Angry bird visits Rapunzel

 

 

 

She is the one I come here for, and every time, I see her shrinking smaller and smaller into her lost self. I sometimes suspect she has disappeared in their sight and they don’t know it.

Twelve noon and I haven’t taken my first glass of water. Ramadan is ten days away, but hunger is not how I feel. Thirst is not how I feel. Just a pain in my spine for sitting way too long in this plastic chair in front of this low table my brother made for his teenage daughter whom I exiled from her room from her bed that I may occupy it myself.

So I can write, I have a bed in Takurong.

Which is cheesy. The wooden chair I brought all the way to here, years back when I discarded all my furniture save that one because it was made of good wood from Bukidnon bought by a friend on her way home, my sister in-law folded and dumped in the kitchen. Because it scratches against their glossy red tiles. Or their linoleum floor. Contempt is what I otherwise have for all these petty bourgeois strivings. But right now I have no time. Just a vague anxiety that I haven’t put in a little money as yet to pay for my one-week rent.

I could feel her hatred. It is polite and crisp. I am immune to it. But not the children. The children relay it to me. I blink.

I cannot get mad here. Not here where they long ago gave me up for sick. A 48-year old unmarried aunt posing as a tomboy to do away with things she didn’t get being such a bad lay. So they don’t talk to me. I had long stopped talking to them, had long stopped seeing them. I blanch each time the brother their father approaches like he could still talk to me like we were friends. No acting familiar. I will hiss. I will claw. Draw blood. 

They have a son who takes to me. I am a curiosity, a wonder. I’m gay but not lonely about being gay like she is. I am full of stories about a world she does not know the beginning and end of. Of girls braver than boys, of houses being razed to the ground, of blasts and gunshots in the neighborhood.

"Is Mherz your boyfriend?"
"No."
"Your best friend?"
"No."
"Coms?"
"Coms is a sister, like you are sister to Coleen."
"Like Father is sister to you?
"Oh your father is no relation to me in the same way that this plastic chair I sit in is a relation to me. We are estranged."
"Strange?"
"No. Estranged. E-s-t-r-a-n-g-e-d. That means no connect, no signal."
"Ah hahaha."

She is the one I come here for, and every time, I see her shrinking smaller and smaller into her lost self. I sometimes suspect she has disappeared in their sight and they don’t know it. She has stopped making detailed sketches of Rapunzel’s hair, the comb of the brush Cinderella used to scrub the floor of the queen’s house. Faggot faggot, the older brother taunts him day in and day out. "He is a boy, we are a boy aren’t we, love?" the mother coos every night at bed time. Great formula to grow another psychotic.

She comes to the room, and gets called out seconds after. "What are you doing there? Come out here." Last night she worked quietly on my bed while the mother busied herself in the kitchen washing the dishes the pots and pans the sink and the muddied floor. A moment of world peace we both had inside. I was at my computer playing Solitaire.  The mother has raised housekeeping to the level of art. The pots’ butts glossy silver, the shirts swaying in the wind blazing like headless limbless scarecrows hung under the desert sun. I have stopped putting time in to be useful anywhere in the house. After each meal everyone escapes, leaves her to wash the dishes and wipe the table right, as she wished. The slippers are always on the rack, you soil your feet but not the floor, Royalty would wince. I pump pails and pails of water into the filter jar until the containers are full, and get back in to my occupied territory.  The room's owner, the 14-year old daughter, keeps away, scowls and turns her back when shot at, afraid that I would sell her pictures to the pervs in Jolo. She would not enter if I am inside and sitting. With my back turned and sleeping, she tiptoes in and out. It is the 7-year old son that keeps on hanging on to my side, forces the door open if I shut it and lock up. The day I was to leave, she did not leave for school, told her mother they have no class; ran in and out of the house to peep in, like I would disappear in the morning mist if she didn't check another time. Gave me an illustrated version of the story I once told her, how Rapunzel was saved by Angry Bird, not by the Prince. The prince kidnapped Rapunzel while her Auntie and she were picking lice at the stairway of their thatch house. He lifted her by her hair and his horse went galloping before the aunt could jump at them. It was a rough ride full of skids and stops because Rapunzel kept on falling off the horse's back, her hair kept on tangling with the branches on the roadside. When they got to the tower, she was all bruises and there were splinters on her hair and face. She braided her hair while the Prince went looking for gauze and Mediplast. When he came back she greeted him with a whip. He yelped. She whipped and whipped him with her hair until he bled. That’s when the Prince found out Rapunzel was a tomboy. He cursed and called for his father and his boyfriends his father’s men for advice, but they were all out having fun without him. He fell on his knees on the marble floor and wept. Up at the tower, Rapunzel went into the bathroom and shampooed her hair.

How she giggled at that part. "She shampooed her long hair? Hihihihihi! She must be gay!"
"Yes she is gay, she’s a tomboy, remember?"

And while drying her hair at the tower’s balcony, Angry Bird came by and Rapunzel whistled summoning her, and my, was Angry Bird big! Rapunzel rode up Angry Bird and they sailed away until she got back to the village where Rapunzel’s friends the street tomboys and her tomboy aunt were gathered in the kitchen around a lamplight plotting an adventure to rescue her, and when they saw her gliding in with Angry Bird, they lived happily ever after.