VIDEOKE NIGHT - Olga Trianta-Boncogon

It’s past midnight as you sit in a converted house. Two stories tall, looming above nearby residences. Concrete on the ground floor, bahay kubo on top, a thatched roof, and wooden stilt walls. It’s the first and only bar in the village. The details of the past six visits wrap around you like banyan trees’ dangling roots. Was it two or three trips ago they paved over the dirt roads and built the bridge? A factory uphill bleeds the river brown. No more milkfish flopping up, no more herons lingering in the marshes. Much is different but more is the same. Motorbikes teem with families and groceries. Women shield themselves with umbrellas from sun rays. Mga carabao soak in ponds between plowing the fields and crossing streets when they see fit.
 
At a picnic table on the second floor, amber bottles of San Miguel surround you. Plumes of mosquito-repellent incense shimmer in the minty air. There’s a laptop and screen on the small stage in front. Every song in the world is accessible but most pick English ballads from the ’80s and ’90s, accents stretched out by mournful notes into a universal, wailing agony.
 
Two cousins are with you. Dako is the stylish one fluent in English. He lounges on your right in a gelled quiff and brand-name shirt, nursing his fifth bottle and insisting you call him the honorific Kuya before his name, even though he is your elder by only two months. There’s the older cousin on your left, Kuya Melchor. He’s just returned from working in an airport in Dubai. You two exchange pidgin French. If only you had paid more attention in class. He doesn’t remember English and Kuya Dako is too tipsy to be your translator, sputtering and giggling between gulps of beer.
 
There are some cute young women around your age the next table over. They drink soda instead of alcohol. You feel your mother’s approval of them from whichever relative’s house she’s reminiscing in tonight. These village girls likely clock your thicker build, paler skin, and abundant sweating, as foreign. You’ll learn later that you’ve been the subject of petty gossip for weeks, from the moment your relatives were notified on Facebook that you’d be visiting after graduation.
 
A typhoon is coming in the next few days. The only sign of the impending danger is that humidity feels like a curtain you’re always walking through. It contrasts with what you left behind. Blasting AC and the latest PlayStation. Air so dry it scabs knuckles in winter.
 
The mic is free. The girls titter when they see you approach the stage, held hostage by a very drunk Kuya Dako. Roving lights glint off the patrons’ faces. The neighbors in the adjacent homes are an aggrieved, captive audience behind mudbrick walls. To get it over with, you ask Kuya Dako to pick a soft English song, and he does. Of course, it’s by Ed Sheeran. Of course, you make awkward, lingering eye contact with one of the girls while singing about everlasting love.
 
You scramble back to your table. Now the sweat is more than just from the heat. But a part of you knows she will never approach you. A provincial insecurity that her English is inadequate, less than because she doesn’t speak with your flat accent. Just by being able to speak with you on your terms, she’s accomplished something you never could.
 
Kuya Dako has been one of the only people besides your mother that you could talk to for the past two weeks. His teeth are phosphorescent from the screen’s glow as he sings his sixth song. The family reunion is next weekend and you pray you can get by with broken Bisaya and posing for excessive photographs.
 
Kuya Melchor offers you another drink. Ambrosia for an eternal night. The room blurs. You just wanted to treat your cousins then crash at the two-room hotel. You and your mom are sharing the bigger room. Two twin beds on brittle frames, less than a foot apart. Intrusive intimacy.
 
Kuya Melchor’s wife joins your group around two a.m. You haven’t seen Ate Carmen the whole trip. The night has new life because there is someone else you can talk to in English. Their children are with your mom, she informs you, then she sings three songs in a row. Kuya Melchor watches her with teary eyes as she dedicates each one to him.
 
You wonder if you’ll love someone like this so that even separated by the world’s diameter, you’d hold firm to desire with the weight of a dozen roles anchoring you: harvesting watermelons and rice and coconuts and selling them at the market, kissing bruises and bandaging cuts on your children’s knees, tending to ailing relatives, chopping chicken or fish for adobo or sinigang in the interstices between, witnessing sapphire and turquoise water decay into the same obsidian that overtakes you the second your head hits your pillow.
 
Could you endure the scrutiny of people who paid you a fraction of your worth for years? Smile through false assurances of raises and bow your head when the same police officer stops you for the third time to check your papers, all to keep the farm going and the kids in school? Those same children who recoil from your touch, unfamiliar with the physical manifestation of the man with the deep laugh from nightly phone calls.
 
These are quandaries only theoretical to you by accidental birthright. In two weeks, it’s back to apply for jobs, break in that new game console, veg out cushioned by comparative luxuries that you neglect to appreciate.
 
Your mom too worked abroad and sent the majority of her paycheck back home. Then she married an American, your father. Every trip back to her sitio, you understand her a little more: why she puts Christmas decorations up in September, the instinctive pointing with her lips, her insistence that omnipresent halimaw will ambush children out too late.
 
Twenty-plus years after her first remittance, you’re here, patting Kuya Dako’s back as he vomits outside. Kuya Melchor helps you carry him home and Ate Carmen laughs like she is young again. There is only one streetlight on the way, at the intersection where Kuya Dako will die two years later, swerving on his motorsiklo to avoid an errant child and crashing into a wall, helmet-less head first. The smooth pavement only conserved momentum. In three years, there will be a pandemic and no family reunions, and in five when they’re back on again, you’ll feel the absence of Kuya Dako on nights when the crickets overtake cicadas and screech until dawn. The pull of a magnetic moon that capsizes sakayan on the village’s River Styx. The neighbors will have won, the bar long closed and the building sitting vacant, the strobe lights no longer drowning out their view of the stars. 

Olga Trianta-Boncogon’s stories are based on her experience as a biracial, multilingual, and incorrigible immigrant. Her interests include playing harp, learning languages, and writing. She’s published short fiction with The City Key, Flash Fiction Magazine, and West Trade Review. Her work has received an Honorable Mention in the West Trade Review’s 2024 704 flash fiction competition. She teaches in Taiwan where she lives with her family.