the pill company by STANLI MARKS
When you relish something, you put it in your mouth and you suck. The prerogative of humanity is the supposition of an inner universe. The world isn’t big enough for all of us. We assimilate what is with-out us to amplify our magnitude and the unambiguous consequence of this is the rotund belief in need. You are a world and that anything with-out you that you want, you need, must be mastered. He puffed up the stairs, sucking on his left index finger. He could still taste the fruitcake on his fingers. His legs were short and if he fell, he would fall less and land less hard but his baggy pants obstructed his ascent by its floppiness, its inattention to his need the way it doesn’t suit him or the strength of his legs that need accentuating.
One set of stairs going up like a neck then another. Soon, he had passed another three and he was on top, but he didn’t stop running. He race down the hallway, scattering children the way a footprint scattered cement, scattered pebbles, scattered water or sand or whatever element was dominant, was covering, a land mass that needed troubling, the way humans populated the universal home. His haste landed in the most direct way to convey an emotion to another personage: the semi-retractable derailment of his need that romped through the hallway, bagging kid after kid that scampered out of his way. There was a hand-print on his shoulder and he had seen a smile that was tight and direct, controlled from breaking into different things that would’ve grown unknown in the deep places of so much people that she could take them over.
He tried the last room first, shoving his head through the door and tranquilizing everyone in the vicinity of his stare. His vantage point accorded him the glare of the entire room that stroked his own readiness to find the right pair of brown-black, overly reduced pair of eyes. Not here. He moved on, going back down the way he stomped through. Another set of doors and he peered into the room and it went quiet, the inspection of their souls and they held onto the white bandages around their necks and the red specks in their throats that functioned well-enough when burning bricks were thrown at them. Thena was at the back, and she came forward eagerly.
“Is it ready?”
“come on.”
She walked all the way to the larger open space across a metal bridge a few feet in length and he followed.
His eyes scanned the little faces and a small palette, like a last brownie, frowned at him from a corner. He signaled to it, the farcical pair of eyes that tore down little faces as it passed.
It brisk-walked down the corridor, its natural gait a little too strong, a little too straight, as though it knew he had a mission and it was part of it. And just like that, it wanted to help because he was master of himself and he knew that the blue shine on his shoes, the extra twitch, the slight delay meant as much to it as it did to him. It was a lording little thing. Its eyes jabbed his as it turned back to him and passed away. It retrieved a small rectangle, wrapped in something blue and topped with a green and red bow.
“Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.” Its face relaxed but it contorted also, as though problems pestered it too much to need mending anymore. It was gone before he could thank it.
Now, he was repelled by the distance. He clutched the parcel and sped down the stairs like he was eating them and he was hungry, but he was, he needed the supplication of the tides of knowing he breathed the same air as everyone.
He was a minor calamity, a small remark, a pitstop.
“He’s a penguin, a bird that can’t fly. He’s stuck in a body that prohibits his own growth, demands less of him, provides more forewarning, on his part.”
“His body with the incompatibility of his spirit proves that what we want aren’t what we need.” She made a secret point and she dug her poniard deeper into Sora’s little white throat. Sora’s hair was black, it was mutilated by the white stripes of light that escaped the petulant misunderstanding that it had once been curly. Her breath smelled good, like perfume in a bottle and she couldn’t help wondering if Sora had the same perfume all the way into her soul, all the way down her throat. If he was wine, was she perfume? If he ingested her, would he die?
Sora sipped her drink from the white Pizza Hut paper cup that she was given and sighed under the white lights that couldn’t be contained by cellophane and plastic bags.
She glanced at the door, hoping that urgency had made him quick and that he actually liked parties even though the thought of socializing, and the need to understand the formulation of opinions and how lives affected thought made his head spin because there was one thing he couldn’t want: confrontation. He had to be here. She looked at Sora and her nails done over to glisten in clear nail polish. It was the statement that won her over. An emphasis on what was natural, what was plain, but natural and, not so much indifference to peculiarities, but a taste for a simplicity that holding hands would leave satiated.
She chewed her lower lip. Where is he?
Nothing comes as easy as you.
Wear me like a locket around your throat
I’ll wear you down
I’ll watch you choke.
You look so good in blue.
Playing out on the boombox and soaring over the little assembly, he ambled in, hands behind his back and he saw her clearly because her back was obstructing his direct entrance into the room. He tapped her smartly on the shoulder. She turned around and relief flooded the little ante-room inside her eyes that he couldn’t get at, that was just partly flooded by a little more light than usual.
“Hi mommy.”
“Son.”
“actually, its father.”
“What?”
He smiled, the fuel in him made him glisten and he wanted to be back out in the sun. He smiled thoroughly, maybe he could clean up the mess in her mind and put all the junk thoughts into his and maybe he’d find something he could use and throw away a thought to her and see if she could cover it in pastel and paint or words or black and white chalk to make it seem better.
“Merry Christmas.” He held out the book wrapped in cinnamon smelling paper. She took the wrapped thing and slid it carefully into the book-bag hanging on her left shoulder.
She couldn’t resist a laugh. “You got me?”
“Yes, mommy. I have you.”
“And I got you?”
“that’s about it. Yes, mom.”
“But, dad, how’s that possible?”
she was such a cynic and he was such a romantic that there was only really one answer that satisfied her belief in irony and his belief in “Fate.”
“What does this make us? Husband and wife?”
“If you want, of course, we could play it out.”
Isn’t it messed up, how I’m just wanting to be him. I’m just a notch in your bedpost but you’re just a line in a song. Drop a heart, break a name. She licked her lower lip just so and he tipped his head back, to own the few centimeters he had that made him taller, and he licked his upper lick with the tip of his tongue. And she stood just a little on tip-toe to close her eyes up the level of his closing eyes. She started wobbling on her precarious stage of small-feet and reached out both hands to grip his waist. She leaned on him and he stood firm, erect, dodging each bullet of regret from his mind because he had taken her cheeks in his red, red palms. She kissed him, leaning on him, strung up in him and her hair fell to smack his knuckles and he felt like he was in a room of her, a fourth wall to hold up the rest that was crumbling.
Kisses were silent things so that when they leave, you don’t have to hear them leaving and they don’t knock, either, so they don’t bother you. What do you say to bid farewell to a kiss?
“Sora’s here.”
“She is?”
“in the bathroom.”
They were parallel each other; straight back and straight hair behind her ears and lips were dry and palms were cold and the flying sensation had broken a left wing in his stomach.
“Guess who.”
His sight obliterated, his olfactory senses marooned on an island that was laced with wine and cinnamon and cherry lip-gloss and his mouth was dry. He was slow to respond and she turned him around and had him open his eyes to the bright glue of his sight to see her. Sora hugged him. Sora took his arm. Sora led him outside to talk.
What do you say to bid farewell to a kiss? Come back.
And my back has been breaking from this heavy heart. He wasn’t a penguin because he was afraid of flying. What grounded him wasn’t an uneasy quell that screamed. It wasn’t noisy in him so she couldn’t fly in, take it, and make it go away down a lake or into a washroom or even into her death-trap of a heart. It was quiet, sturdy, built of timber, reinforced by cotton and cooing and drugged in ink and swelling. She didn’t know what it was but it didn’t hurt him. He wasn’t a penguin that couldn’t fly. He was a peacock that didn’t want, or need to.
He had taken her kiss and she wanted it back to tell her how his lips tasted, how near the ocean he had been and how much biting had he done due to anxiety.
It has been established that to break a man, you take away the founding part of him. She needed to find that. Or fit into the slot, or make a new slot for herself. She felt persistent, a storm, a little key that needed a lock to pick and she found it. She sat on a white plastic chair and remembered the cinnamon-wrapped book he had given her. She tore at it gracelessly till the ribbon was in the bottom of a pile of sheer paper. It was a small, thin book that had been wrapped in a power-books paper-bag to protect it from the harsh wrapping tapes and harsher handling. She slipped it out and flipped it open, careless in this moment to notice the title. The dedication page was smudged with the pencil-marks of someone, certainly not his, that was an untidy scrawl that lit the page in an insulin fire because of the rapid movement that stole the eye and the extracted potency from whoever’s hand. A small dedication for him.
. . . because you are the tag-price, the small latch that wouldn’t give, the last button, a last prevalent thing that entered the world when everyone gave up. Because you are the erudite formless hour that didn’t require a clock’s tick to note, because you were the hour when man craned its neck up, simultaneously, for a shot at rain, a note in the sky, a cloud to block the sun. because you’re done up in warm arms, wrapped. Because you deserve someone who spoke without believing that repetition can help understanding, but because repetition used up her voice and you liked that.
It was a blob of insight and it was for her. She reread it. She understood that he was potentially destructive and that he was a little lure and she was a bait and that there was only their destiny to catch. She smiled. . . . repetition used up her voice and you liked that.
He came back walking through the door. Sora left, he said. She needed to get back to work. He became silent and he looked at her shoes and he rested his forehead on a piece of wall near her. There was a page marked in the book and she read; when I cannot look at your face, I look at your feet. / my little tower / I love your feet / only because they walked / upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters / until they found me. {Pablo Neruda} She noticed that he was tired and she blew a breath into his face.
He smiled, refreshed.
*kilig naman ako !!* | 
