Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
"The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
Mahatma Gandhi
... and the video below, although shot in China, can very well be Korea or the Philippines, home of the beloved asoscena.
Your dog, your dish. Sick bastards.
I had a dog once named Sugar, a large furry dog that was the very picture of sweetness and loyalty. Technically, he was not really my dog, but Candy's dog. When I was a little boy still starting in grade school, we lived for free in the house of Mother's old friends while they worked in the United States and their house largely stood empty except for their little girl and her half-sister, her half-sister's husband, and their frisky toddler who was capable of tiny terrors. They must have no inkling on what to do regarding domestic management, because the family came to us for help with a strange proposition. We were very poor then and in need of friends' charity, and so when Mother was asked to act as housekeeper and Candy's yaya, she said yes, and it was quickly agreed that we all moved into one part of the big house somewhere in Bantayan, a northern borough of Dumaguete. Candy's older half-sister Josie was a fairy tale figure -- the Evil Queen from Snow White, or one of Cinderella's stepsisters. Those years were one of the brightest and the darkest of my life, haunted with the specter of this older woman preying on me. She picked on me because I was small and a runt-skinny, I was young, I was a boy, I was poor, and my poor family lived under the caprices of her mercy. She was hell, and she must have relished it.
All I had to turn to for my secret grief was Candy, who was my age and my fellow survivor in Josie's psychological games. Both of us, in turn, turned to "our" dog Sugar who kept us company and played with us. The drama came to halt one day when tensions between Candy and Josie finally came to head, and Candy's parents promptly came home from California to right things. As one last form of revenge, Sugar was summarily sent to the workers building the Mormon church in the neighborhood, and was promptly slaughtered as fodder for carpenters and masons.
That was one of my earliest skirmish with horror. There are still rare nights when I wake up from some dread, hearing Sugar's terrified whine filling the air of my nightmares, begging reprieve. There was none for him, and that day, a long time ago, I believe a part of me died, the part where innocence was. Childhood for me ended that day.
9:40 PM |
Dog Shit Country
