The Red Cross ambulance arrived an hour later. The two volunteer EMTs were younger than I was, probably here as part of their university co-op terms. The driver parted waves of traffic as the ambulance’s priority mode engaged. Despite this, some places still slowed to a crawl; Manila was an anaconda, unmoving and unyielding.

Two hours later and a generous contribution from Janice’s boyfriend—a man I had yet to thank for everything he had done in my life without me knowing—we were assigned to a room at St. Luke’s Medical Center, where Papa breathed like he was snoring.

“He breathed like he was snoring.” That’s what the nurse said. I was skeptical at first until the doctor came.

“A mini-stroke,” she had said, as if strokes were nothing more than refrigerators. Papa would brush it off like nothing happened. He hadn’t left the bed without anyone’s assistance. Now, he wouldn’t even leave the building.

“Three days.” That was all I could remember the doctor saying before she moved on to patients with a chance at surviving.

I sat in the chair opposite to my father’s bed. I tried to recall the last words he uttered to me. Was it wrong to say I didn’t remember? Papa’s past, those evenings at the cinema, his platitudes to Janice and me, and his criticality of anything resembling mainstream cinema were how I wanted to remember him. That’s what he deserved.

“Anak,” he said, straight to my thoughts from a place far distant.

He made that strange snoring sound again, his head tilted toward the ceiling, and in that brief instant of recollection, I recalled every event leading up to here: the history of a man and the choices he made, the family he carved as if from the trunk of some ephemeral tree. Provider, guardian, and stalwart. He had once been all those things, and now, nothing more.

Someone else had to take the reigns.

It couldn’t be Janice. She was deep in her journalism studies—not exactly a path that would put food on the table, or at least not yet. If anyone would keep this family alive, it had to be me. I couldn’t wait for opportunities to fall into my lap, though; I needed to find them, make them. Sitting idle wasn’t an option.

I leaned back in the chair, feeling a flicker of something familiar—control. I thought about the van ride to Taal and back, my friends asleep or watching the stars as I carried them. They depended on me. I felt I could be depended on. Behind the wheel, I wasn’t just going from one place to another—I was moving forward, steering my course. But now, with everything spinning out of control, that feeling seemed out of reach.

What if I took up delivery or courier work on the side? It wasn’t glamorous, but it could pay the bills. Hell, screw Andrei’s warning—I could drive for a Giant Killing team again. But then I’d need a script like Reggie’s to pull the cars off Manila’s fleet network. Also, I’d have to pray that a field agent wouldn’t track the vehicle.

Maybe my urge to drive was nothing more than the longing for freedom, a way to escape this hell.

I didn’t even own a car. I never had. I didn’t know how to get one legally, but maybe there were other ways. People found solutions all the time; why couldn’t I?

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Hopelessness crept in, gnawing at me, but I couldn’t let it swallow me whole. There had to be a way—there always was. People made it through worse than this. I just needed to find my way. And I knew exactly what that meant.

To survive, you needed money. To get started, you needed money. To save the people around you, you need money. It always came back to that.

During this introspection, my feet touched the backpack carrying my belongings and one thing more.

Papa’s typewriter paper felt coarse, like aged hair. I had found other sheets underneath his bed. It didn’t take long to piece them together, these fallen and discarded memories, these piles of ideas. I gathered the coherent passages, found patterns and continuations, and formed what my father had left behind: a story.

The Crest and its Killers. Author: Kenneth Vargas.

I ran my fingers over the pages, feeling their weight. The world didn’t know this story—just like it barely knew my father. Unlike the hardcovers and paperbacks I had dropped into fiction chutes, The Crest and its Killers was a completely original work.

I wondered if that would matter.

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As night drew on, I buried myself in my father’s fiction, reading aloud to myself, laughing and reflecting, and imagining my father as the protagonist, the villain, and the setting itself. There was a marriage, a divorce, and a violent battle with soaring creatures. There was a heist and heavy rainfall. Intrigue and indecision. Politics and pride. A new concept appeared in every chapter, a direction I hadn’t anticipated. There were tears, too, and not just my own.

Janice slept in a chair beside Papa’s bed, likely thinking my fascination was just a scavenger hunt for hidden genius. She lay there holding Papa’s hand while I read on. I needed no hunt to discover this genius, however. It was everywhere.

What lay in my father’s works was far from the rehash on those green screens, the muddled words in recycled dialogue that plagued the cinemas. They were not blank protagonists nor reused plots. These emotions and these stories were real. I finally saw what Papa told me years ago when we left the cinema after seeing Crime Lords. These stories were real. Papa, within them, was real. I felt he had never left.

The lights dimmed past midnight. Janice was fast asleep. I had just finished reading through The Crest’s first part when I sat up and watched Papa.

His chest did not rise.

I waited.

“Papa?” I swallowed. “Papa?”

There came stillness in that rising morning. The sun blazed against Manila’s wall of haze and smog. Every light in the city seemed to flicker off at once, like candles snuffing.

Janice rose next, summoned by my callings for Papa. She felt his pulse and called for a nurse. She hugged Papa until she couldn’t anymore. She cried, and I did too until I couldn’t anymore.

There wouldn’t be a wake. Formaldehyde was too costly, and no one would come to see my father. I tried my luck anyway, messaging around and getting radio silence, but there were no responses. It was more apparent to me now than ever that my extended family wanted nothing to do with us.

The nurses told us of cremation, and Janice knew even her relationship with that foreigner named Bryce was not ironclad enough to ask for funeral expenses.

Sitting there, the weight of it all hit me again. We had nothing. No family beyond Janice and myself now, no money coming in, no way to give Papa the send-off he deserved. But I wasn’t going to let that paralyze me. There was always a way.

The pages of The Crest and its Killers lay open on my lap, their weight pulling me back to the present. Maybe it was more than just a collection of memories. Perhaps it could do more than remind me of him—maybe it could save us.

That’s where I’d start. Tomorrow—no, tonight—I’d take The Crest to a fiction chute, just to appraise its worth. It had to be worth more than a few books. If it wasn’t... well, I’d figure out something else. Driving. Cubicle work. There had to be something.

There had to be.