(2021) Heights Vol. 68, No. 2

It was on a night like that when Juana last saw him. Nanay, Leon, and Maria were asleep on their cots. A rustling outside woke her up, and she rolled out of her hammock to find Manuel’s empty.

She found him sitting by the door of their hut, carving into a block of wood with a machete. Even though he was only two years older than her, Manuel had arms and hands browned from tilling the hacienda fields and the slouch of an old man. They talked quietly of nothing in particular, careful not to let their family hear through the bamboo walls, with Manuel slicing wood and keeping his fingers dangerously close to the blade. When he turned his wrist, Juana noticed the calluses on his hands and the sheathed bolo resting against his leg.

There was a mark on his arm in the shape of a sun.

“What’s that?” Juana asked. Manuel had been working at the hacienda for months now, but there were some things he refused to talk about.

“Just a wound,” he said. Juana knew he was lying. He wasn’t looking at her. The mark on his arm looked too dark to be old blood.

Manuel caught her staring and finally spoke. He filled up the dead air with how the orange sunrises greeted him during the picking seasons.

He and Isay, another farmer, would wake up early to see them, and chuckle whenever the rich Spanish family who owned the hacienda spoke Tagalog in a funny accent, during the few times they descended from their mansion to speak to the encomenderos. How he, Isay, and their friends would drink after a long day in the fields. He left the next morning without a goodbye.

Weeks passed and no one in Santa Cruz knew what had become of Manuel, not even the old women who gossiped at the daily masses Juana attended. The few pesos her mother was making while washing Jesuits’ robes weren’t enough for the old men who ran the rice granaries of Laguna. Juana, Leon, and Maria had to stop attending the Jesuit school in the center of town, and soon Juana became tired of cooking the same meals over and over again, flavorless without the spices she would have spent on.

They had felt hunger before, after her father had died, driving Manuel to work as a farmer. But the hole in her stomach felt deeper 118