Prologue
She is walking. Three steps outside her bedroom door. She paused. She heard someone think. It was Aripiprazole, his name that day.
Shadows of walls fall upon the corridors of the great house she inherited from her dead grandmother. Sometimes she could still hear her through those walls. She runs.
She runs to the wide azotea where silent chairs behave themselves in manner she has ordered them to be. She told them one day, “Keep quiet, and keep your feet on the floor. No jumping!” Now that she thinks about it, she must’ve been too uptight. Even the stairs seemed to shiver as she pass. She stopped. She was at the foot of the wide staircase. The door in front of her just as wide as the stairs. How wide could everything be? Yet be narrowed by sunset?
The shadows of the sinking sun marring her small ashen face. She was young, she always thought.
“She said you were supposed to cook tsokolate for dinner,” she said.
“Yes, I will,” said he in short reply. A same ashen face, young too and handsome. His thin lips smiles at the little girl standing in front of him. He loosened his black tie and took off his black coat. His pants were also black, and his shoes, even his eyes and his well kept hair. How could anyone be so ashen in all those darkness?
“You didn’t turn on the lights,” he said as he stepped forward to kiss her on the forehead.
“She wants to see how long shadows can be,” she said kissing him on the cheeks. He stepped up the stairs, she following behind.
“And how long did they become?” he asked, his voice so deep the wood all over the house drowns in it.
“She thinks they were as long as Aripiprazole’s legs,” she answered.
He stopped to ask.
“A new friend?” he looked worried.
“No, silly” she answered.
“Is it a new animal you found on the net?” he was puzzled, of course.
“Your name,” she explained. “Your name she found today, you said you lost it the other day?”
He smiled. Yes he did. And so he was Aripiprazole, like a name of a new animal. He continued to go up the wide staircase, she followed still.
He walked like silence, she thinks. A tall, black death she imagines him to be. To lay him down a black casket. His long legs on the silken white pillows, his breath exhausted.
“Why don’t you wait for me in the kitchen, I’ll be cooking shortly,” he said as he walks through the dark corridors and into the the door at the end. She followed him but when he closed the door she stayed behind.
It is not good for a little girl to come inside a boy’s room, she thinks. But she could peek once in a while, when he lets the door open on weekends.
And she is such an obedient girl. She goes to the kitchen without opening the light. Her large black eyes wide open in the growing darkness. She imagines how her pupils have dilated in the dark. They could explode, she thinks, if she continues in all the blackness.
The cupboard are in their place. The table was laden with a basket of plastic fruits. It was a square table in the middle of the room. She sits properly, like a lady, she always remind herself. And she suddenly wondered how odd it was, Aripiprazole’s clothes were as well presses as they were when he goes out of the house. Even the black and white tiles on this old house looks as if they were just pasted today. She would ask him when he goes out of his room.
She heard someone walking. He turned on the switch that was by the kitchen wall. Beside the refrigerator. The light came screaming.
“Did you stay here all day?” Aripiprazole asked. He still had the same clothes on, without the coat and the tie. His black leather shoes are without wrinkles.
“Yes, she did,” she said.
“And what does little girls do when they are left alone in the house?” he continued while he opens the cupboard. The couldron, the pots, the skillet, are all arranged according to color and sizes inside. He takes the tall stainless kettle.
“She reads your books and writes in her journal,” she said. She remembers always to hide her journal under her pillow as if pillows are safe enough as bulletproof safe boxes.
He didn’t say anything, just pouring water on the kettle. Measuring delicately the water in his mind, maybe estimating how much tabliya he would put.
The night filled outside the house. Crickets saved the house from silence. They don’t often speak when they eat. They, not the crickets. After Aripiprazole had microwaved the roasted chicken he bought from work, the rice in the rice cooker had been cooked, they both ate dinner together.
He eats slowly. He must be tired from work, she thinks. He always cooks dinner. Adobo or menudo, or some other specialty he was taught.
After eating, she would go straight to her room to read her emails. Her room was just beside Aripiprazole’s room. It was once the master bedroom in the house. The bed, a wide canopy bed. The walls were repainted in auburn. The wind blows the white curtains from her capiz window. Pitch black outside, the only light in the room is the glare of her laptop’s LCD screen.
A dog barked. Must be Aripiprazole feeding the wretched animal in its cage. She kept telling him to just give the dog away or sack it and take it someplace it could never go back. But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t understand how it feels like to be left in the house with a barking dog. But then again, she thinks, she doesn’t understand either.
She jumped out of bed and opened her closet. She let her hands feel the fabrics. Then she pulled out this one dress she really wanted to wear in her sleep. A deep red gown with laces and ruffles for sleeves. The dress fits her up to her knees.
Knocks from the door. Three times.
“Close the windows and turn off the lights when you sleep,” reminded he.
And so she did. Closing the wide capiz windows, yes, and turning off the lights? Oh they were turned off, she said to herself while stripping down and putting on the red laced dress.
In front of the mirror, she could see herself, wrapped in that red dress, behind her is her room, silent and cold in the dark. But she likes it that way. She dreams beautiful dreams there, like chasing arms or legs on beautiful sunny days where their garden seldom sports blooming gumamelas. And always, in those dreams she is alone with her journal. Writing her experiences in those dream of ever changing landscapes. She likes to tell herself, that one day, she will find that journal, maybe under her pillow, read it beside the window while waiting for the sun to set, again and again.
