SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The Calderone arrhae lies on a pillow of blue velvet, a ring of thirteen gold-dipped coins, strung together like a crown. I’ve never seen this ancient family treasure, but I’ve heard of it: four-peso coins engraved in Spanish lettering, kept away from outsiders’ eyes, passed down and used in every Calderone wedding since the first, in the 1800s.

“The color’s gotten tarnished, see?” She lifts the arrhae and shows me a series of dark spots on the underside of the coins. “Go to Manila Jeweler’s, above the tiangge, and get it re-dipped. It needs to look good for my son’s wedding.” She lets the arrhae fall back onto the pillow. “Salma’s my suki there; tell her to give you a good price in my name.”

I can’t believe she wants me, of all people, to hold onto the Calderone arrhae. Me, with only one strong, healthy hand to hold. But I do not mention this. “Yes, Ma’am Loretta.”

She presses an envelope into my hand; inside is a thin, crisp stack of hundred-peso bills. I swallow hard and look into her eyes. Age clouds their edges milky blue, but at their core, they are mahogany-hard.

“I trust you, Tin,” Ma’am Loretta tells me. “More than I trust anyone else in this house. Don’t break that trust.”

“I won’t po ,” I say.

I can’t escape from the room fast enough.

A ten-minute jeepney ride becomes thirty with traffic, but I make it to Greenhills without incident. Pushing my way through the tiangge , with the arrhae box tucked in a pouch beneath my blouse, is harder. The market writhes with people, flooding in and out of makeshift booths, pushing past the vendors shouting, “Ma’am! Bags! Wallets!”

My sister hates this place, but I adore it. There is a lovely anonymity among the crush of humanity in the tiangge ; people are pressed too close to care about small things like a withered arm or a damaged face, anything but: “T-shirts, 300, Ma’am! Hairclips, 25 pesos, Ma’am!”

Climbing the steps to the jewelers’ alley, I let the security guard check my purse. He doesn’t think to check the pouch around my neck. They never do. The jewelers’ alley sprawls before me in a sea of glass cases and glittering stones, almost all of which are real. You could drown in opulence here.

“Manila Jeweler’s?” I ask the security guard. He points me toward a stall in the corner, with a big, plastic banner reading: sale. It seems largely abandoned, but a single figure is tucked at a desk, behind the large display counter. At first, I think that person is a girl, but then I realize he’s a boy my own age, with very long black hair. Most of that hair is tied in back in a ponytail, falling well beyond his waist.

I clear my throat. “Salma?”

He glances up at me through stray strands of dark hair, and I catch sight of a pair of eyes, the color of new bamboo. Oh.

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” he says. “Salma is my mother. How can I help you?”

“I was told to give something to Salma,” I tell him. There’s a strange, high pressure in the back of my head, very similar to the shrill sound I hear during bangungot . I feel stupid, and I have an irrational urge to hide my arm from him, even though he’s already seen it. “My ma’am is her suki . My ma’am says she’ll give her a good price, and I don’t want to be cheated.”

He smiles. “What’s your ma’am’s name po ?”

“Ma’am Loretta Calderone.”

The boy whistles. For the first time, I notice he’s holding a pencil, and the papers in front of him are covered in sketched jewelry designs. “Oh, yes, I know her. Everyone up here knows Ma’am Calderone. What work does she need done?”

With hands that have suddenly grown clumsy, I fumble for the pouch and pull it from my shirt. I am stupidly conscious of the droplets of sweat that splatter from the bag onto the countertop. When the boy sees me having trouble with the drawstring, he reaches for the pouch. “Here, let me—”

“I’ve got it,” I say, pinning the edge of the pouch down with my right elbow, and using my left hand to pull the drawstring free. I pop open the box so he can see the arrhae, keeping it close to my body in case he tries to grab it from me. “Ma’am Calderone needs this dipped in gold for her son’s wedding.”

“May I see?”

Reluctantly, I let him take the arrhae. He examines it in the light, peering closely at the tarnished metal. “We’d usually charge 1,000 pesos for this, minimum. But for Ma’am Calderone, 850.”

“800,” I reply shortly.

“You would beggar us, Ma’am!” he protests, but there’s a hint of a laugh in his voice. It’s a nice laugh. “850 pesos for Ma’am Calderone.” He pauses. “But 800 pesos for you, if you tell me your name.”

“Done.” I slap the money down on the counter, before he can change his mind. A name given is surely worth 50 pesos. “I’m Tin.”

He grins again. “Rodante,” he introduces himself.

Instead of shaking his hand, I make him write a receipt to prove that Manila Jeweler’s is now in possession of the Calderone arrhae, and has agreed to dip it in gold—“14k? 24k? Yellow, or white?”—for 800 pesos. Rodante folds the arrhae and places it carefully back into its box. “I’ll take very good care of this for you,” he says, when he does shake my hand at the end of the transaction. His green eyes are serious. “I promise, Tin.”

“If you don’t, I’ll find you,” I threaten. “Worse, Ma’am Calderone will find you.”

He laughs again, as he lifts himself out of his seat and walks toward the back of the shop. That’s when I see that he’s limping. Rodante’s right leg is a tangled, rippled mass of scars. Just like my arm.

The hum in the back of my head builds to a dull roar.

I am dreaming, and dreaming proper, of my mother’s house in Bicol, a small, bamboo-and-hemp structure that the ma’am in Manila call a ‘shanty’—a word I never knew before coming to the city. Shadows from the malunggay trees dapple our house’s nipa roof, and the scent of the white sampaguita blossoms, by the door, is so strong that I almost don’t smell the dead god arrive.

Perhaps I came on too strongly, earlier, says the dead god. Today it wears a skin bristling with black feathers, thin panels on the side swinging open with each movement, to reveal white bones beneath. I keep forgetting how young you are.

“I’m not that young.” When I lived here, Nanay’s house and the land around it were full of running, tumbling children. But in the dream, the house is silent. The curtain over the doorway swings open in the thick, salty breeze, revealing darkness inside. “Did you go back for her funeral?” I ask the dead god. As soon as the words leave my mouth, I feel stupid; who knows if or how gods travel?

The dead god sighs. I stayed by her side, until your family cremated her, and scattered her ashes in the sea. Then I came to find you.

A face flashes in the window, and for a moment, I see my mother running her palms over the latticed screen, checking for dirt. The dead god’s mark glimmers like white fire in the sunlight, a web of discoloration and scarring across her face. She vanishes before I can call out to her.

I loved her, the dead god says quietly. Very much.

“She loved you, too,” I say. The sea wind whips around us, ruffling the dead god’s feathers and my own short black hair. “She used to tell us stories about you all the time.” I don’t say that these stories, like those of all of the old gods, are banned in the Calderone household, in favor of Catholic masses and Ma’am Loretta’s saints.