Inflammable [On Indefinite Hiatus]

Chapter 5: Breaking Through The Silence

Chapter 5: Breaking Through The Silence

***

Logic forces me to believe in this, 


And I have learned to see, 


And I can only say what I've seen and heard, 


And only you can choose, 


And every choice you make will affect you, 


Search your own self

 - Flyleaf, “Breathe Today"

 ***

There was an execution at the town plaza, and a crowd had begun to gather.

Torture and floggings were usually done in the dank, dark tunnels of the prisons in the walled city; when the time was ripe and the scene was ready for public consumption, the prisoner was taken out, begging for his life or lethargic and already half-dead from his struggle, and his life snuffed out before a mob of eyes. It was hardly entertainment, but it broke the deafening lull of the day-to-day grind.

Emilio checked the daily that day, and found out the name of the hapless soul: Agapito Flores. Incidentally, he was to be executed with two more men, whose names Emilio had read, but the letters blurred out of his memory when he saw Agapito Flores being led to the gallows; the man did not seem to realize that these were the last minutes of his life. He kept staring at the horizon as if waiting for someone, maybe a face in the crowd; then again perhaps his mind was already dull from suffering.

The other two prisoners slated for death were squealing like pigs, crying like small children. Emilio couldn’t say he was numb to the screams; that would be completely heartless of him. In fact, their screams bit through him like a dozen tiny blades, now raining on him like needles, now nipping at him from the inside. But a coldness trickled down his spine at the sight of Agapito Flores: here was a man who seemed to have given up the fight.

It was the third month of Emilio’s fourteenth year, but the years in between did not simply race by without its tribulations. The summer of his eleventh year seemed to have given him a taste of contentment and joy, but that did not apparently last.

That did not change the fact that he was still an indio boy, and upon enrolling in his new school for secondary education, he immediately fell back to the old routine of being singled out by his Spanish and mestizo classmates. He had better clothes, and shoes with proper shoelaces which he diligently polished every night, and while his haircuts were still less than regular there were times when they would fall over his face, and his classmates would tease him that he looked like a girl and  that he wore his mother’s clothes when she wasn’t looking.

No longer under Maestro Pascual Ferrer’s watchful eye, Emilio found himself jumping back to his reluctantly querulous nature, which spiraled into full swing whenever the offense upon him became too personal and unmistakably biting. He no longer had a teacher to instruct him to survive in brawls, but he still recalled all the lessons Huang had taught him. Memories of Qingshan and his lithe but powerful movements played themselves in his brain as he tried to reconstruct them on himself. His body and mind were pliable. In the absence of a teacher other than himself, he became his own teacher.

Soon, he began to topple boys bigger than him. Sometimes he didn’t even need to strike at all; his tormenters would always throw the first punch as Emilio had also successfully mastered the art of wheedling an opponent to make the initial move. The lumbering youths a head taller than him would fall facedown on the dust in hot-tempered attempts to hit the indio boy as solidly as they could, but Emilio was quite elusive. In fact, it was the boys his height whom Emilio found more troublesome; they could efficaciously grapple at him somehow, and there would be some sort of struggle before both he and his opponent lay on the ground, disheveled and grey with dirt.