header image

HOME

This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

Interested in What I Create?



Bibliography

Tuesday, April 04, 2023

entry arrow5:30 PM | The Gargoyles

Flash Fiction

They were at the funeral, the gargoyles: these blistering bores who thought themselves so highly as society women in a city without a social calendar. They’re just mostly old and rich and bored, or at least were once rich — some had been stealthily selling off property piecemeal to keep up with appearances they could barely afford, the dreck of third generation of landed family without an ounce of an idea how to make a living, the heydays of their sugar wealth already decades behind. [The rest of them were athletes in the social game of climbing ladders.] There’s Katrina, whose claim to fame was having a gay father, now long dead, who did pageants for the city. There’s Melissa, whose family owns the biggest grocery store in town — and whose pink plastic shopping bags constitute the very colors of our overloaded landfills. There’s Minette, a secretary for a government official who feels that the light of power she basks in was hers. There’s Monina, whose English is as atrocious as rotten balut, and whose salvation was marrying a moneyed white man. Then there’s Greggyboy, a predatory gay man who calls himself a historian but whose laughable articles are littered with grammatical errors and stolen research, and makes much of the fact that he was [the poor] relation to many of the rich clans in town. I could pretend it was a bit sad to see them preen themselves like important birds outside the funeral home, but I snickered instead. They were a hive of noise, the chatter of gossip their shield, inflected sometimes by a phrase or two in bad Spanish. It was hilarious. But a friend was dead, a confirmed bachelor who had been their figurehead in that club they kept while pretending they did local culture and the arts proud in our small city, as if it was charity that needed their choking attention. That man was kind and nice and talented, and I could not see how he could be friends with these monstresses. Now all that was left of him was this urn of ashes, and maybe that was grace — perfect exit from a life in the company of gargoyles.

Labels:


[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich




GO TO OLDER POSTS GO TO NEWER POSTS