My 2nd Published Short Story

I'm one of 12 authors in "Fantasy: Filipino Fiction for Young Adults," a short-story anthology edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Kenneth Yu. The book comes after "Science Fiction" and "Horror," both also edited by the same esteemed writers. The new one's rather difficult to find--not in a lot of bookstores (I got mine at F. Sionil Jose's Solidaridad bookshop in Ermita), but you can order it online through the UP Press website here.

Just a little background: I wrote my story, "In Teresa," way back in 2016, in one of those rare writing spells I no longer seem capable of sustaining. Five-ish hours at the Starbucks across RCBC Plaza, Makati City, where I had earlier processed our visa application for that Taiwan trip with my sister. Of the many things I've written, this story is the one I most enjoyed coming up with. Relatively fresh out of med school, I decided to turn my closest friends into literature--so if you went to school with me, you'll be familiar with the characters in my story, not that they're accurate representations of their real-life namesakes. 

A couple of months later, I tweaked this story and gave it a realist twist and included it in my portfolio for the 56th Silliman Writers Workshop.

And about the title of this post: Yes--really--this is just my second published piece of fiction! Fiction, I have found, is definitely harder and more demanding to write, compared to poetry. No shade.

Buy our book! Support literature! Here's my first paragraph:

     Nobody goes to Teresa Building unless they have to. Five years ago, a teacher jumped off the top floor--a janitor claimed he saw her--but they never found a body. No blood stains on the ground, no broken bones, nothing. That's what Francine, my senior buddy, said anyway. She was a freshman when the whole thing happened. It made the evening news that day, and the papers for several days. There were a lot of angry parents, she said, and it took weeks before the police finally left the school premises. Everybody was scared shitless, Francine said. There wasn't a day when a girl wouldn't just break into tears in the middle of class. Chalk it up to the solidarity of the feminine psyche, Francine said (she's pa-deep like that). Teresa Building is now mostly storage, except for the ground floor, where Mr. Rubio, the slightly hot computer teacher with hairy, veiny arms and a small paunch, holds his hands-on sessions.