The old woman’s grip was not merely strong - it was absolute, as if her hand had replaced Lina’s own bones. She pressed her thumb with surgical accuracy against the bruised flesh, making Lina flinch. The pain was sharp but intimate, a kind of recognition.
“He returns soon,” Rosita said, voice both whisper and thunder. Lina’s ears rang with it, and for a split second the entire market seemed to hush, even the flies stunned into silence.
Lina jerked back, but the hand tightened, holding her as a mother might hold a child teetering on the edge of traffic. Rosita leaned in, her breath sweet and ruinous. “When you are ready for another path,come to me,” she said, and this time her voice split into layers - one soft, one guttural, and one that sounded exactly like Lina’s own.
Then, without warning, the grip vanished. Lina stumbled backward, nearly colliding with a crate of durian, the world suddenly too bright and too loud. All eyes were on her, or so she imagined, but no one spoke. Not even the children.
She cradled her arm to her chest and hurried away, out of the market, through the boiling streets, up the stairwell that reeked of fried garlic and rotting paint. Once inside her apartment, she locked the door, then checked the lock twice more before daring to breathe.
The rest of the day was a blur - boiling water, chopping ginger, sorting laundry with numb hands. Her phone buzzed with a message from Carmela, but she ignored it, unwilling to share the contamination or confess what she could not articulate. When dusk fell, she closed the curtains and lay on her bed, shivering in spite of the heat.
Sleep refused her. She tossed and twisted, the sheets binding her ankles, sweat slicking the small of her back. Every time her eyelids fluttered shut, she felt the thumb on her bruise, the certainty of that voice echoing through her skull. Outside, the city’s night symphony - a siren, the bark of feral dogs, the rise and fall of distant karaoke - did nothing to soothe her.
Threshold of Choice
The phone rang at five minutes past midnight, a shrill, digital scream that sliced through the apartment’s quiet. Lina had been sitting in the dark, watching the headlights of late-night taxis bleed across the ceiling. She didn’t move, hoping it was a wrong number, a phantom signal. But it rang again, and again, each peal tightening the knot in her stomach. She knew who it was. The timing washis signature.
She crossed the cool tile floor and picked up the receiver, her hand a pale shape in the gloom. “Hello?”
Static hissed across the line, a sound like frying insects, and then his voice, thick with cheap whiskey and the hollow echo of a satellite connection. “Lina.” It wasn’t a greeting; it was an indictment.
“Ramon,” she said, her own voice a stranger’s, thin and dry. “Is everything alright?”
A wet, humorless laugh crackled in her ear. “Is everything alright? That’s what you ask me? I should be asking you that, shouldn’t I? Is everything alright over there,mahal?” The term of endearment was a weapon, sharpened on his tongue.
Lina closed her eyes, her knuckles white where she gripped the phone. “I was sleeping.”
“Sleeping,” he repeated, savoring the word as if it were a lie he’d caught her in. “Alone?”
“Of course, alone.” She kept her voice flat, an empty field where his rage could find no purchase.
“I heard a noise,” he slurred. “When you picked up. Sounded like a man clearing his throat.”
“It’s the connection, Ramon. You’re on the ship.” She could picture him perfectly: sitting in a cramped cabin that smelled of diesel and sweat, the bottle sweating beside his elbow, his eyes narrowed at some imagined betrayal playing out on the dark screen of his mind.
“Don’t tell me what I hear,” he snapped. “I hear what I hear. Did you go to the market today? Did you see that son of a bitch who sells the fish? The one with the arms, who always gives you the extra shrimp?”
“I bought tilapia, Ramon. From Aling Nida’s boy.”
“Ah, the boy. Yes. He’s a man now, isn’t he? A man who looks at what isn’t his.” His voice dropped into a conspiratorial whisper, asound more dangerous than his shouting. “You wore the yellow dress, didn’t you? The one that shows the shape of your back when you bend over.”
“No. I wore my blue blouse. The one from the clinic.”
A long pause, filled with the hiss of the ocean between them. “The blue one. Even worse. That one is thin. You think I don’t remember? I remember every stitch of clothing on your body.” He made a soft, guttural sound. “When I get home… I’ll know. Don’t think for a second I won’t. I can smell it on you. I’ll know if you’ve been with someone else.”
The line clicked dead.
Lina stood holding the receiver, the dial tone a flat, mocking buzz against her ear. She placed it back in its cradle with a hand that had begun to tremble violently. The tremor started in her fingers and spread, a seismic wave that traveled up her arm and into her chest until her teeth chattered. Her breathing came in short, ragged gasps. The apartment, her carefully curated sanctuary, suddenly felt contaminated, every surface crawling with his suspicion.
Her eyes darted around the room, seeing not furniture and flowers, but evidence. The indentation on the sofa cushion where she’d sat. The single glass by the sink. The faint scent of her own floral soap in the air. All of it, a trail of her solitary existence that he would twist into proof of a secret life.
She had to erase it. She had to erase herself.
The impulse was a fever. She tore open the cabinet beneath the sink, her movements jerky and uncoordinated. The plastic bottle of bleach was cool and heavy in her hands. She unscrewed the cap, the chemical fumes a sharp, clean assault on her senses. It was the smell of purity, of obliteration.
She started in the kitchen, pouring the bleach directly onto the counter, the viscous liquid spreading in a glassy sheet. She scrubbed with a rage that bordered on joy, her whole body thrown into the effort. The sponge tore against the laminate, but she kept going, scouring the surface as if she could strip it down to raw wood. She poured more into the sink, watching it swirl down the drain, taking with it any imagined trace of another’s touch.
Her hands began to burn, the bleach eating at the delicate skin between her fingers. The pain was a focus, a bright, clarifying point in the chaos of her panic. She moved to the bathroom, the epicenter of all bodily sins. On her hands and knees, she attacked the floor, the brush in her hand a furious, bristling weapon. She scrubbed the grout between the white tiles, her knuckles scraping raw against the ceramic. She watched, with a detached fascination, as small beads of blood mingled with the soapy, chemical water.
