish shopping - she has to get to work.”
Letty tittered. “Of course, of course! I only want to help. You know me, always thinking of my girls.” She touched Lina’s cheek with a papery hand, and then drifted off to the next aisle, trailing rumors like a dirty train.
Lina let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. The world swam back into focus: the sizzle of frying fish, the briny reek of shrimp, the drone of scooter engines outside. She looked at Carmela, expecting reproach, but found only a soft worry, and a tired affection.
“You don’t have to listen to her,” Carmela said. “She lives for other people’s drama. It’s like - “ she groped for the English, lips pursed, “food for her. Junk food.”
Lina laughed, weak but real. “She would starve without it.”
They made their way toward the exit, baskets loaded, neither eager to say goodbye. Outside, the light was brighter, crueler, bouncing off metal roofs and painting sharp shadows across the street. A stray cat picked through spilled rice, its tail a banner of defiance.
Carmela reached out, hesitated, then squeezed Lina’s hand, quick and warm. “Call me tonight, okay? Even if just to say hi. I worry about you.”
“I will,” Lina promised, surprised at how much she meant it.
She watched as Carmela turned up the street toward her own home, legs pumping with the purposeful stride of someone who believed in destinations. Lina lingered by the market’s edge, letting the chaos recede. Her nerves still tingled from Letty’s touch, her thoughts thick with the certainty of what awaited her.
She dreaded the long walk home, imagining specters at every corner, and felt a wave of relief knowing her shift at the clinic would start soon. Work would keep her mind occupied, prevent her from drowning in anticipation of what was to come.
By the time Lina left the clinic, the sky was already bruised with evening.
The walk home traced the same path every day, but tonight Lina felt the distance as a narrowing corridor, each step more constrained, the shadows drawing in as the sun spilled its last from behind the apartment block. The neighborhood changed after dark - corners that had seemed familiar now bulged with threat, the lazy games of children replaced by the stalking silhouettes of stray dogs and men who drank their dinner from bottles wrapped in newsprint.
She kept to the right side of the road, hugging the uneven boundary where cracked pavement gave way to dust and wiry tufts of grass. She’d learned the hard way that walking with purpose, arms close, eyes down, bought her a kind of invisibility. Still, she could never shake the sense of being watched - not by the people, who had seen her so often as to render her part of the furniture, but by something else, less patient, waiting for a lapse.
She moved fast, the blood in her ears loud as surf. Every step a tally, every corner a calculation of angles and sightlines. She barely registered the fading catcalls, the low arguments from behind warped fences, the scent of burning garbage that clung to every surface. It was only when she reached the last bend, the border between theirbarangayand the reedy, low-lying land beyond, that she slowed.
At the edge of the neighborhood stood a hut so small it seemed at war with gravity, every plank a different color, every wall patched with scavenged tin or palm. The ground around it was different from the red-brown clay everywhere else - it was black, pitch as tar, as if something had bled out into the soil and killed it forever.
An old woman sat on the low stoop, legs folded, arms draped over knees as if she’d grown there. Her hair was silver, bound in a tight bun with a pin that gleamed dull in the twilight. Her skin was the colorof dried leaf, creased and tough, and it stretched thin over a face that seemed carved rather than born. The woman was knitting, or perhaps knotting; the thing in her lap was a snarl of red and black threads, wet-looking, impossible to follow with the eye.
Lina tried not to look, but something in the air made it impossible to ignore. The woman’s eyes were open, too wide, and black as the soil beneath her. They locked onto Lina’s as she approached, and the charge in that glance prickled the hair on Lina’s arms. There was a knowledge there, a bright and hungry intelligence, as if the woman could read her like a chart.
Lina almost faltered - almost - but she kept her steps steady, gave a quick, shallow nod as was polite, and looked away. The woman said nothing, but the silent echo of her gaze followed, twisting up the spine and into the skull.
It was only when Lina was a block away, the hut lost behind a crumbling wall of bougainvillea, that she exhaled. She walked faster, unlocked the apartment gate with fumbling keys, and shut the door behind her with the decisive click of a bolt well-practiced.
For a full minute, she leaned against the door, head pressed to the chipped wood, willing her heart to slow. The silence of the apartment was at first a comfort, then a threat. She knew she should move - but she stood, listening, waiting for some sign that the old woman’s gaze had not followed her inside.
Eventually, habit took over. She moved to the kitchen, took out the the vegetables from the crisper, wiped down the counters with a neat, circular motion. She set the rice cooker, measured the grains precisely, as if the secret to safety was in the details. She checked the locks again, once, then twice, then turned off all the lights but one, a low-watt bulb in the living room that left the rest of the apartment in a state of mild, permanent dusk.
Her phone buzzed - a message from Carmela, no doubt. Lina ignored it for now. The memory of the old woman’s face sat at the edge of her vision, always just about to emerge from a corner. She had heard stories, of course; everyone in the barangay had. Some called her Nanay Rosita, the Keeper of Shadows. Others whispered words like “bruha” and “kulam” and crossed themselves when passing by. Lina had always dismissed it as neighborly nonsense - until now, when her own body seemed to believe in curses more than her mind did.
She ate her dinner in silence, the food tasteless. She arranged and rearranged the living room: cushions straight, curtains just so, remote controls aligned with military precision. She checked the locks a third time. She looked at the crimson-edged letter, still on the counter, and thought of burning it, swallowing the ash.
When it was late enough that sleep might not be an enemy, she stripped down to her underwear and lay on top of the bedsheet, the heat still clinging to the walls. She stared at the ceiling, at the faint water stains that mapped out archipelagos and animals she’d never seen.
Her mind replayed the day in a loop: the bruise on her arm, Carmela’s worried eyes, Letty’s gossip, the old woman’s silence. And always, under it all, the knowledge that Ramon was coming home, and that this time, something in her had shifted, minutely but forever.
