Corners and crevices became her obsession. The space behind the toilet, the lip beneath the sink, the drain in the shower where a single strand of her own dark hair might be mistaken for a stranger’s. She scoured the mirror until her reflection was a warped, faceless ghost in the steam. She poured bleach into the toilet bowl and watched it foam, a cleansing baptism of fire and fumes.
The smell was overwhelming now, clinging to her clothes, her hair, stinging her eyes until they streamed with tears she refused to acknowledge as anything other than a chemical reaction. She worked until her muscles screamed and her lungs ached. The apartment was sterile, every surface gleaming with a harsh, chemical sheen, rendered as blank and featureless as she wished her own body could be. Exhausted, she leaned against the bathroom wall, her hands red and weeping, and stared at her work. The home was clean. It was empty. It was ready for him.
At some point, exhaustion pulled her under. She dreamed of water - black as ink, thick and endless. She floated above it, then found herself standing at the edge of a shore made of splintered bone and sea glass, the horizon split by a moon swollen to the size of a skull. The air was colder than anything she’d felt in waking life.
A line of figures approached from the surf, each cloaked in shadow, faces hidden beneath veils of red thread. At their center stood a woman. She was Lina, but not Lina; her hair was long and loose, her dress sodden with brine, her wrists encircled by cords of braided silk. Around her neck hung a pendant - no, a talisman - made of something so dark it seemed to eat the light, pulsing with a heartbeat Lina could feel inside her own chest.
The woman raised her arms and spoke words Lina did not know, but still understood: “I choose. I bind. I endure.” The words burned her tongue, left a taste like salt and copper.
The shadow figures circled the woman, drawing strange sigils in the sand with their bare, blue-veined feet. A wind came up, whipping their garments into screaming banners. The black water surged forward, rising and rising, until it swallowed the ritual, the shore, the moon - everything but Lina and the woman with her own face.
The talisman at the woman’s throat glowed bright, then split open to reveal a second, smaller mouth inside, rows of teeth sharp and red. The mouth smiled.
Lina woke with a start, lungs full of air so cold it hurt. She sat upright, clawing at her neck, searching for the weight of the talisman. Her sheets were twisted around her hips, damp with sweat, and her heart rattled against her ribs like a trapped animal.
For several minutes, she did nothing but breathe, slow and deliberate. The city outside was quiet now, a lull between the storms. Linalooked down at her wrist, where the bruise had faded to a dirty green, and wondered if it would ever truly leave.
She closed her eyes, and in the darkness behind them, the woman’s mouth still smiled.
Lina woke before dawn, choking on her own heartbeat. The room was as dark as the dream, shadows pooled in every corner, but her body was drenched in sweat and the sheets stuck to her skin like plastic wrap. She pressed a palm to her chest, half-expecting to find the blood-dark talisman there, pulsing in time with her panic.
Instead, her fingers found nothing but bare flesh and the afterimage of memory. She lay back, shivering in the humid air, and tried to slow her breathing. The dream refused to fade. Each time she blinked, she saw the woman - her face, older and harder, lips drawn back to reveal a smile that promised both salvation and hunger.
Outside, the city’s waking noises filtered in through the slatted window: the first drone of mopeds, a rooster insistent and off-key, a distant clatter of metal on concrete. The air carried the memory of last night’s heat, heavy with the scent of wilting flowers and burnt rice. Lina stared up at the ceiling, trying to reconcile the world of the dream with the one that awaited her. The difference felt less distinct than it should have.
She got up and paced barefoot through the apartment, careful not to disturb the neatness she had created the evening before. In the kitchen, she poured a glass of water, but her hand shook so badly thatshe spilled half of it down the front of her nightgown. The chill did nothing to cool her nerves.
On the counter, the vegetables she’d bought yesterday still glistened with a film of market grime. She remembered Rosita’s words - When you are ready for another path, come to me - and felt a fresh jolt of fear. The old woman had known, with that terrible certainty, exactly what Lina faced. Even now, her thumb throbbed where Rosita had pressed the bruise. Lina cradled her wrist, tracing the yellow-green bloom with a gentleness she would never show to anyone else.
She didn’t want to admit it, not even to herself, but the prospect of Ramon’s return - once merely a shadow on the horizon - now loomed with the weight of an executioner’s blade. She could not picture him without also picturing the hands that gripped, the voice that accused, the eyes that searched her body for secrets she didn’t have. She had lived with the hope that he would change, or that she would, or that the world would at least give her the strength to bear it.
Last night’s dream had offered something else. Not hope, exactly, but power. The image of the talisman haunted her: how its darkness seemed alive, how it glowed in the moment of choice. The words that echoed in the space behind her teeth - “I choose. I bind. I endure.” - felt like a script she was meant to read, an inheritance waiting to be claimed.
But there was fear, too. What if the other path led not to freedom, but to something worse? What if the darkness in her was not a tool, but a trap? Lina stared out the window, watching as the first light sketched pale lines across the skyline. The edge of the barangay was visible in the distance, just past the knot of banana trees and the slumping roof of the abandoned sari-sari store.
She thought of Nanay Rosita, sitting sentinel on her rickety stoop, eyes bright as river stones, waiting for the lost to come home.
Lina’s breath fogged the glass. She set the cup down, wiped her hands on her nightgown, and stood very still, listening to the city find its rhythm. There was time yet before Ramon arrived. Time enough to pretend, or time enough to change everything.
She drew the curtain aside and gazed east, toward the hut at the world’s edge, and felt something inside her tilt - a small, seismic shift. Maybe this was what it felt like to choose. Maybe this was how it began.
The knock at the door in the afternoon was so soft Lina almost convinced herself it was a figment of the chemical haze still lingering in the air. But it came again, a gentle, insistent tapping. Through the peephole, Carmela’s round face was distorted, her brow furrowed with a familiar worry. Lina took a moment to compose her own features into a mask of placid neutrality before unlatching the locks.
“Mela,” she said, forcing a small, tight smile.
Carmela stepped inside, carrying two plastic containers that steamed with the warm, savory scent of chicken adobo and rice. The aroma of garlic, soy, and bay leaf was an immediate affront to the sterile void Lina had spent the night creating. It was the smell of home, of comfort, of a life Lina felt she no longer inhabited.
“I made too much,” Carmela said, her eyes scanning the apartment before landing on Lina. “Thought you could use some.” Her gaze dropped to Lina’s hands, which Lina reflexively tried to hide behind her back. But it was too late. Carmela had already seen the raw,chapped skin, the angry red of her knuckles. Her smile faltered. “Diyos ko, Lina, your hands… And what is that smell? Did you spill the whole bottle of bleach?”
“Just spring cleaning,” Lina said, her voice brittle. She stepped back, creating a space between them that felt miles wide. “You shouldn’t have. I have food.”
“This is better,” Carmela insisted, moving toward the kitchen with the careful, deliberate gait of someone navigating a minefield. Her expression was a painful mix of pity and helplessness. She opened the refrigerator, its interior as stark and empty as a hospital room, and placed the containers inside. Her movements were nurturing, an echo of a friendship that felt like it belonged to another lifetime. “You need to eat, Linang. Keep your strength up.”
Strength for what? Lina wanted to ask. To scrub harder? To endure better? She remained by the door, her body a rigid line of defense. The kindness felt like a physical weight, pressing down on her, demanding a vulnerability she could no longer afford.
Carmela turned from the refrigerator, her hands clasped in front of her. She looked as though she wanted to say a hundred different things, but the words died in the suffocating, bleach-scented air. She saw the new, hard set of Lina’s jaw, the emptiness behind her eyes, and knew that none of her words would find purchase.
“Well,” Carmela said finally, her voice small. “I should go. Let me know… let me know if you need anything.”
