The Angelic Conflict (Extended Published Version)

Untitled Part 10

THE GIRL looks at the boy whose white shirt almost blinds her. Everything she visually perceives is almost too bright despite the low lights of the café. Her head feels heavy, threatening a headache. Her bones burn like fire; her ears close in like she is under water and being lugged deeper. But despite these, within her flares a light feeling. Like cotton candy and clear cerulean skies. Every time the boy smiles, she is impelled to smile, too.

The girl closes her eyes and tries to recall when she has last felt this way. Not the nauseating symptoms of an impending fever; but the funny, sunny tingles in her insides.

The girl is not a great artist, but if she were asked to sketch the place she lived in as a child, she most definitely would be able to sketch it in great detail: all the cream ceilings and the chipped, dirty white walls; all the aluminum, screened windows that flooded the space with zephyrs and gusts, and sunlight and moonlight and starlight, depending on the time of the day; and all the bulky wooden furniture. She could draw the eight-seater dining table, the kitchen shelves filled with different glasses and porcelain angels her late mother had collected. The little mezzanine that had become her room: her unpainted armoire made of Narra wood; her two-foot tall single mattress; and her corner by the window where the only television in the house sat— her little nook where she would endlessly rewatch her favorite films— The Sound of Music, Annie, Spy Kids, Dr. DoLittle, The Parent Trap— memorizing lines and gestures, hoping one day to perform on the screen. The girl loved that unit very much. It housed so many memories. Perhaps because there was something there that she could not find anywhere else since leaving: love.

The girl grew up with only a father. Even so she always felt like she had known Ruth, her mother, somewhat, somehow. She knew of Ruth's adventures as a singer, which her father narrated to her; she knew of Ruth's favorite dishes, which her father cooked for her; she knew of Ruth's most beloved songs, which her father sang, albeit out-of-tune, to her; and she knew of Ruth's recordings with a Walkman, which her father played for her on a little red cassette deck. They held every auditory track her mother adored: copied sermons, songs, orchestral pieces, voice memos... Because of these they were a family, whether her mother was alive or not.

The last recordings were during Ruth's pregnancy. Ruth would record herself every time she would talk to her tummy; she told her forming child why she and her husband loved their baby so, why she would name it as she would, and whatnot. And the girl listened to these, when warm milk could not lull her to sleep, under the blanket at midnight, her head on her father's chest. Her mother's words would perform a duet with her father's snore.

Things started to change when the girl turned eleven, though. She noticed the distance being forced between her and her father. She could tell he was making himself busy with work. He did not tell her stories anymore, nor cook for her, nor sing for her, nor bring her to school, nor listen to the tapes with her. Every day she had to hunt for the fast-food packages her father would leave in the refrigerator and walk to and from school by herself. They only saw each other on weekends, and even that was of the shortest moments.

Four months later, her father said that he would be leaving. He had warned her about this before. He would ride the seas to work in a nearby country somewhere in the Middle East.

"Why?" she asked, staring at a rice box. As usual her father had had his dinner at some restaurant without her. Perhaps even with someone she did not know.

The bulb in the kitchen blinked. It was a chilly evening, as cold as her father's voice when he said, "Because my current job isn't paying enough."

The girl had meant to ask why her father was stern. Why he raised his voice at her like he never had before. But she did not attempt to clear up any misunderstandings. She took the box and opened the lid. Shrimp, she thought. Her father had forgotten she disliked shrimp. The girl took the chopsticks provided and split them, letting her father exit the kitchen— letting that conversation, steely and untrusted, dissolve into their last.