Lina nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She watched her friend leave, the click of the closing door a profound and devastating relief.
Later that day, there was another knock. This one was louder, more official. It was Kapitan Ernesto Cruz, his button-up shirt already showing dark patches of sweat under the arms. He stood on her doormatshifting his weight from foot to foot, his gaze fixed on a point somewhere over her left shoulder.
“Lina,” he began, clearing his throat. “I was just in the area. Checking on… community matters.” His discomfort was a tangible thing, a third person in the cramped hallway.
Lina said nothing, merely waited.
He fidgeted with the watch on his wrist, a thick, silver thing that seemed too heavy for his hand. “Some of the women… Tita Letty… they expressed some concern. About Ramon’s return.” He finally chanced a look at her, but his eyes slid away almost immediately, landing on a crack in the wall tile. “I just wanted to say, officially, that the community supports you. The barangay is here for you, whatever you need.”
The words were a script, delivered without conviction. He was absolving himself, performing the role of a concerned leader so he could sleep at night. He had no intention of intervening, of dirtying his hands with the messy, private violence of a marriage.
“Thank you, Kapitan,” Lina said, her voice perfectly toneless. Her stillness was an accusation, and it made him shift his weight again, eager to flee.
“Yes, well.” He glanced at his watch again. “I have a meeting. Just… know we’re here.” He gave a clumsy, aborted gesture that might have been meant to be a pat on the arm, then turned and walked away with the brisk pace of a man escaping a bad smell.
Lina closed the door and leaned her forehead against the cool wood. She listened to his footsteps retreat down the stairs. Carmela’s adobo sat untouched in the clinically clean refrigerator. The Captain’s empty promises echoed in the sterile air. The visits had done nothing but shear away her last, foolish hope. They saw. They knew. And they would do nothing.
She was completely, irrevocably alone.
# Scene 3
After Ernesto left, the silence in the apartment pressed in on Lina, heavy and absolute. She drifted into the bathroom, the one room she had scrubbed with the most vicious piety. The air was still sharp with the ghost of bleach. She stood before the mirror, her bare feet cold on the tiles, and looked at the woman trapped in the glass.
The harsh fluorescent bulb overhead was merciless, carving sharp hollows beneath her cheekbones and exposing the faint, web-like lines of exhaustion around her eyes. It was her face, the face she had lived with for twenty-seven years, but it felt like a mask she could no longer remove. Her fingers, still tender and raw, rose to trace its geography.
She touched the curve of her jaw. Ramon had once held her face in his big, calloused hands as if it were a chalice, his thumbs stroking that same line. “So beautiful,” he had whispered, his breath warm against her skin after a long shift, the love in his eyes so potent it had felt like a physical shield. He had worshipped this body, charting its landscape with a tenderness that had promised safety, a lifetime of it.
Her fingers brushed her lips, and the memory curdled. She saw another Ramon, his face flushed with rage and liquor, those same hands becoming fists. She remembered the metallic taste of blood in her mouth after he’d backhanded her for burning the rice, the shock of the impact a white-hot flash behind her eyes. He punished the same body he once revered, as if trying to break the vessel that held a spirit he could no longer control. The tender moments and the violent ones were not separate; they were part of the same terrible story, the love and the rage twisted together into a garrote.
Looking at her reflection, she saw the girl who had believed in his promises and the woman who now knew them to be lies. He was coming home again soon. The thought no longer produced thefrantic, trembling fear of the night before. The visits from Carmela and the Captain had burned that away, cauterizing the wound. What was left was something cold, something heavy. It was the dread of inevitability, the certainty that the cycle would not just continue, but worsen. Waiting for him to change was a slow death. Waiting for someone to save her was a fantasy.
The woman from her dream rose in her mind, standing on that shore of bone and sea glass. Her face was Lina’s, but her eyes held a power that Lina had never dared to claim.
*I choose. I bind. I endure.*
The words were no longer a mystery. They were a path. A choice. The darkness that had terrified her in the dream now felt like an inheritance, a weapon left for her in the ancestral dust.
A profound calm settled over her. The frantic energy was gone, replaced by a singular, chilling purpose. She knew what she had to do.
As dusk began to bleed purple and orange across the polluted sky, she moved with a newfound deliberation. She did not pack a bag or write a note. She simply took a worn, gray shawl from a hook by the door and wrapped it around her shoulders. She left the lights off, locked the door behind her without a backward glance, and descended into the growing twilight.
She walked purposefully through the barangay, her sandals making soft, rhythmic sounds on the pavement. The familiar noises of the neighborhood - the sizzle of street food, the shouted laughter, the melancholy ballad drifting from a karaoke machine - seemed to come from a great distance, as if she were already moving through another world. She walked past Tita Letty’s sari-sari store, its lights a cheerful, false beacon in the gloom. She walked past the corner where children played their last games of tag before being called inside. She was invisible to them all, a ghost already leaving their world behind.
Her path led to the edge of the community, where the cracked streets gave way to a dirt track. The ground beneath her feet changed abruptly. The familiar red-brown earth became a strange, dead black, soft and almost greasy underfoot, as if the soil itself were saturated with old secrets and sorrows. It did not crunch; it absorbed the sound of her steps.
Ahead, Nanay Rosita’s hut stood in silhouette against the last of the light, looking less like a structure and more like something that had grown out of the blighted earth. It was small and crooked, a collection of salvaged wood and rusted tin that seemed to hum with a quiet, ancient power. The air around it was different - cooler, smelling of woodsmoke, dried herbs, and the faint, coppery scent of blood.
Lina stopped before the low, warped door. She raised her hand to knock, her knuckles hovering inches from the wood, but before she could make contact, the door swung inward on its own, soundlessly.
Nanay Rosita stood framed in the opening, a small, hunched figure casting a shadow that stretched long and monstrous behind her from the flickering candlelight within. The interior was a shock to the senses. The walls were covered in spiraling symbols drawn in what looked like charcoal and ochre. Shelves overflowed with bundles of herbs, cloudy jars filled with unidentifiable things, and artifacts of bone, stone, and dark, polished wood. The air was thick with the scent of burning sage and something else, something wild and feral.
Rosita’s dark, penetrating eyes met hers. There was no surprise in them, only a profound and weary recognition.
“You’ve come to learn about choices,” the old woman said, her raspy voice a statement, not a question. She reached out, her bird-like hand closing around Lina’s arm, her grip firm and guiding. She pulled her gently over the threshold, into the warm, flickering dark. “There are always choices,anak. Even when it seems there are none.”
The door swung shut, plunging the world outside into silence and shadow.
Blood and Bargains
