Smoke and moonlight
This piece of flash fiction was first published in the Manila Times’ Sunday Times magazine.
“Give us your wallet and your watch.” The rumbling growl rent the night and pulled her out of her own head and into the reality of cracked sidewalk and the godawful sewer smell.
Elise cursed the foolhardy hurry she was in for this predicament. She’d left her last class for the evening without taking her Rado watch off her wrist, and this was where sentimentality got you: In the middle of a circle of thieves just fifty meters from home. It wasn’t the value of the watch, a gift from a doting uncle come home from working in Germany, that got her adrenalin up and her fight or flight instinct set on high. It was that glinting knife-tip and the rust on parts of the blade that did it. She had been walking that last stretch home, as much to breathe in the night air as to do some memory work on her lessons.
So she forgot that she lived in a neighborhood where the middle class sat next to the slums and this is what she got: Robbery at knifepoint, with none of the neighbors out to see what trouble she’d fallen into.
She broke left, where the circle was loose, and made a mad dash into the apartment complex compound, her heart a trip-hammer in her chest. She cursed the medium kitten heel that caught on the root of a balete tree, the one in the small courtyard thirty meters away from her front door. Her knee hurt where it had scraped the pavement pushed up by the balete root, but she shrugged it off, pulling herself up against the massive balete trunk.
That tree had been rooted where it stood when the apartments were built around it — mostly because even a bulldozer at full rip could not uproot it.
She’d righted herself, and would have resumed her sprint for safety when the smell of acrid, burning tobacco hit her nostrils along with an earthier, animal smell. A large shadow, vaguely human in shape but for its size, covered her like a shroud of ink.
“Don’t move, girl,” said an inhumanly deep voice floating down from the tree branches. “You will be safe if you don’t move and don’t make a noise.”
A heartbeat later, Elise heard the slapping of several shod feet hitting concrete. She could smell the sour smell of that group of sweating druggies approach the tree sheltering her and it would be but moments before the full moon abandoned the clouds hiding it and shone on her.
“Don’t move.” The voice above repeated its instructions. “Stay silent.”
Elise closed her eyes and prayed to whoever would listen. She took the watch off her wrist and slipped it into her skirt pocket. She held her breath as the leader of the thugs stood squarely in front of her, his chest heaving before her twitching nose.
“She isn’t here,” said Thug Number One.
“Well, she isn’t anywhere,” Thug Number Two answered.
Thug Number One flicked his blade dangerously close to Elise’s nervously-gulping throat, once, twice, then away. The other thugs searched the nearby bushes and the tiny banana grove across her position.
“It’s no use,” said Thug Number Three on a slur, “she’s not here. The pretty little thing would have made such wonderful entertainment. Too bad.”
“Let’s go, you idiots,” Thug Number One said, his blade flashing in the moon’s reflected light as he motioned to the main exit of the courtyard. “If you hadn’t been so slow, we’d have had ourselves money and a cute little fuck-toy. You’re all so damn lame.”
Elise closed her eyes again, willing her racing heartbeat to slow to normal, praying her breathing wouldn’t give her away as she listened to the thugs hurry off before the town watch came through the place.
“You can move now,” the voice above made itself heard again. “They’re gone.”
She looked up to take a good look at her savior, a giant smoking a stinky cigar, the animal smell likely coming from the rough-sewn goat-hides the bearded and hairy giant wore.
Elise wanted to speak, to say thank you, but the words would not come. She reached into her skirt pocket instead, for the pack of verboten Philip Morris 100s nestled in there with her wristwatch. She shook out a stick and lit it, putting it in a deep crack in the balete bark.
The kapre nodded and smiled — or at least it looked like a smile to Elise. “Go home, mortal. This is not the place for you this late at night. Go on. I’ll keep watch on you. I have since you moved in and I will keep watch over you until your time to face Bathala comes.”
