The Kapre

The Kapre
By Patricia Karunungan

I awoke to the smell of smoke, and for a moment forgot where I was, who I was supposed to be.

I had fallen asleep with the windows open again. Summer was over, and I kept forgetting that the chill I found so pleasant in the day always deepened with the night. I had left the floor lamp in the corner on, too. In its soft glow I caught curtains dancing: there, the source of the draught. Rising from the bed, I grabbed a nearby jacket and draped it around my shoulders. The floor burned my bare feet like ice. I followed the cold, pushing past the curtains and through the gap between the sliding doors that connected the balcony to my bedroom. I had almost expected someone to be there, his shadow-dappled back turned to me, one elbow resting on the parapet, the glimmer of a lit cigarette held idly between two gnarled fingers.

But of course, there was nobody.

There was only the city laid before me, life reduced to twinkling pinpricks of light. Urban constellations. The Eiffel Tower was the brightest arrangement, glittering in an array of colours even at this late hour. The air in the city was always redolent of cigarette smoke, but I had not expected a tendril of it to snake its way into my room on the seventh floor. I fingered my hair, long and tousled from sleep, and considered the soft weight of the fabric on my shoulders. Would the smell linger on me? I was alone, yet the smoke said otherwise.

The smell of tobacco I did not mind so much as an odour than as a seductive aroma: it was evocative, to say the least, and it was all too easy to let myself feel memory’s undertow begin to pull. Leaning against the balustrade, I marvelled, not for the first time, at how far from home I had come—if I could even call Manila my home, when I had only the half-remembered dregs of a childhood there. I never stayed long enough to know what it means to be Filipino, and maybe that also means that I will never know how it feels to be at home. Perhaps I have already had a dozen homes in a dozen cities, and that elusive awareness of belonging lies between being a guest and an intruder.

A sense of awareness filled me, a sense of my own smallness in the universe, acute and familiar. Here was another city to be new in, to trespass. Another city of warm bodies to avoid no matter the chill and loneliness, of connections to willfully miss lest they become more knots in the tangled ball of nostalgia I carried around.

Just a short while ago, I unravelled. I let myself learn the heat of another person. To soothe guilt with a balm in the shape of a man. I still remember the feeling of his scarred hands on my scarred ribs. His tentative English and my polluted French. The astonishment that came with the knowledge that love, if that was what it was, would not diminish me. As soon as I understood this, I ended things.

The flashing lights of the Eiffel Tower singed the corner of my sight as I closed my eyes. Every night he spent with me, it was his custom to stand here where I was and enjoy a cigarette before going to bed. Standing by the sliding doors, the curtains languidly brushing against my body, I would watch him on the balcony, this space that is both entrance and exit, and be reminded so much of someone else. Someone from a different time and place.

There had been a boy, a cigarette, scars and knotted flesh too. Only the great Banyan from my memory was missing, but the Eiffel Tower was there to cleave the expanse, its skeleton and shimmering lights resembling a tree engulfed by strange fire. The right side of my body ached dully, even though the wounds I once had there had long ago healed.

When I returned to my room, I closed the windows and the doors but I carried the cigarette fumes into bed with me. The duvet was already cold. I breathed out and imagined each thought I accumulated on the balcony leaving me in coils of smoke. But they only coalesced into a surfacing memory: of a burning tree, and of young flesh made monstrous in a baptism of wayward fire. I couldn’t help but remember the boy with the burnt back.

The hours before sleep were spent buffeted by the riptide of memory, before I found reprieve in the mercy of bad dreams.

*

My first Parisian sunset was spent on some steps by the River Seine, hugging my knees to my chest and wondering at how the sun was only beginning to sink at 9.45pm. My family moved often when I was growing up, but it was my first time in Europe. I didn’t know that days could be so long in the summer. I had a week to myself before I began working at the university that hired me, and I intended to spend it mapping the city with my feet.

I had found a deserted pocket of space between Pont de L’Alma and Pont des Invalides, far away enough from both the Eiffel Tower and Napoleon’s tomb that I could count on no tourist crowds disrupting this rare stretch of silence. Already I had learnt that it was difficult to be alone in this city. There was a small ferry moored nearby, which seemed to be empty. A brace of ducklings was attempting to climb a chain stretching from the boat, while their mother looked on from beside the bollard to which it was tied.

The sky had been a relentless blue all of that day, but the colour swiftly gave way to a deep indigo once the sun kissed the horizon. Lights from the Eiffel Tower, the two bridges, and passing tourist ferries made the water in front of me sparkle; and instead of stars I thought of offerings, candles sent floating down the river for gods and the dead. As a child I had learnt about the Aghori in India—cannibals, who sometimes scavenged the bodies sent down the Ganges as part of funeral rites. The Aghori are a branch of Hindus, yet they are feared and reviled by most members of the religion. Seen as monsters for how they choose to worship the same gods.

Where I was born, monsters are often the first things children learn about—through folktales, but this English term fails to convey its precise connotations. In Tagalog, folktales are called kuwentong-bayan; when translated literally, it means “story-nation”, or “storytelling nation”. I always took it to imply that if I forgot the stories of my homeland, I would lose my last foothold in its culture. So I clung to what I knew, but what I remembered most was perhaps the cruelest traits of my people: even in a country of sameness, there would always be those who are made into monsters.

The last of my childhood there was spent in the company of one such monster. He was darker than anybody I had ever met back then, and I wondered if it was his skin or the fact that he had only one eye that had made my mother tell me to stay away from him. We lived in the middle of three houses attached to each other, however, and it seemed impossible not to make contact. As though to prove this, the neighbours on our left planted a cucumber vine one day, and within weeks it had colonised our front gate and the grilles separating our driveway from theirs. The boy lived in the house on our right, and somehow the vines never reached him.

When we first met, I was playing alone in the gated driveway after school not long after we had moved into the neighbourhood. My family relocated to Felicity Street after a disagreement with my grandparents, in whose house we had been living. It was the first of many migrations. As I rode around in a too-small tricycle, I spied a dark head peering at me between the bars atop the wall dividing our two houses. I stopped and watched two dark hands emerge and grip the bars. The palms were a startling pale orange, as though they belonged to a different pair of hands. The hands seemed to expand—into arms, then shoulders, a head of closely cropped hair—until I realised that I was looking at the boy whom I was never supposed to meet. With an alien kind of grace, he swung his long legs onto the parapet, and stretched his body languidly on the narrow expanse. Resting his cheek against a raised hand, he called out to me.

“What’s your name?” His voice was hoarse and raspy, the words breaking in strange places.

“What’s yours?” I shot back, crossing my then-stubby arms and jutting my chin defiantly at him.

“It’s a secret.”

“Then I can’t tell you mine, either.” My bangs were plastered to my forehead with sweat, and I wanted nothing more than to push them away, but I kept my arms crossed out of stubbornness.

I was only six years old then, and to see him as he spoke to me I had to crane my neck upwards. He faced me with his left side, the side with the eye, but he made no effort to hide the missing one. It was a curious disfigurement: the socket was empty and of a ferocious pink, like a raw wound that had not yet scabbed over. With nothing inside to keep the shape, his eyelids sagged sadly, almost pendulously, upon his high cheekbone. I recalled a news report I had seen on television before, of a little boy who died after somebody had thrown a stone into his eye. The body was shown onscreen, dressed for the funeral, hair slicked back, the stone still lodged into the eye. “Where’s your stone?” I had almost asked the boy on the parapet.

“Do you know Leslie?” I asked instead, unfolding my arms and continuing to pedal my tricycle. The action rewarded me with a slight breeze. “The girl who lives in the house next to mine?”

“I’ve seen her, but I’ve never spoken to her.”

“She’s coming back from school soon, and we’re going to play in the street together. Do you want to join us?”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not allowed to.”

My tone became petulant as I took in his attire—a plain green sando and plain blue shorts—and compared it to mine: a short, sleeveless cotton dress with a fading teddy bear print, and holes of varying sizes adorning the hem. There were no cute animals or cartoon characters on his clothes, and I thought that that was why he didn’t want to play with me: I was too little, or too girly. As the youngest of three siblings, I was used to a scarcity of playmates, but I still found disappointment unacceptable.

“But you’re already so big—you look like you’re, what, twelve? You still listen to your parents?”

“You don’t get it,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t have a choice. The gate is locked and I don’t have the key.”

“Can’t you climb it? You can already climb this wall.”

“No, I’m not allowed to go out at all. My parents will get very angry with me.”

“What about school? You do have to go to school, don’t you?”

The corner of his mouth curved upwards in a sad smile. “I can’t go to school. My parents teach me at home, but not much. How about you tell me what you learn at school? Mathematics and all that?”

“I don’t know,” I deliberated, “that doesn’t sound very fun.”

“I’ll play with you every day.”

“But we’re not playing right now.”

“You could play teacher and I’ll be your student.”

“Oh, yes, that does sound fun! I could get a blackboard and a table like the one I have in school—but you won’t be able to sit and pay attention, since you can’t fit through the bars and climb down.”

“I’ll pay lots of attention from up here, I promise.”

Just then, I heard the familiar rumble of Leslie’s school bus. I hopped off my tricycle in excitement and ran to the gate to meet her. She had been my first friend in this unfamiliar place, and since there were hardly any other children on Felicity Street I was excited to bring someone new into our fold. Leslie, still in her school uniform, descended from the bus and greeted me through the latticework. Her grin disappeared and her face turned pale, however, when she approached and saw the dark boy behind me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, following her line of sight in time to catch the boy scrambling off the parapet. For a moment, he was all limbs; he moved like a frightened animal, throwing away the grace with which he had first appeared to me on the parapet. His retreat baffled me—why had he done that? “Do you know him, too?”

“How long has he been there?” she shrieked, thrusting her hands between the grilles and gripping my shoulders, hard. “Don’t talk to him! You’re not supposed to talk to him!”

“W-why not?” I stammered, finally feeling the guilt sink in now that I had been caught doing something my mother told me not to do.

“He’s dangerous!” she hissed. Her voice dropped to a whisper, and I had to lean in to catch what she said next: “Don’t you know? My nanay told me—he’s a kapre. That’s why he’s not allowed to go outside. His own parents hate him! They beat him—because he’s a monster.”

I shuddered. Leslie was speaking the way my titas used to when they would babysit me, scaring me into going to bed earlier with talk of monsters. Leslie drew back and stared at me solemnly. “You’re lucky that I warned you in time. He could have hurt you. Don’t talk to him again, or I won’t play with you anymore.” With a swish of her pigtails, she was gone.

*

 That night, my mother was working late and I was frightened of sleeping alone. I curled up next to my yaya on her sofa bed in the living room, but slumber did not come easily. “Ate,” I called in the dark, “what’s a kapre?”

“Your mama never told you?” she asked, with a hint of amusement in her voice.

“No,” I murmured, keeping to myself my mother’s opinion on folklore: that it was for the provincial-minded.

“A kapre is a monster that lives up high in Banyan trees. He’s big and hairy, with dark skin like those African men we see on TV.”

“Is he evil?”

“Sometimes, if you don’t do what he asks.”

“What does he ask for?”

“Usually cigarettes, candy. The kapre likes to smoke—if you look up a Banyan tree and see one, he’ll be stretched out on a branch smoking. But not everyone can see him. Usually only children can—like you—and even then he’s so gigantic that you can’t see his whole body unless he allows you to.”

I had made up my mind about the boy, that he was a baby kapre, and one day when he was too big to be fenced in by the gate he would simply leave and find his own Banyan tree. I thought of his missing eye, and how, perhaps, it wasn’t actually missing—I just wasn’t worthy enough to see it yet.

“But because they’re always smoking,” my yaya continued, “they’re always starting fires by accident. Whenever there’s a sudden, mysterious fire, a kapre is likely to be the cause.”

“Can kapres ever be good?”

“Aba! You’re curious tonight. Did Leslie tell you ghost stories today?”

“Please, Ate, just tell me.”

“Sige. If you see a kapre, it means that he wants to be friends with you. If you’re friendly back, by doing him favours and bringing him cigarettes, he will protect you from danger and evil as long as you are near his Banyan tree. If you reject his friendship, he might curse you or set your house on fire.”

“He sounds lonely,” I remarked, raising myself slightly on my elbows. I knew how that felt, waiting for Leslie; all he had done was show up and offer his company. “He doesn’t sound bad, just lonely.”

“Ah, that’s what you think. The kapre gets jealous easily. If he sees you playing with other children too much, he might hurt them to keep you all to himself. And since you’re a girl, it will only get worse as you get older—he might want you as his bride one day and he’ll kill anyone who tries to take you away from him.”

“That’s silly,” I said, shaking my head even though my yaya couldn’t see me in the dark. “If we’re friends, he wouldn’t do that.”

She chuckled softly. “Enough ghost stories. Go to sleep. There are no Banyan trees here anyway.”  

*

In the daylight, I felt braver. The sun kept monsters away—except perhaps those that dwelled in the shade of the Banyan tree. In the lull before Leslie came home, I stood in my family’s garage, facing the dirty white wall that separated my home from the kapre’s lair. I was bouncing a ball over and over against the wall, hoping that the sound would summon him. After a while, he appeared and settled into the same position on the parapet he had assumed the day before.

“Are you a kapre?” I asked point-blank, standing akimbo and jutting my chin at him again in an act of bravery. This time, I was wearing the most grown-up clothes I had—my school uniform, which consisted of a white blouse and a red tartan skirt. But I had traded the black patent leather shoes and frilly white socks for a pair of pink Powerpuff Girls slippers.

“No. I’ve been called that but I’m not one.”

“How do you know what being a monster is like?”

“You tell me. You’re the one who goes to school.”

For the first time, I noticed that he was far bonier than I was, and his skin had the strange appearance of being covered in a fine layer of dust. Leslie had told me that if I touched him, his colour would stain my skin like grease. “Well...” I deliberated, “do you smoke?”

“Sometimes, when there’s nothing else to do. I take my dad’s Marlboros but he always finds out and beats me.”

“Then why do you keep doing it?”

He shrugged, but only one of his shoulders was free to move and it looked like a spasm instead. “Do you like it?” I pressed.

“I guess I do, it makes me feel cool, like an action movie hero. Like I can do anything. But that doesn’t mean I’m a kapre,” he added hurriedly when he saw my eyes widen in alarm. “I’ve seen your tatay smoke, too. That doesn’t make him a kapre.”

“You’re right, but that doesn’t prove that you’re not one, either.”

“I know I’m dark, but I’m not hairy.”

“Not yet,” I corrected. “When you get older you could get hairy. I’ve seen that happen to my big brothers.”

“But they’re not kapres, are they?”

“But they don’t smoke, and my dad’s not hairy. You smoke and you could be hairy one day.”

“So all hairy men who smoke are kapres? What if your kuyas start to smoke, do they become kapres?”

“No!” I shrieked indignantly. “They can’t be, because that would make me a kapre, too, and I know I’m not one. I’m not hairy!” I added, reaching for the back of my neck. I had intended to brush away the hair there that had made my skin hot and sweaty, but instead I found myself fingering the short locks, which barely brushed against my shoulders. I had always wanted to grow it long, but I never found the weather agreeable enough to accomplish it.

“There’s no such thing as girl kapres,” he said, cracking a grin. “So your kuyas could still be monsters.”

He was right, and I gaped at him in response. I clenched my hands at my sides as my cheeks burned with embarrassment. “Wait,” I cried, thinking quickly. “They don’t do what you do—you like high places and talking down to little girls like me. Aren’t you exactly like a kapre already?”

He frowned, and I smiled triumphantly to myself. “But if I don’t climb up here, how am I supposed to see you and talk to you?”

“You don’t talk to Leslie at all. You even ran away when you saw her. Why do you talk to me?”

“She’s different. She’s scared of me. You’re not scared of me. You’re nice.”

“How do you know? What if I’m just pretending to be nice?”

“Because you didn’t ask me about my eye. And you don’t look away when you talk to me. Nobody has ever been this nice to me before.”

“Not even your family?”

He shook his head. “My father isn’t my real father. He calls me an askal, the same as a street dog. That’s how I know I’m not a kapre.”

Just a different kind of monster, I thought, and cupped the words in my tongue. I had known enough at that age to know when I should no longer speak.

The rumble of an engine crushed the silence between us. Leslie’s school bus was approaching. Without looking back at the parapet, I knew that the boy had already slipped away. A part of me wondered: if I ever found my way onto the white parapet, would I find a stain in the shape of his likeness? 

* 

Ezra had taken the liberty of inviting himself over for coffee two weeks after I had ended things with him. I wouldn’t have let him in if he hadn’t caught me at my apartment building’s entrance, struggling with the heavy wooden door and the bounties of an overzealous grocery trip. He insisted on helping me, and like a fool I let him. Now he sat before me in my dining nook—he was too close, or the table was too small.

“I just want to know again why we broke up,” Ezra said, his brows furrowing. I had drawn the curtains shut; the light was hurting my eyes. But one harsh beam of sunshine had found a way in where the fabric ended, and I knew that where I sat half my face was lit and the other in shadow, like a mask. “It was a good thing, what we had,” he pressed.

“I realised I didn’t want to be tied down,” I said, curling my palms around the white mug in front of me. I looked not at his face, but at his hands. The skin was lined with scars, raised, discoloured; and some fingers looked more like tree branches, knuckles and nails jutting and twisting like burls. His ring finger was missing the tip.

His hands were how we met: he caught me staring at them when we were both at the café down the street from my building. Instead of taking offense, he approached me with a smile and I let him charm me into having dinner with him that evening. One date became two, and soon he began calling me his petite amie.

“I was not going at your pace, I understand that,” he breathed. “I’m sorry. But I really like you, and I want to see you again. To keep seeing you.”

“I remember blood,” I said, ignoring what he had said. “That last morning you were here, there was blood on my sheets. It wasn’t mine. Were your hands hurting again?” The tea in my mug was hot, but not enough to make the ceramic painful to touch. Over wine and crepes one night, he had told me that a machinery accident was what broke and bent his hands. Sometimes the cuts that were stitched shut long ago would open again where the skin creased.

The confusion was palpable in his voice. “I’m sorry.” Again, the apologies, even though the only transgressor here was me. “Was the blood difficult to remove? Do you need money for a new bedsheet?”

“No need,” I said, shaking my head. My own scars prickled like phantom wounds and I tore my eyes away from his hands. I took in his thin, light blue shirt, how in the light the sleeves did nothing to hide the rest of his old injuries snaking around his arms. “It was just a random memory.”

Ezra frowned as he raised his cup of coffee to his lips. For what they had been through, his hands were still deft—I knew that he worked to make them appear as normal as possible. That was Ezra: gentle defiance, no victim. When he set the cup back down on the dining table, it landed on the edge of a quotidien I had cast aside after a failed attempt to improve my French. Some of the liquid spilled onto the paper. He didn’t seem to notice.

“Can we be friends?”

I said nothing, because whatever answers I had would not satisfy him. How could I explain that he reminded me of a ghost, yet I still let him get close to me—precisely because I needed to know if I was still a hostage of my own memories?

When I continued to let the silence stretch, he broke it.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No.” My reply was immediate.

“I need to know something.” He let go of the cup and rumpled his hair, loose locks rising just to fall against his forehead once more. The marks on his hands shone dull and pink when they caught the light. “Is it because of the way I look? My hands, these deformities?”

A bark of laughter burst out before I could stop it. “No, of course not. As you saw, I have my share of those too.”

“We are different,” Ezra said slowly. His hands moved up and down in the air, as though they could conjure a gesture clear enough to make me understand. There was more than one language barrier between us. “Your wounds, you can hide them. I can hide mine, too, but I do not want to. If you feel shame to be seen with someone like me, you are not the first. I know that my hands are like a monster’s.”

But that’s the thing. If you’re a monster, then what am I? This was not a conversation I wanted to have with Ezra, even though I owed it to him to explain why we could not be. The one I really wanted to talk to was no longer here, but just a shade in the graveyard of nostalgia.

“Your hands don’t bother me,” I said instead. “And you’re not a monster. I just wasn’t ready for a relationship, and I don’t think I’m ready to be friends with you yet. It is I who should be sorry. Thanks for helping me bring up my groceries.”

Whatever gaps existed between us were bridged for just a moment: the dismissal in my tone was unmistakable. We had spent just the summer together, and I did not know him well at all. Yet the heartbreak on his face was familiar to me by now, a translation of the tender anguish he carried inside himself but could not articulate.

I know because I carry something like that, too.

Ezra plastered a wan smile over his face and nodded at me, getting up from the table. He was gentlemanly enough to thank me for allowing his intrusion, then saw himself out. Later, when I was clearing the mugs, I saw that his cup had left a dark stain on my newspaper. I tried to rub it away with my thumb, but I only smudged it more. He had more in common with the boy on the parapet than I had thought: at the fringes of my conscience, they were both casting shadows.

I turned the paper over to hide the stain from view, but it was no good. The waves of memory were back lapping at my feet, tugging me farther away from the coastline every time the water ebbed. What was the point of telling myself kuwentong-bayan, when the only story I had left was the ugliness of my race? We made monsters only to pretend that the value of other morals was real. The fear of monsters was the same fear that sold skin whitening products and the fidelity of loveless marriages. Because he had been born the wrong colour the boy on the parapet was loved less. Enough for a father to feel betrayed and beat his own son until his eye came loose and bloody from its socket.

The boy’s name was Jonathan. I only came to know the truth of his life when I was much older, returning to Felicity Street for the first time since my family had moved away. The three houses still stood, in new coats of paint, but somebody had cleared away the cucumber vines. Leslie’s family was long gone.

I was told he still lived there, but I couldn’t see him. He didn’t want to see anybody. The one I spoke to was hired help, a stocky, middle-aged woman from a faraway province. Her skin was the colour of milk coffee, and I wondered if her presence made him feel less like an intruder in his own home. Through broken English and my own limited reserve of Tagalog words, I managed to piece together history: his name, that his father had recently died, that his mother was still around but her mind was going. We spoke through the bars of the gate; she wasn’t allowed to let me come in. It was nearing dusk when I left, and when I drove past the house one more time I thought I saw a dark, broad back just beyond the gate. Past the edges of his sando were welts, still glistening after all these years. The tired, crumpled way skin heals after being burned.

You can’t see the kapre’s whole body unless he reveals himself to you. I wish I hadn’t seen. The scar was the mark of my own sin.

I filled my mouth with tea and swallowed thickly, wanting to feel the burn on my tongue and in my throat. But it was too late: it had gone completely cold. 

* 

I call it a sin because I have no other name for it. And in remembering only this one story in enough fragments to call it a whole, I felt complicit in the crimes of my nation’s history. This was the only way I knew to be Filipino. I know how the kapre had been really born: from dark-skinned slaves imported by the Spanish, those old colonial masters. They spun tales about their supposed-depravity and ugliness; they wanted us to fear them so that we would never look at them, befriend them, desire them, and free them from their occupation and class. They were made into monsters.

But I had seen one of them and had not been frightened. I saw the lonely boy beneath the broken flesh of the beast and could not save him. Could I have? Perhaps my first mistake was in keeping him secret, as though he was still undeserving of a place in the light. For me he existed only in the small hours between homecoming and playtime; for Leslie he did not exist at all.

There was one day when he was tired of talking, and I saw him light a cigarette for the first time. The action was so grown-up that I felt more acutely the gap between his world and mine. The smoke came down from the parapet and sank into my hair. Leslie would smell it later and know that I had lied about scorning the kapre—my father, the only other person around me who smoked, would not be home until well after we parted for dinner. Was it on that day that she began her machinations?

My yaya had been wrong about there being no Banyan trees. Felicity Street was longer than I had imagined: the first house on the stretch was Jonathan’s, then mine, then Leslie’s, and nothing for a while after. After the nothingness were trees and fractured tarmac. It was an unfinished road, an abandoned space that saw only the occasional company of a travelling peddler looking for shade to rest in. I had never ventured into the grove before because Leslie told us that people, including her family, burned their garbage there. But she had found an old playground here, and one afternoon she took me on her bicycle to see it.

From the branches of a Narra tree dangled a rusty swing, the only evidence that children had once played here. Even further inside the copse was a small clearing, in the centre of which stood a magnificent Banyan tree. Looking at it, my knees began to tremble.

“Why did you bring me here?” I cried softly, afraid that my voice might wake the spirits in the tree. “Leslie, I’m scared!”

“Why should you be?” said Leslie coolly. “You’re friends with a monster.”

“But he’s not a monster, Leslie.”

“I told you I wouldn’t play with you anymore.”

My eyes stung with tears. They were hot, and I was suddenly conscious of the way my hair stuck to my forehead and the back of my neck with sweat. “Why are we here?”

From her pocket she retrieved a lighter. It had a long metal nose attached to a blue handle—I had noticed the hilt sticking out of her pocket on the way here, but I thought it was just one of her brothers’ toy guns. Leslie threw one of her arms behind her, and I finally noticed the damp newspapers heaped at the base of the tree. Farther away, a plastic container of fuel lay abandoned on the grass. “If you still want to be my friend, burn the tree.”

“That’s stupid! You’ll make the other monsters come out!”

“When the tree dies, the kapre will go away. He’ll go somewhere else and find a new Banyan tree. He’ll leave us alone.”

“But he’s not doing anything bad!”

“He’s tricking you!” she screamed. “One day he’s going to eat you! Then he’ll come after me and it’ll be your fault!”

She pushed the lighter into my hand but I would not take it. It fell to the dirt with a clatter. “Sige, if you don’t do this I’ll leave you behind,” she hissed. “There’s only one bike and you don’t know how to ride it. You won’t be able to run away fast enough from the demons.”

My lower lip quivered, along with the rest of my body. I felt small and weak and there was a twinge in my chest—an ache that I would grow to learn as the first bloom of hatred.

When I bent down to pick up the lighter a maddening thought entered my head: Leslie made my blood boil—what if I set her on fire instead so she would know how I felt? The boy on the parapet had taught me how to make the flame on a cigarette lighter—the precise angle to position my thumb, the rapidity with which I should push down on the spark wheel. I was always too frightened by the spark to let it fully become fire, but there was no need to fear that with what I had in my hands. I clasped the lighter and felt the nothingness of its weight, and with a roar I pressed the trigger and charged flame-first at Leslie.

She screeched and knocked me away. When I fell, something hard and jagged met the back of my head. She was older, bigger, stronger. I had accomplished nothing except scratching my hand on the cheap, jagged plastic of the lighter handle. From the ground I watched Leslie snatch the lighter from my open palm. She scrambled to the Banyan tree, crouched at its base where the newspapers were for a moment, then scrambled away again. Pain blossomed everywhere, more than I thought I could possibly feel. I watched Leslie’s back grow smaller and smaller in the shade until I could no longer see at all.

This part: I only know what my parents told me. The fire spread quickly—that day it had been hot and dry enough. And Leslie had prepared the fuel and newspapers well, just like how her mother had taught her. I should’ve burned with the Banyan tree but a larger body covered mine. That one burned instead. Only my right side was seared. Leslie didn’t tell anyone that she was the one who started the fire. Neither did I. On that day I learnt that monsters are real. I needed thirteen stitches on my head, and no number of stitches could sew the crumpled skin across my ribs smooth again.

When I close my eyes there is an image I see sometimes: the silhouette of a boy hovering over me, blackened by a backdrop of flames. The picture hurts the way the sun hurts the eyes. I wonder if this had been the moment of rescue, or an illusion to comfort myself for having missed it. It was the last time that I was with the boy on the parapet.

By the time he was discharged from the hospital, my family and I had already left Felicity Street. My parents didn’t think it was good for me to stay. I didn’t say goodbye to Leslie, although it was only through her guilt that I had survived. She had cycled furiously back to our three houses and cried for people to save me. She had felt bad enough to plead with the kapre. I found it harder to believe that he had climbed out of his cage, at last, for me. But when he left that cage I filled it instead. In the years that followed, I lived with the absence of his body. A self-imposed solitude with no absolution in sight.  

*

I stay alone because I dislike the heat of other bodies. Like smoke, desire is evocative and unwelcome. But I also stay away because I know that I, too, have become a monster.

In the café where we met and sometimes in town, I see Ezra and his gnarled hands. We pass each other without saying a word. Sometimes his gaze lingers on my form, as though he wants to speak to me. But I always look through him, indifferent, my heart still like a stone. I cannot lie and say that how I treated this man bothers me, but I do not remain completely unaffected. Every time I see him I feel the weight of an invisible rock in my hand. Sometimes I think it is my heart. I curl my fist around its smoothness and think about how it feels to lodge it into an eye.



Patricia Karunungan is a freelance editor based in Singapore. She graduated with an MA from Nanyang Technological University, where she specialized in contemporary Southeast Asian fiction. Her writing has appeared in Going Places, SG Poems 2017-2018, LONTAR, and Get Lucky: An Anthology of Philippine and Singapore Writings, among others. She also co-edited this is how you walk on the moon, an anti-realist fiction anthology. In 2017, she was awarded the Koh Tai Ann Gold Medal.