By Peter Ong Cook
We paid so much heed to superstitions, to fortunes, blessings and healers, in our small, manufactured houses filled with too much furniture and smelling of recycled fry oil. The old woman leaned forward on the overstuffed green sofa, her spine bloated into a hunch. The white roots of her hair blended pink into store-bought auburn dye. The droop of her cheeks and sag of her neck would have betrayed her age anyways. She held her hand to me, palm down, limp.
“Go ahead, son,” prodded my mother from behind. “She is your grandma. Let her bless you.”
This was how we connected with elders in our Filipino culture. By intimate touch, their fingers guided to caress your forehead.
She was not my literal grandmother. They never were. My Nana from Indiana and Lola from Tacloban died a year apart, at least a decade ago, so this was just another tenuously related elderly woman. I had so many grandmothers, and yet none.
“She brought food,” my mother told me, lifting a foil-covered bowl, something medicinal, an old recipe from the Provinces.
My lip involuntarily curled in disgust, my lizard brain recalling the soups that tasted of bitter black yam leaves and seawater.
The old woman croaked dissatisfaction in Tagalog, words denture-slurred so much that I could not make them out. I did not understand the language, but I knew their meaning.
Judgment. How dare I react negatively? But of course I would react with bitterness, because I was born and raised in America, had never set foot on Filipino earth. Because I did not speak the language, I could not know the culture.
I took her hand, an apology for my sin of impurity. The thin, loose skin of her fingers slid across her phalanges. Her spiteful pursed lips disintegrated into a small triumphant smile, baring her teeth, some still real, an underbite of stained, crooked teeth, and a gold-capped molar. I closed my eyes and lowered my forehead to the back of her fingers, which smelled of menthol ointment and instant coffee grounds. The wax-paper skin caressed my brow.
Her touch poked me with static shock, a pop so intense it rattled in my skull. I could hear vibrations tick in the fluid behind my eardrums, and I smelled ozone. My brain felt squeezed by pressure like it had been submerged deep into the ocean where sunlight could not reach.
My knees turned to liquid, and I collapsed to the ground, my cheek hitting soft brown dirt.
I was no longer in my mother’s doublewide in a sea of chaparral. I was outside, humidity licking my temples and the back of my neck. Foliage surrounded me, jagged leaves on papaya trees, coconut palms pregnant with green lobes, wild bushes waggling fluorescent green leaves. The salted sea breeze was infused with the tang of decay, of rot. My forehead, tender where the old woman touched me, pulsed, a headache funneling inward.
Her resonating laugh thrummed like a machine gun. She stood alone, barefooted, long black toenails curling into the sand.
“Perhaps you are dreaming,” she said. She stood tall now in this foreign land, her face was still lined with age, her hands decrepit. Her hair was silvery-copper and translucent, glowing where it absorbed sunlight. Her posture straight, her weight distributed on her stocky frame. The heavy spine and frailty I saw before were an illusion.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I am your mother, your murderer, your savior.” Her bare skin was sun-darkened, covered in age-faded black tattoos depicting blocky patterns, stories, names in ancient script. Her pupils were black and glossy, like crude oil.
“Witch,” I accused. “Bruja?” I knew enough folklore to know some words, but the first name on my tongue was a Spanish-inspired word. My cheeks burned with shame. My mother told me the stories of the supernatural, of ghosts and trolls. “Mama-mamba–” I stumbled over the word.
She raised her brow, her eyebrows sparse and barely visible. “Mah-mah-mah!” she said, mockingly. “Mah-mah-mambabarang? Mah-mah-malakat?” She scoffed.
Mambabarang was the word on the tip of my tongue, but it was the wrong one.
Her torso extended beneath her dress, her head and shoulders rising as her bare feet remained planted in the dirt. I flinched at the sound of fatty bone popping out of its socket.
“Malupad?” she continued. Her upper body shifted forward independently at the waist, the sounds of slurping stickiness and slopping guts making my own stomach wrench. “Maybe Abat? Awok?”
There were so many names for a witch on the islands where my ancestors once lived.
The top half of her body detached, floating away from the bottom entirely. I gagged at the putrid, wrinkling smell of fresh blood and shit. It hovered toward me, ragged tips of intestines dripping bile below the hem of her dress, leaving a slick trail of blackened fluids. The legs left behind were naked, pale, hips rimmed by bloodless rags of torn skin, the pink stem of her broken spine poking up.
She approached, her face was colorless except for her bruise-purple lips, which curled back into a fanged smile.
“Aswang,” I muttered, my limbs heavy, my body sapped of energy, her presence weighing on me. She was an aswang. I could not run away even if I tried.
The legends sprinkled the fertile soil that nourished my childhood imagination. My mother was so fearful of the aswang who detached their torsos from their bodies at night, floating in darkness, seeking the flesh of the newly dead. She called them Filipino vampires, as nothing else was quite comparable in western folklore. I never understood the terror of half a person floating around, who could not chase and devour you like a nimble werewolf or a tenacious zombie.
Now I understood. This aswang was where death and life intersected, celebrating the nether world between them, occupying it with a smothering force and the stench of the dead. Her very presence sucked at my soul, sapping my energy.
Her face stopped inches from mine. “Say it again,” she commanded, breath frigid, sweet like fermented fish sauce.
“Aswang,” I repeated at her command, the word slipping through my tightening throat. “Aswang.”
She laughed, the sound colder, drier than I expected. “What are you ashamed of, Americano?”
The aswang pressed her fist against my sternum, something enclosed within. “Take it.”
I did not hesitate. Her skin was firmer, but still waxy. Her palm opened and a fetid odor drafted across my nostrils once again. “What-what is it?”
Something cold, round, pearlescent, draped with hairlike seaweed sat in my palm. Like holding dry ice, it gnawed on my palm.
“I knew your grandfather.” She coyly grinned, baring chocolate-brown teeth, some covered with gold. “Perhaps I really am your grandmother.”
She cackled, the whooping, mirthful laughter I’d heard so many times from the mouth of my own mother.
She pressed the back of her hand between my eyebrows, connecting us, blessing me. My head spun with pain. My eyes rolled back as a high-pitched ringing pierced my eardrum. Everything went black.
* * *
“Remember mo ba ako?” she asked, her words slow, thick-tongued. Again the old woman sat on the sofa, not afloat. Frail. I stood in the living room, my mother seated behind us. The salted air and the decay of the aswang’s domain were replaced by moth balls and dry heat radiating from open windows. The foliage was replaced by knick-knacks in curios and a black velvet painting depicting pastoral Asia: rice paddies, grass huts, and yoked carabao.
No time had passed since she blessed me. Had I blacked out and awoken, the encounter lasting mere milliseconds, was it a dream? A daydream? A nightmare? Yet my scalp was still moist from the humidity of the other world.
“She is asking if you remember her,” my mother said, smiling, translating the accented words as if I did not understand.
The old woman eyed me, her dark brown eyes with gray-rimmed pupils, a borderline glare. I nodded my head, the feeling of water sloshed in my ears. “I remember you,” I said, placating. I did not know her from my past, but I knew her.
“You were isang bata when we first met,” the old woman slurred in English. “You are so big now.”
I felt like a child again, this grandmother recalling a forgotten history. “Yes,” I said.
She strained to rise. I scurried closer to her, holding her elbow and supporting her back assisting her to standing. With her hunched back, she only rose to my chest.
“Kuma-in na tayo,” she said. Let us eat. Her breath was cold. I guided her toward the linoleum kitchen table. She whispered, “Do you still have what I gave you?”
The icy ball, shaped more like a bean and large enough to fit snugly in a teaspoon, still stung my hand. I opened my palm. Its pearlescence shone beneath briny filaments. “Yes.”
She nodded as we huddled to the small galley kitchen overstuffed with full-sized appliances, scarred Tupperware, round tins repurposed, and the aroma of lunch. Freshly steamed rice, sour soups, garlicky marinades. “Kuma-in mo,” she said, motioning to her mouth with pinched fingers. She was asking me to eat it.
The pearl bean pulsed against its hard shell. The strings of seaweed on it now squirmed like spindly black maggots. The rising vapor of rancid flesh brightly churned in my throat.
“Eat it,” she hissed, her mouth again full of brown, pitted fangs and golden teeth.
I swiftly shoved it in my mouth, hoping to swallow it whole like a giant pill. Saliva filled my cheeks as my stomach sought to reject its writhing brackishness. It was too large to swallow, so I crunched down on its shell, splitting it like a lychee nut, bitter gel oozing over my tongue, as pungent as a restaurant dumpster. I was glad it wasn’t warm. I gulped, and it all slid down my seizing throat in scratchy lumps.
The old woman cackled. “You,” she said, “are a good boy.”
I was dizzy for a moment. As in the jungle clearing, my fuzzy vision cleared until I could see clearly.
My stomach churned. Now I was hungry. Starving. Thirsty, the saltiness parching my throat. My core waited to be filled.
“Thank you, grandmother. Lola,” I whispered. “Salamat po.”
She patted the small of my back. We sat down at a rickety folding table, the surface covered with dishes of food, no room for table settings.
Together we dined on rice, on noodles, on fishy stews, on garlic and vinegar and ginger and shrimp paste. On things from the earth, things from the sea. The cloudy medicinal soup grandmother brought sat at the pit of my stomach, a pond for everything to soak in.
Eventually I was full, but I was not satisfied.
I needed to know if I’d done enough. I was afraid to look at her face again, afraid to see judgmental grandmother or grinning devil.
But now, I needed to know. Was it enough.
Peter Ong Cook is a Filipino-American writer. He once had a newspaper route, delivering from a bicycle in the crepuscular hours, a job had more influence on his life than any subsequent career. His recent stories can be found in Trouble in Paradise from Dreambridge Press, and the anthology Howls from the Scene of the Crime. He can be seen walking his very vocal husky on the streets of Los Angeles. You can find him on Instagram @peterongcook.
