I clicked the front gate of our house unlocked and closed it gently. Concrete walls narrowed into me. Dirt caked my jeans. The path sloshed beneath me.

“You have to hear this,” said a voice. “I swear you’ll love it. So, Louisiana told me—and what kind of name is that anyway? Make sure you get that. Louisiana told me that Peter was courting her. But I had already suspected Peter was already courting my friend, Yan! He always chatted her, but she never blocked him! And so, when I asked Yan if anyone was courting her, she puffed her cheeks out in a smile and said—and I swear to Mary, Mother, and Joseph this is what she said—‘I am an NBSB! No Boyfriend Since Birth!’ But, like, why does that matter? I’m just asking who’s courting you!” A laugh. “So, I caught her! Just like that! I’m like the NBI! Maybe you can put that in as well.”

Janice was my sister, wielding gossip like protagonists did pistols. Her voice emanated throughout the entire neighborhood, and she knew it.

She could have made chismis—Filipino for gossip—with my mother, or so my father said. And when she mentioned the NBI, the National Bureau of Investigation, she was comparing herself to the Philippines' own FBI, always digging for the truth in everyone else’s business.

“Ever the journalist major,” I told her.

She just smiled.

A plastic plank that had once been a table was our front door. A bucket was a chair I sat on. The table I placed my backpack on was nothing more than a slab of wood balanced on cinder blocks.

Laundry hung like curtains, blocking access to the stairs. From above, Janice peered down as if I had anything to contribute to her discussion.

I saw behind her shoulder the outline of a spherical shape hovering just outside the upstairs window. I had missed it on the way in. I thought it had risen from the dead and followed me home.

“You marites,” I told her, using the Tagalog equivalent of gossiper. “It’s not going to learn anything from your chismis.”

“It did with Yan!” She shook like some disturbed bobblehead, the kind jeepney drivers set up on their dashboards. “She told it a story about the time me and her and Steff went to Bicol and Matnog, and the boat dropped us off outside the cave, and we had to swim inside to see it. And two weeks later, you know what happened? We were watching the season premiere of Beach Killer: Undaunted. They even modeled a character after me. Didn’t I tell you?”

This was the tenth time she had told me, but the story had grown old by the second recitation. “There was no way that’s the same drone from the beach, and of course, nothing is interesting about university girls on an outing anyway.” Besides, Beach Killer: Undaunted had tanked under critical ratings. It was, as Papa always said, “rehashed Hollywood colonizer garbage.”

Janice huffed. “Maybe it’s not as interesting as what you’ve been up to.”

My hands clenched. “Hoy!”

“You can’t fool me, Jayson,” Janice snickered. “Investigative journalism is real.”

“It’s what gets them killed too.” Perhaps that was harsh, so I pulled back a bit. “Shouldn’t you be ‘investigating’ more interesting things than your own brother?”

Janice sighed. “I just knew you were scraping. You’re always out late when the agents can’t see you.”

I was thankful she had dropped her voice at the last part.

I didn’t support my sister’s study of journalism, but she had taken to it with more gusto than I had seen anyone do to anything. “There is so much corruption here,” she had said before. “The only way we escape it is by holding ourselves to a high standard? How do we do that? Exposing it for all to see.”

I could only nod at that. “You do you,” I said.

I took my backpack and walked up the stairs to our room, ready to silence Janice if she continued, but she didn’t, lounging against the wall that separated us from our neighbors, thin as plywood. We could hear every spoken word, every fight, and every…well… you can guess the rest. Even now, the single mother of two on the other side berated her teenage children, an experience I had often thought lucky to dodge. At times like these, entering a dark room lit by nothing more than our cellphone flashlights, I wasn’t so sure.

I slumped against the opposite wall, putting myself as far from my sister as possible, while she busied herself in her group chats. The fiction scraping commission had already reached my digital wallet, but the top-up for 6GB of data had already been deducted. Half of my weekly funds were already gone.

When I was sure Janice wasn’t looking over my shoulder, I checked the web for any trace of us in Taal. If there was a story, it was overshadowed by another one. I read the headline on Rappler’s front page.

THE TONDO TUSSLE

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

METAMATICS LEAD RAID RESULTING IN 19 PNP OFFICER FATALITIES

“The Tondo Tussle.” It sounded like a cheap Kung-fu flick. “The Tondo Slaughter” would have been more apt, yet both titles would have fallen under Papa’s scrutiny.

I skimmed message boards on Reddit, checked Facebook groups, both public and private ones that I joined days before, and put search terms like “drone attack,” “thieves,” and “Taal” into web crawlers. I found more discussions of the downed drone, but we had aimed our attack correctly in the window before the drone could send its diagnostics back to Metamatics. As it turned out, we were just another bullet point on a security bulletin, overshadowed.

Yet my heart couldn’t stop beating. Not quite palpitations, but harder than any exercise. All of this for 500 PHP, the same thing for months before and the same thing tomorrow, but the stakes always rose. Soon, it would hit its peak. How long could I sustain myself?

The only proper door in the house led to a room on the second floor. As I turned up, I thought I heard a pounding.

“Anak,” said a muffled voice from behind it.

Janice paused her video call and placed her phone down. Her face reddened, and her lips quivered. Her eyes went wide. Then, as if her shoulders could cover her ears, she curled up in a ball and sunk her head. “You do it,” she muttered.

“Anak!” repeated the voice.

Janice eventually did follow, and I led the way, opening the bedroom door. Blackness greeted me, as did clicks and clacks and a loud chime. A bed occupied most of the room. A man sat on it. An oxygen tank rested next to his bed, a typewriter as large as a carry-on suitcase on his lap. Its illuminated keys lit his gaunt face, his balding pate. His blank eyes regarded me as I entered.

“Anak?” said Papa. My father. He frowned at me. “Not you again. Where is my son?”

I wanted to say, “Your son and daughter have always been here,” but there was no sense correcting my father after what his mind had become.

Janice folded her arms by the door, leaning in but not fully committing. We thought it would eventually become easier seeing Papa like this, but it never did.

“Rice,” I told her.

She was down the stairs instantly, returning minutes later with a steaming bowl. No proteins or vegetables, just plain white rice.

Papa swiped the bowl from Janice’s hands, much like the kapre in the stories he used to tell me—the same tale I had shared with my fellow Giant Killers that evening. My phone’s flashlight illuminated Papa’s gaunt face. He eyed me like I was some stalk of bamboo in his way.

“Where is my yaya?” he asked, his mouth full. A grain of rice dripped onto his white shirt. Before, the garment had hugged his muscles; now, it was far too large.

He still asked for our yaya, our longtime nanny, even though we lost her years ago. Some habits, like some memories, linger longer than others.

I steadied the bowl for Papa. He would drop it otherwise. “It’s alright,” I told him. “Yaya is here. Anak is here.” I said the words, but I wished for a time when he would address us by our names again.

“And nanay?” murmured Papa, using the Filipino word for mother.

Of course, he wasn’t referring to his own mother—he was referring to mine. His wife.

I exhaled. “She’s away. She will be back soon.”

Papa’s nod always came after the calm assurance of these two phantoms in his foreground. We were nothing but smoke to him. I never had the strength to remind him that Mother had left a long time ago before even I could remember her.

Janice remained silent through all this, youth paralyzed by the withering down of the support structures that were your parents. She was younger than me, so things hit her harder. I had to be strong for her. We were all that was left.

“It’s weighing you down, Papa,” I told him but faced the typewriter. “We should take it off.” I moved to lift it.

Papa’s hands clutched around it. His neck tightened, and I smelled something foul.

I changed him, and while I did, I couldn’t help glancing at the typewriter’s screen again. I don’t know what I hoped to find—maybe an interesting passage, a glimpse into the mind of a modern-day Illustrado, one of those Filipino “intellectuals” in the past, now fading away. Instead, I saw a random string of characters, the product of my papa rolling his fingers across the keys without reason.

Sheets of papers littered the floor, discarded from my father’s grumblings. I threw them out every day, but some I kept—those that formed the bits of stories he had always told me before his condition. I stooped to read them this time, but there was nothing.

Janice left shortly after that, claiming to be late for a study session, though I knew Papa’s forgetfulness triggered her anxiety. It was the same I felt when all my supports underneath me started falling, and I drowned.

Drowning. That could have been a better fate for my papa, a once-proud and intelligent man now stooped down to nothing.

“If I start going, don’t give me morphine. Give me paper.”

I was in the doctor’s office again with my father’s words the day he had the diagnosis. I thought Alzheimer’s only affected North Americans or Europeans, that segment of the world that seemed to be riddled with mental illness and anxiety and trauma, until I realized it occurred here too, just no one talked about it. I learned quickly that no one in the world was safe from diseases of the mind.

“Don’t say things like that, Papa,” I remembered telling him. “Just keep focusing your brain. Keep training.”

“I have been, anak,” he told me. “I have been.”

His sentences became fragmented in the coming weeks. Days would pass without him speaking. That had been years ago, and when his words started failing, so did the rest of his body. His breathing troubled. He couldn’t leave the bed without our assistance. All this time, Janice watched, and so did I, seeing a man we could rely on now withering to less than a child. We could not depend on him anymore.

Soon, Janice and I would be alone.

I tucked my father in that night, clearing the way for his autonomous snores. I kissed his forehead. “I’ll be here again tomorrow night,” I told him, “with more money this time.”

I meant it, too, even if it amounted to walking back to TelePerformix with my head down or scraping by myself.