Soon after high school, she received a scholarship to play volleyball at San Francisco State University, where life led her next. With her sports background and a degree in Fine Arts (emphasis in drawing and painting), she had no clue what to do—so she took up a career in personal training.
A few years later, she found that painting still held her interest in her off hours. So she decided to return to school and was accepted to the Savannah College of Art & Design for an MFA in illustration.
Today, she spends her time working hard at school in Atlanta, power lifting, and reading when she gets the chance.
Odd and Ugly
I
You come to my tree at high noon in July, sweating, panting, young. So very, very young. I can’t help staring at you: it’s like watching a walking, talking circular window with square glass stuck through it. I knew you’d come someday, but I’m still so stunned to see you that I disbelieve my own eyes. The small sack in one hand and the clay jar at your hip tell me that you mean to stay, too.
“Are you the kapre from the stories? The one with the shell necklace?” you ask, your voice high and clear. You set your jar down and gather your long, sweat-dampened black hair over your shoulder, away from your nape, as you glance up from under your straw salakot. Your eyes are the color of tablea chocolate bubbling in a cup. I’m startled that I remember so human a sensation.
“That depends,” I say. I lower myself so you can see me, a thing moving and detached from the canopy of leaves above, although I’m of the same hues. Humanoid, but decidedly not human. I catch your gaze falling on my necklace: several cowrie shells strung together with black beads and woven thread, with a single shell hanging from the middle like a pendant. Your expression becomes momentarily unsettled; maybe you’re startled by my ugliness, just like all the other passersby whom I like to scare. Whatever it is, you shake it off, and the action comes from inside you: a slow resolve that hardens your features and makes you cling tighter to your small sack of belongings. Your boldness is commendable, as always.
I ask you two questions that I already know the answers to: “Who is everyone? And who are you?”
“Everyone is the town, and I am Maria,” is your simple answer. I thrill to hear your name. “My tatay owes you a debt.”
I remember your father as a frightened young man, clutching a mango stolen from my tree, begging for forgiveness and blabbering about the cravings of his pregnant wife. It feels as if that happened only yesterday. “Ah, you’re that Maria. You’ve grown.”
You ignore that. “What’s your name?”
I laugh, long and low. “Oh, no. You haven’t earned that yet, ’neng. And you shouldn’t wander out here by yourself. The town’s tongues will wag about you meeting a lover.”
“Let them wag.”
“The Guardia Civil will say that you’re conspiring with revolutionaries.”
“I don’t care about that.”
“The friars will denounce you as a witch.”
It takes a while, but you give me a slow nod. I’m impressed, though I have no proof that you truly understand the implications of your declarations. You say, “I’m not afraid of them, señor. I’ve come to erase my tatay’s debt.”
Señor. I’ve been called many things in my long life, and most of them unpleasant—but never that. The irony tickles me.
I drop to the ground and straighten my back. You barely surpass my collarbones. But my height isn’t what gets your attention—you realize that I’m wearing nothing but a loincloth. Your gaze snaps back to my face, though your cheeks are pink-tinged. I grin at your discomfort.
“Erase his debt with what? Another mango?” I know I’m being difficult, but what other way is there to be? This was never going to be an easy situation for either of us. “I’ve no use for money, and I have everything I need in my realm. Are you going to offer me yourself, ’neng?”
You pout. Your bushy eyebrows meet, and your lower lip sticks out, an arresting dash of pink in your sun-browned face. You’re making quick mental calculations.
I’m fighting that part of me that has always adored you.
“Yes,” you say in an even tone, flooring me once again. You always were so quick to take up a challenge, as on the day your father first asked if you would like to learn to hack stalks of sugarcane with a bolo knife. I just marvel to see it up close.
And then you add: “I’m going to offer you my services, señor. As your housekeeper.”
I don’t fight the part of me that is also irritated by you.
II
It doesn’t work that way, a human woman un-courted by a kapre shouldering her way into his tree. I’m supposed to chase you first. I’m supposed to leave small gifts around your house, and you must come to me willingly. I’m supposed to choose you—or so other kapre told me long ago, when I still attempted socializing with them. I’ve never actually courted human women before. But here you are, choosing me—or my home, at least—and I can never refuse someone passage when they wish to enter my home.
“I don’t have a house to keep!” I huff.
“Then I’ll be your tree-keeper. Or your realm-keeper,” you shoot airily over your shoulder as you make your way down my halls. “This is a good deal, you know? You don’t even have to give me wages or anything more than a place to stay! I only have to work off the debt!”
I grumble, “You’ll just mess everything up, ’neng.”
You don’t know your way around, and I’m not going to give you a tour—I didn’t formally agree to you being my housekeeper, after all—yet you seem unconcerned with becoming lost. I guess you’re that confident that you’ll get to know all the firefly orb-lit tunnels and caverns, all the gardens and groves that I’ve filled with collected human treasures—and all the various flora in between—the same way you know your own home.
Still, that doesn’t stop me from pulling you by the shoulder when my giant Venus flytrap’s jaws snap across the path ahead.
“Be careful, ’neng!” I say, and remember too late what I shouldn’t have said. On cue, the whispers begin.
Is that her?
Don’t be stupid, that is her!
Who?
You know—her!
She’s not very pretty, is she?
I thought she’d be prettier, too.
“I’m right here, you know!” you call out, and I can’t help but laugh from deep in my gut. First, because their discussion about you is honestly amusing and second, because I’m relieved you stopped them from saying anything more.
Nearby, the fire tree—delonix regia, who prefers to be called Delonix—whispers to me alone, That is her, isn’t it?
“It is.”
If Delonix were a person, she would nod. She is something like my second-in-command here, the queen of all the flora by some unspoken agreement. She is also my eyes and ears around my realm. How do you plan to go about this?
“Go?”
I assume you have a plan or you would’ve handed her the stone by now—
“Delonix,” I snap. “Not here.”
Honestly, you weren’t supposed to be here yet. My intention was to let your father know someday in the distant future that I wanted my debt paid. He wasn’t supposed to send you here before that day—so what happened? But I put off asking you in order to introduce you to the flowers. I show you to them all—the spinning vine flowers, the luminescent flowers, the rotting corpse flowers, the toothed flowers, the flowers with faces. I rattle off their names like a carpenter hammers a nail in wood, and I’m impressed when you echo them with accuracy and grace.
“What amazing flowers you all are,” you say with a smile that comes from your entire being. You stroke the flowers who allow themselves to be stroked and bow to those who demand to be bowed to. “I look forward to working with you all from now on!”
I allow myself to think ju
st for a fraction of a moment that maybe you can handle yourself around here, that maybe it will be nice to talk to someone who isn’t rooted to the ground or clouded in malodor. Then I push the thought down like a stone in mud.
I’m glad you’re here, but that doesn’t mean we can be easygoing with each other.
III
In August, you discover very quickly that being a housekeeper in my tree is more like being a gardener. Those flowers don’t all get hungry at the same time, and not all for the same food. Some of them tend to go on and on about their myriad personal woes or else the tedious gossip of the plant kingdom. Day and night do not pass like they do in the world outside my tree, but I can say with certainty that feeding and talking to everyone is two days of work.
Yet you listen to them all as if your very life depends on it—and in some carnivorous cases, it truly does. You pass sufficient judgments on debates and arguments when called for. You don’t appear to be tiring out anytime soon; in fact, you move as if you already belong here, as if you’ve only just returned to your home. The only thing that gives away your humanity is that you decline the flowers’ and the trees’ offers of fruit and honey. The fact that you still climb out of my realm to gather your own food and water every now and then means that you don’t intend to stay forever. No one may eat anything in a kapre’s realm and expect to live in the wider world again.
I don’t tell you that women who end up in kapre trees are not meant to leave. I don’t tell you that it is completely within my power to bar your passage out. I don’t tell you that I’ve made an exception for you. If you already know all this, you’re not letting on.
Somehow, you’ve also found out—likely from Delonix—that I sleep in the acacia grove. Or maybe the smell was a giveaway, I don’t know—I’ve been told for years by various creatures that the ash from my cigars can be smelled from miles away. Between feeding and talking to the flowers, you’ve somehow made time to sweep the ash from the grass. While I’m grateful for the cleaner grove, you’ve also displaced and rearranged my cigar stash. In fact, you’ve done that for all the objects in the grove: shiny trinkets and love letters and parasols and all manner of things that people have lost in the forest outside over the years. When I discover this, I draw myself up to my full height. I bare my teeth as I tower over you. You stand there scowling up at me, defiant like a lit lantern in darkness.
“I knew you’d mess everything up, ’neng!” I growl. “I can’t find anything!”
“Señor, if you just let me explain my categorization system, then you’ll be able to find everything,” is your none-too-gentle answer.
“I don’t want anything categorized! I want everything where they were before!”
“Well, I can’t put them back in the exact mess I found them in,” your tone has grown frosty with logic now. “That’s unreasonable.”
“Unreasonable?” I thunder. I know I’m being unreasonable. I’ve lived the way I liked, alone, for so long now. Someone else coming here and touching my things reminds me of a more distant time, when I couldn’t own anything. I know I’m reacting to those times, but it’s too late to stop being irritable. “What’s unreasonable is this arrangement! I’m going to pay your tatay a visit—”
“No, no, don’t!” You are about to reach for me. I know it, you know it. But something holds you back; I’m willing to bet that it is my ugliness and quite possibly my glower. You lower your hands to your sides; they continue to twitch, so you ball them into fists. “Don’t do that, señor. I swore to my parents I’d work off tatay’s debt.”
Something about the way your head is bent, the way your fists uncurl and pluck at your checkered saya, the way your slippered feet dig into the ground where you stand makes me uncomfortable. What aren’t you telling me, I wonder? At last, I say, “All right. I won’t. But next time, you better let me know before you clean around here.”
You chuckle, a small sound. “The cleaning was as much for my benefit as yours.”
I feel the irritation rising in me again. “What do you mean?”
“I’m sleeping in the calachuchi grove next to yours,” you say. It is astonishing, now that we’ve moved on from the subject of your father, how unruffled you are—either with this statement of yours or the fact that faint clouds have begun billowing from my nostrils. “And I can smell your revolting cigars from there.”
“Then why didn’t you categorize the stuff there, ’neng?” I spit out “categorize” like a mouthful of santol pits.
“Oh, I already have,” you say that as if it’s something I already should have known, and I guess I should have. You always did appreciate order. “I just came in here to do something about the stench and accidentally moved some things. So I thought I’d do something nice for you and clean your grove.”
That knocks the wind out of me. I know you learned your thoughtfulness from your mother—I’ve seen you help her help your elderly neighbors carry bayongs brimming with fish and vegetables from the wet market to their houses. You’d make a fine wife for a human husband—and because I let my guard down just a little, the words spill from my mouth before I can censor them. I regret saying this up until the moment you lower your head.
“Anyone who’s heard of me already thinks I’m a troublesome woman,” your tone is subdued, just as when we discussed your father. It really doesn’t suit you. “I’m not afraid of the new high-and-mighty haciendero snatching up our lands, or the Guardia Civil, or the friars in their big churches. My neighbors say that makes me odd, even dangerous.”
Anger curls in the pit of my stomach. Oh, if that miserable town only knew. “Then no one in that town deserves you. Even a blind man can see that that makes you brave.”
You look up at me again. The big brown pools of your eyes are gleaming.
“Thank you, señor,” you say, your voice lowered to a breath. I can’t help watching your lips form over the words.
I turn away from the desire to kiss you—from you—for all the good it will do.
IV
Why do no other creatures visit you, señor?”
“Because I don’t want them to. And most aren’t as thick-faced as you, ’neng.”
You let go of the yellow-stained blanket you’ve been washing in the stream running through my realm, stand up, and give me a dainty curtsy. Your hair falls forward; you’ve taken to wearing calachuchi flowers in it lately. I don’t say so, but they and their sweet fragrance become you. “What a lovely compliment! Thank you, señor.”
I choke a laugh on my cigar. The embers fall on the branch where I lounge, then to the grass. The flowers nearest me call to each other, Look out! You’ll get burned! while the rest giggle and titter with—and not at—your sense of humor. Some of them say to me, She’s as thick-faced as you! They’ve gotten even bolder with your coming.
You return to the washing. “There’s something else I’ve been wondering about.”
“Ah, no end to the wondering with you, is there?”
You don’t answer back, but I could swear that there is a hint of a smile in the slight profile I can see from my vantage point. “When I was little, my parents and neighbors used to tell me stories of the diwata of the mountain before she disappeared. Where is she now? Surely she visits you?”
The diwata of the mountain! The diwata of the mountain! the flowers chant in singsong.
I hush them. I don’t know what to say to you, though, and you can tell. You spin around to find me tapping more ash from the cigar.
“No, she does not,” I say at last.
You bite your lip.
“The diwata doesn’t visit anyone now, ’neng.”
“Isn’t that worrying?” you ask. You’re crumpling your saya in your hands again, as you always do when you’re anxious. “The elders say that she hasn’t been seen by anyone for hundreds of years! I thought maybe she kept to her kind or so, but if she doesn??
?t visit even you—”
I support my weight with the branch and lean forward, my interest piqued. “Why are you so worried about her, ’neng? She was long before your time.”
“I—” You stare at the grass now. You quiet down as you wrestle with some inner turmoil. “I guess I thought that she’d answer the pleas of her supplicants. I thought she’d protect us from the abuses of the Kastila. If not her people, then her lands.”
I lean back against the trunk. “’Neng, if you’re under the impression that the diwata is all-powerful, then you’re mistaken. The friars came to her promising friendship. By the time their corruption came to light, they’d already turned most of the population to their god. She couldn’t drive out the Kastila without help, any more than you can.”
You sink to your knees. “So she’s abandoned us for good?”
“Hah! Never,” I take a puff from my cigar. “She can’t abandon you any more than she can abandon her mountain.”
“So where is she?”
I hesitate. “Diwata will be found when she wants to be found.”
“But will she come back?”
I meet your gaze. Worry swims in it. How young you are, how naive, how innocent.
“Someday. I’m sure of it.”
V
As someone who never had anything, I wanted everything. And yet, how I was ever unsatisfied with spending long days and nights counting stars and fireflies and loving the diwata of the mountain the best way I knew how baffles even me. I wanted to be able to change into animal forms like she could. I wanted so badly to know what it was like to be not me, not in my own skin.
We fought about this a lot, but somehow, I won in the end. Slowly, the diwata began to teach me the secrets of how to change into a chicken, a dog, a goat, a boar, and so much more. Despite her reluctance with all this, she’d always laugh whenever I stopped the transformation halfway. I’d be sprouting feathers or four hoofed legs or a beak or tusks or a bushy tail. Sometimes all at once. We liked going to the river and laughing at how ugly I looked every time I did this. Anyone else would’ve been frightened by my grotesque appearances, but not her. And still, she remembered to warn me that if I favored one form too long, that form becomes mine.