J. Marcelo Borromeo
1. THE DISPATCHPagpag
The bird had been ten years old. It was a common parakeet, but the store sold it as a lovebird in a pair when Mom bought it for my sister Nina’s 12th birthday. They said that if one of them died, then the other would soon follow after. A week later, one of the birds died. Mom kept waiting for the other parakeet to drop, but it didn’t, not for another ten years.
Mom died though.
Dad and I observed nearly all the important rituals to honor the parakeet. We kept the body on display for three days. We adorned a tupperware coffin with bright lavender flowers I’d plucked from the condo garden. We didn’t invite anyone to view the body, but within our household, we ensured that everyone paid homage, including the dogs. We even prayed the rosary to ensure its holy repose.
When I asked Dad where we should bury the bird, he suggested taking it to my lola’s backyard, since it had plenty of real estate for pet graves and technically I was entitled to a portion of that land as her grandson. Dad drove us there, we buried the bird. I said a few words about how I would miss its singing. Then we went home, which was our big mistake.
Recently, one of my classmates’ grandparents died, and after the funeral, the teacher who drove our class brought us to a McDonald’s that was on the way back to school. Not on a whim, he said. He told us we had to make a pit stop before coming home from a funeral, or else the spirit of the deceased would follow us home and bring bad luck—sometimes even death itself—with it. Pagpag, it was called. Any small detour would have sufficed. We just needed to go somewhere that would confuse the spirit: a Starbucks, drive-thru fast food, even a gas station. But Dad wasn’t in the mood to buy merienda that day, and I wasn’t hungry either, so I forgot to complain.
All I could think of was what I would tell Nina on the off chance that she called. She loved the bird just as much as Mom did.
Later that night, I heard its song again. Half-awake, I thought that something had flown in through my window. But when I came to my senses, there was no mistaking it. The bird’s unrelenting whistle had taken on a misty quality, as if it were singing from inside a deep, narrow well. In death, as in life, its call was less like a melody and more like a scolding. However, that was only the first of our bird-ghost’s harassments, and as we would soon find out, our parakeet was more terrible in its new form than it had ever been before.
First, the plague of the droppings. Either the bird had made friends in the afterlife or it was eating plenty. Feces covered every inch of our furniture like plastic wrapping and Dad had to deep clean everything to get the smell out of the condo. Next, the miracle of the eggs. Every egg from the dozen Dad bought at the supermarket suddenly hatched one morning, and the hatchlings grew into mayas over the course of a single day. Before they flew out from our balcony, they scattered eggshells over the floor, although most of them had nested in the areas around the carpet, which Dad had to vacuum later. Finally, there was the great roosting. The birds that hatched came back with bulbuls, pied fantails, sunbirds, and zebra doves, invading our kitchen and garbage can, spurring Dad to hide the raw meats and fish as soon as he’d finished cooking. The whole week, the dogs yelped incessantly, not in alarm, but in fear. Evidently they saw something we could not.
Exhausted, Dad declared that he’d had enough. He called a priest, a family friend who had never once performed an exorcism but moonlighted as the teacher of Film electives at the local seminary. Within hours, he was with us on the seventh floor, sprinkling every corner of our unit with salt and holy water.
After the ceremony was done and the dogs quieted down, Dad and the priest sat and snacked while I went back to my room. As soon as I got on my bed, my phone trilled in my pocket. It was Nina. I still hadn’t figured out what to tell her, but I was worried she would suspect something was wrong if I didn’t pick up.
“Hello?” I said.
“Howdy buns,” she said back.
“The bird died.”
“Ha?”
“Dad forgot to feed it.” Whenever I find myself under pressure, I just can’t help ripping off the band-aid.
Anyway, that set Nina off, just like I thought it would. She said that that was just like him to forget, how he never did any of his chores, how you could never get him to lift a finger until the very last second. I kept saying, “Yeah, m’hm,” even though there were other questions I wanted to ask her: Where are you now? Are you safe? Will you ever come back?
Instead, I blurted out: “Ate, we didn’t make pagpag.”
“So?” she said. “Not like he did it for the other one—and look where we are now.”
2. BUREAU INVENTORYNintendo Switch (charger recently recovered)
Assorted TBR pile: Joy Williams, Amparo Dávila, Ling Ma
Current read: My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
Star Wars Moleskine, destined for novel 2
One (1) emergency pack of Momofuku Soy & Scallion Noodles
Black “Music by John Carpenter” dad hat
Comically oversized zines produced by film distributor A24
Two (2) 1TB hard drives containing movies that I assure you were legally procured
Older drafts of novel 1—one in green, a few scattered pages in salmon
Surprise! It turns out I also have secret ketchup
3. BIOGRAPHYJ. Marcelo Borromeo is a Filipino writer with an MA in Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) from the University of East Anglia, where he received the Seth Donaldson Memorial Bursary. His work has appeared in Kill Your Darlings, Untitled: Writing, ANCX and Joyland. He has attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and, more recently, the Sewanee Writers' Conference as a Tennessee Williams Scholar. He lives in his hometown of Cebu, where he is working on his first novel about haunted houses. Find him @miostark.