“My mother said you go up the pek-pek, the pookie. You suck out the child.” My breathing was heavier; it took a while for me to get all those words out. I was whispering in her ear, her wild hair wrapping silken history around my neck. She pulled away and with the marker made arrows next to her ‘No’ before lowering herself down on me. When medicine failed, I prayed to God. I prayed to St. Peregrine and learned his prayer by heart. For so many years you bore in your own flesh this cancerous disease that destroys the very fiber of our being, and who had the recourse to the source of all grace when the power of man could do no more. Ask of God and our Lady the cure of the sick whom we entrust with you. Every day at lunch I went to the hospital’s chapel and prayed. Every night in my sleep I prayed. And when those prayers failed I prayed for the Manananggal. I prayed it would come and mistake Jennie’s tumors for a fetus and suck them all out. I prayed Jennie could swallow its spit and then split herself in two and leave the sick half hidden in the bushes. Then I cursed the beast. I decided it had poisoned her, had reached up and in the act of removing her womb filled it with a black chick, with the disease. Every morning Jennie and I were together I woke up to her arms around me. I lay in the fetal position, tears streaming down my face, and her arms were there, loving me, protecting me. I always thought myself the prince, but I was wrong. “What do you dream of?” the Manananggal writes on my arm. The sun is streaming through the window. She’s together now, her legs wrapped around mine. I feel the tears on my face, her fingers wiping them down my cheek, away from my skin. “History,” I tell her. “A rainbow of history—of lovers and mothers and dogs and those slain at the stockades.” “What do you dream about?” Jennie asked, her breath warm awakening in my ear. “The Manananggal,” I’d say. And she’d hold me even tighter. Kiss me behind the ear. I could feel her smile even as she tightened her grip, even as I reached for her once more.
102 · Dreaming of the Manananggal