A Holiday Album
fiction by Bryant Apolonio
11 July 2019 at 1:52:51 pm
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[It was a fossil by the end. A bleached exoskeleton, porous and fleshless. The rough weather, the seabirds, the feral dogs of the shantytowns and the strand had scoured it bone-clean over the last week. Only hair-like fibres remained—a strange and alien pelt—bobbing with the waves that lapped the shore.]
11 July 2019 at 12:45:28 pm
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[An establishing shot of the beach. This is the last time he ever went overseas. The bright blue rind of the Pacific, framed by cycad fronds and mangroves heavy with foliage. The heat shimmered off the dunes. A crooked staircase in the foreground, wound down…]
The upper steps had come loose and Jay had to hold onto sapling branches to steady himself as he made his way down the hill. Shoddy work, he thought. The supporting beams at the base of the structure were barnacled, the wooden boards curled with rot. Eventually, he arrived at a small beach. He’d been walking for about an hour now and had sweated a dark arrowhead onto the back of his shirt. He took his thongs off and padded onto the sand, which was muddy and compact, and tiny crabs burrowed into bellybutton sized holes in the earth.
11 July 2019 11:08:19 am
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[Tinapa, eggplant, the sinangag cooked in butter the same way his mum did it.]
It was off-season in Buena Suerte. The food vendors that still operated fought over Jay’s custom. They beckoned him over—pare! pogi!—and switched coolly to English when they heard his Tagalog (half-arsed, broken). He bought breakfast and he tried not to think about Maria as he made his way through the poblacion. There were no dreadlocked backpackers around at this time of the year. There was no-one haggling over hire surfboards or losing money at the sidewalk casinos. The one or two tourists he saw seemed to be sleepwalking. Locals threw seawater out onto their porches to keep down the dust. A karst gecko sunned itself on the side of a propane tank and scuttled away when Jay cast his shadow over it.
He ate as he walked—scarfed the food down quickly, barely chewing—and he wiped his hand on the seat of his boardies. (You can judge, but, in the weeks and months to come, a grieving heart will have him eating meals over the sink or straight out of the saucepan. These were kinder days.)
Eventually, the pavement turned into a dirt track and he found himself in a part of town that hadn’t been built up for tourists yet. There were construction projects that had been abandoned and subsequently disembowelled by the recent weather. It was rougher this year, they had said. Each season worse than the last, they said. The flood was coming. There were gaunt chickens scavenging around the fallow ground. Jay poked his head inside one of the buildings and saw a mess of reo bars and torn insulation and bat shit, PVC pipework leading nowhere.
11 July 2019 at 8:30:12 am
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[The louvre window’s three-part view: sky, Maria, sand. She’s inspecting something but it’s hard to tell what it is from this distance. What’s she looking at? Pinch and zoom way in. The image scrambles, pixel smudge.]
By the time Jay got dressed and stepped outside, she was already gone. There was no-one in the restaurant except a couple of cleaning staff watching NBA highlights. Jay crossed the patio into the lobby and approached the front desk, thinking he’d ask if anyone had seen the woman he’d checked in with, but—chill, bro; take it easy—he instead veered over to the wire carousel full of brochures and, with a practised indifference, leafed through one. The concierge, a skinny guy with caterpillar eyebrows, approached him and said that the bistro was closed for the next few days. He apologised and suggested some places in town that were good for a feed. Jay thanked him and took a twenty-peso note out of his wallet, which the concierge, still smiling, declined.
10 July 2019 at 7:07:48 pm
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[They’re sitting at a plastic table, at a little cocktail bar by the beach. The waiter offered to take a photo of them when he brought over their drinks. Jay had a singlet on and a flush that ran up from the front of his neck to his cheeks. Maria wore a cotton dress that cut low so you could see the white of her bandeau top.]
The bar was full of military men and they looked exactly how you’d expect—buzz cuts and lightless eyes—and they were a hundred per cent checking Maria out and both of them knew it. The pair have had a bitter argument. They’re not speaking to each other. Maria sashays over to the speakers when an emotional banger comes on—it’s a song that means something to them, or used to—and she dances. Everyone’s watching. Anyone who’s sitting down stands up; everyone already standing stands a little straighter, inspirited by the force of this woman’s being, which arrives like a gust of wind. Maria’s oblivious to it all, dancing like a goddamn weapon.
Conflict! A junior lieutenant slinks over, having been egged on by his mates. Maybe it’s one of the white boys—a hayseed Amerikano, a steroidal yokel on his tour of duty in the colonies—or maybe it’s a Filipino guy, the nephew of a tobacco king or compromised legislator, dripping charm and patrician sleaze. The antagonist asks Maria if he can buy her a drink, and if she’s waiting for anyone, and if she wants to go somewhere else? Yes, she says; no, she’s not; yes. And, if this were a different kind of story, Jay would exhale sharply through the nostrils, drain his glass and storm over there in slow-mo fury to fucking start something. The ghosts of their old selves never forgot their lines. The final act (INT. CLUB, ON THE DF – EVENING) and our hero is about to punch on with every dog and deadshit in that building like they were Penelope’s suitors and he was Odysseus, returned.
But this is not that kind of story. Jay can’t remember if there was anyone else in that bar in Buena Suerte, but, if there had been, they’d kept to themselves. If any naval officers were around, the nine-dash line was the only curve they had eyes for. And, if there’d been a wash of purple neon light, Maria hadn’t danced in it.
Instead, what happened was: the bartender played a weird, digitised samba playlist from his iPod Classic. They’d sat in silence and Jay picked the labels off his beer. Maria drank only water and kept going to the bathroom. Then she told him that she was going back to the hotel and he could come if he wanted or he could stay or whatever.
10 July 2019 at 6:26:43 pm
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[The sunset that made him swear under his breath. A sunset made up of every known red. Cab sav / sangria / hot metal / ‘URGENT’ stamps on unpaid bills / blood, of course / lipstick freshly applied or long worn off / durrie ends.]
They sat on the beach until the mosquitoes came out.
She told him that she wasn’t sure if she loved him.
I don’t think I can do this anymore, she said.
9 July 2019 at 3:01:13 pm
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[It’s been pissing down rain for three days straight. A south-westerly batters the jetty; it flips pump boats like coins. Salt spray. Lightning. Someone says, You see that?]
In the siege of heat and nerves and claustrophobia, one of them was bound to snap.
She’d been knives-out about the idea the entire time. While Jay was scrimping back home, cashing in his Woolworths points, always vigilant about flight sales, she’d moan and complain. I don’t know if it’s a good time. Work’s being a bitch about leave. I’d prefer not to.
When they finally touched down in the Philippines, she was rude to his relatives who’d come to pick them up from the airport.
Then she met his great aunt—a sweet old lady with a grey mousse of hair and a gooselike wobble and a tendency to forget—who doted on them, offered them a place to stay, and exhorted them to eat, eat, eat! That’s the third time you’ve asked me, Maria said (snapped) and Jay almost lost his shit.
What else: the trip over from Manila to Puerto Princesa and then the auto-bus to the hotel, she slept the entire way. They wended through the hills for hours—past coral reef and coconut atoll, the Spanish forts and the lean-tos that hunchbacked into the surf—and she’d whinge whenever he shifted in his seat.
And who could forget the look on her face when she saw the hotel they’d be staying at (the one that didn’t even have a swimming pool), and the room that the bellboy finally dragged their suitcases to…?
He kept a tally of the offences.
You act like you’d literally rather be anywhere but here, he said.
She said, What makes you think I want to be here?
8 July 2019 at 2:01:13 pm
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[The cracks in the ceiling plaster. Dark lines that ran up the walls and spread out like nerve endings.]
Because in the shadow of his resentments, she’d tended her own garden. You keep giving things to someone, they will feel an obligation to give you things in return. Things they might no longer want to give you. Things they weren’t even sure existed anymore.
The rain eased and Jay left the room to stretch his legs and walk along the beach. The tide had dredged up coils of seaweed, orbs strung together like a necklace and fishing nets from Chinese trawlers. He wanted to see the blob again, which always seemed to be in a different place as if it was crawling south down the coast, searching for something. When he reached it, he saw that a lot of the skin and muscle on the body that was there before was gone. Sandflies hovered nearby but seemed unable to find any purchase wherever they tried to alight.
It suddenly struck him as odd that they would just leave the blob here. That no-one had taken it away. Nobody seemed to have even tried. The rain started getting heavy again and he jogged back to the hotel room, where Maria was awake and reading her book.
These are the kinds of afternoons that are first to be forgotten when it all ends: the appendices and marginalia of a once-relationship. Maybe one day they would be able to say to each other, We were kids then. We hurt each other but now our hearts have mended so we can speak without rancour or regret. Don’t dwell.
8 July 2019 at 10:01:13 am
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[A screenshot: a news article within a seizure of sponsored links. MYSTERY: Hairy, blob-like ‘monster’ in El Nido, Philippines: Scientists BAFFLED by strange furry object from the sea. It had become an internet sensation. The article was shared a thousand times over. Amateur biologists had offered their takes. The comment section was going wild. The Biodiversity Management Bureau announced it would be harvesting samples.
That day, Jay spent ages reading about other blobs—‘globsters’, they were called—around the world. An animal’s carcass would decompose but for the cartilage and blubber and all the other indigestible tissue that even the sea refused. What was left behind was an unusual, vaguely organic mass that bore no resemblance to whatever the creature was in life. This was the time for speculation and conjecture. A scientific verdict would be passed down, yes, but before that: cryptozoology.
Before the experts pronounced the body to be a baleen whale, the villagers saw the kraken; before they identified the oarfish, it was the last plesiosaur; a shell-less sea turtle used to be the Montauk Monster. Before they told you that this decomposing heap was a megamouth shark, it was so much more. It was terror and reverence and revulsion all at once. Leviathan.]
The isolatoes scrolled through their different social media feeds. Their expressions rarely changed no matter what they saw on the screen. Occasionally one would sit up in bed, rigid, to show the other a meme. Then they’d sink back down into the mattress. Rainy days bled into one another.
7 July 2019 at 7:01:13 pm
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[With the lens pushed up so close to his face you can see each pore on his skin. The hotel room’s halogen light does him no favours. Parentheses of dry skin in the corners of his eyes and his mouth; his broad nose even flatter, even wider. God, he looked old in this. He was 26 then. He wondered how old he must look now.]
When he looked up, he saw Maria standing by the open window. Tropical air slunk into the suite like an old family pet. It was dark, and she cupped her hands and peered through the glass to see outside. A savage storm. The kind nobody from this country would ever forget, no matter how long they’d been away for or how far. Something there? he asked her when he joined her by the window. Maria didn’t respond. She just kept staring out there, as if somebody was about to show up or something was going to happen. Nah, she said eventually, There’s nothing. Then she turned away from the window and went into the kitchenette to fix up a cup of tea. Jay followed.
And when both were away from the window, and no-one was there to keep watch, it finally appeared. A great shape rising from the shallows. It shook water off its dark mane and howled. A frightening and otherworldly howl—a howl that sang of life and death on the drowned continental shelf—that was obscured by a clap of thunder.
6 July 2019 at 6:35:20 pm
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[She’s standing in the doorframe, her hair wrapped up in a towel. She’s just come out of the shower. Maria always ran the water too hot and her skin went pink. The steam rose off her. She wore one of those sideways smiles that once rendered him powerless, kept him mesmerised in love. He tends to pause over this one.]
Oi, she said.
You look good.
Give me that.
He passed the phone over and she scrutinised the cracked screen before handing it back to him, satisfied.
Then she flopped down on the bed, pulled the thin sheets up over herself, till they formed a tight plane over her torso. He leaned over to extract the wet towel from beneath her and she took the collar of his shirt and pulled him down into a kiss. Her arms’ gooseflesh in the A/C fan. A feeling like a bottled-up laugh rising. They held each other, groping, twined, their breaths now syncopated, a little pulse pecking at his forehead.
6 July 2019 at 12:01:13 pm
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[The last day of sunlight. This one’s of him, afloat in the open sea, in the shadow of white limestone cliffs.]
One morning, they hired a kayak and paddled to an isolated beach that pushed right up against the famous cliffs that skirted the northern part of the island. He remembered looking up at them and thinking that they really did seem to have faces: contorted expressions half-hidden in the stratified rock, a host of sphinxes eyeing their prey.
He left Maria on the beach while he swam to where the waves were low and gentle. The conquistadors called this the peaceful ocean and then they fell one by one to the natives on the beach. Jay dived under the water and butterfly-kicked to the seabed, where small black fish darted between the coral. Something swam beneath him, cutting a dark v; he swallowed water, surprised. He rose up to the surface, coughing.
Maria stood on the shore and watched him. Weak waves slapped the sand and fizzed away, leaving white, briny streaks. She bunched the hem of her sarong up against her thigh so it wouldn’t get wet.
You okay? she said.
Come swim with me, Jay called out.
She shook her head.
It’s fine once you’re in here, he insisted.
She didn’t reply. Instead, she walked back to where they had left their things and fished his phone out of the midden of clothes. She returned to the water and then pointed the lens at him, angled, crosshaired.
Look over here, baby.
The wind blew and whipped up her black hair. Dark clouds rose behind her, advancing like a tired army.
Look here.
6 July 2019 at 9:57:48 am
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[A woman’s voice says, The fuck is this, Jay?
Whip-pan from the blob to Maria. Her hand is over her mouth. Why would you show this to me?
Laughter. It’s sick.
God. You’re the sicko, mate.]
5 July 2019 at 3:46:44 pm
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[The strange object lay on the break of the shore. In the late-day sun, its fur shone like the surface of oily water. It was about the size of a pig and it had a similar shape, but it looked like nothing Jay had ever seen before. Perhaps this part here was a mouth, a flat and toothless mouth. Perhaps this bulge was a dorsal fin. It was a horror movie sequence. This was the horrible omen washed up on the beach in the opening credits. ‘Dies Irae’ plays. The electric noise, the glissando shriek.]
A small crowd had gathered nearby, mostly hotel staff. They were all filming it on their phones, too. A man in a black baseball cap and maroon polo walked over to Jay. He had his company logo stitched onto his cap, and his demeanour and the space he maintained between himself and the whole dismal mess gave off the vibe of middle management.
There’s nothing to worry about here, sir, he said. It’s just an animal. (His tone suggested that this was meant to be both an explanation and reassurance.)
What’s going to happen to it? Jay wanted to know.
The man told him they’d radioed a fishing crew in to help with the clean-up. They would cut it up and the crew would drag it back out to sea. He said that if they just pushed it back in the ocean, it—whatever it was—might attract sharks.
Jay loitered around even as the crowd began to dwindle. The sun was setting and the fishing crew still hadn’t arrived. At some point, he walked over to the blob and touched it, which he immediately regretted. It was clammy and covered in a greasy, purple film. He rushed over to the water and dunked his hands in to wash off the residue. He suddenly felt very nauseous. He had to breathe through his mouth—once, twice—before the feeling passed.
28 April 2019 at 07:04:00 am
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[An older photograph. Maria stands in front of her sliding mirror, already dressed in her scrubs. She is getting ready for work. She is combing at her thick hair, which she will tie back in a sloppy knot. It is a cool, bright Sunday morning in her Ashfield apartment. She is suspended in sunlight.]
He came up behind her and held her waist.
I really have to go, she said. I’m sorry.
She watched his face in the mirror and he watched hers. In her eyes, he saw chances and futures—the possibility of marriage and children, the certainty of aggravation, of gratitude, of money woes and movement—in every saccade. And what did she see? (A youthful fling? An unserious man? A dropkick to be punted?)
Things were different between them now; no-one could deny that. She was a fiend for her work and her shifts meant they hardly ever saw each other. He can’t even recall how long it’d been since he’d last stayed over. They were growing apart as inevitably as milk soured.
Stop, he told himself. You’re overthinking this. She doesn’t know how this ends. You don’t know, either.
Outside, the new articulated buses crept across the intersection. A jogger hopped from foot to foot as she waited for the lights. The corner cafés and the Vietnamese bakers made brisk trade in the early hours.
Stop thinking. Act.
When Maria opened her mouth to speak again, Jay squeezed his words between the spaces of the ones he feared she’d say next—
Babe, he said. Let’s go somewhere nice.
✷✷✷
Bryant Apolonio is an award-winning writer and lawyer currently living on Larrakia Country. He won the inaugural Liminal Fiction Prize and he is working on a collection of short stories.
