There's something about the high level of sexuality in men that thrusts in her the need to give her breast-feeding mammaries away to man-sized and man-hard tongues and the attatched caressing, sometimes biting teeth and hands.
Somewhere in Cebu are her parents. They have in their squalid second-floor apartment a small cornertable with several family photographs pressed between the wooden table and its glass frame top. A small fern, or even a fake bonsai, sits at the innermost corner, gathering cobwebs with the wall.
In these photos, the woman smiles out at them from a McDonalds, presumably the one in Greenbelt where Ronald sits with a grin that seems especially rich. She carries a little boy of four, proudly sitting on her lap with a knocked-off Battle B-Daman from Divisoria in his hands. Short, soft hair standing straight up, with a wide forehead, this boy is.
She plans to send him to school, and someday maybe to college. This boy is the first grandson.
She also planned to stay in Manila for half a year.
It's been four years, she tells the writer, who is busy fondling her breats, tongue searching for the teat which, when found, tickles the woman and makes her laugh.
The writer is funny, says the woman. He makes her laugh.
This writer has very little intentions towards that end. He bought the woman for the night, to fuel his imagination, to give his mental and physical erections a dubiously earned massage. There is more hedonism and malice in his mind, but for now, he concentrates on the left nipple.
On his table is a beer, left untouched. His hands slowly crawl into the woman's sheer dress, slowly massages her through the material of her panties. Earlier that day, that same hand slowly wound its way over the keys of a typewriter, whilst the other hand played with a cigarette.
It was a rush job, that story, a complex study of the smoking habits of people. The editor who had commisioned him to work on it was on the phone, screaming at him with the lust of a manananggal, promising various kinds of punishment short of an act of god, if he didn't finish the six-page article within the week.
The writer was on the first paragraph of the first page. There was this Xavier Xaviera story he was reading before the editor had called, anal fucking on Mt. Apo. There was something in the way Mr. Xaviera (not his real name) had fashioned the story that made it seem more like a news article rather than a sexy story.
It had the same quality of the Arnold Clavio interview he'd overheard at the newstand when he bought the tabloid out of pure lust at the sight of Maui Taylor on the front cover. Arnold Clavio was speaking about famine, drought, Red Tide, and politics.
"Funny," the writer had thought then, "this guy really sounds like a jeepney barker."
It was a good thing that the newspaper vendor was a good friend of the writer. He was two pesos short of coins for the tabloid, and he'd warned the man on the offset, just as Arnold Clavio was listening to a senator reply to his question about pork barrel.
This question would soon lead to Arnold Clavio talking about famine, drought, Red Tide, and politics.
It was a tough time, thought the writer. Everyone was suffering from the lack of money.
Later that night, as the writer's tongue made its way into the woman's hot and inviting pussy, just as he'd unhooked his belt and was getting ready to ram her against the wall with his erection that not Xerex Xaviera, not even Maui Taylor was able to satiate, the woman dug her fingernails deep into his back and clawed rivulets of cloth and flesh and blood and gore.
He slammed her against the chair she was on, in mixed pain and pleasure, and rammed his dick haphazardly against her, not even checking if his aim was good.
She dug her fingers deeper into his back. The blood was free flowing now.
This was ecstasy, thought the writer. His mind was spinning, and his erection was massive. There was nothing else he needed to worry about, just keep on pushing, keep on pushing.
He was pushing an eternety for both of them.
Finally, he managed to chuck himself into the woman. She gasped, and dug her fingers as he worked himself into a frenzy, cumming prematurely and abruptly.
Anticlimactically.
He had to have more of her, he said. He asked her what time the brothel closed. But she couldn't leave, she said, the managers would follow her.
She asked for his address. The writer gave it to her with a five hundred peso tip - from his life savings - and scurried out of the bar.
He sat in his room, waiting and brooding over cigarettes. There had been a telegram snuck beneath his door when he'd arrived, and as he'd expected, it was from the editor. The article had been given an extension, up to tomorrow morning - that is, sometime today, at around nine a.m. The writer ripped the letter and tossed the pieces out of his window. He thought of unplugging the telephone from the wall socket.
There was a silent knock on his door at around six thirty. He couldn't open the door fast enough; the writer grabbed the woman by the waist, slammed the door shut and turned all three locks. "I love you, goddamn you," he whimpered, as he tore the wrappings away from the woman, who didn't know what exactly it was that was happening to her. "I've got to have you, the entirety of you. I'll take the very humanity of you tonight."
He pressed her down on his bed, the foamy material swallowing her up like angry waves. He was violent. He thrust into her, and she broke under him, whimpering, as if she were made of fetta cheese. The writer was screaming, blabbering about the ill effects of nicotine abuse, the permeable characteristic of the lung and the way smoke slowly turned the soft meat into something you'd see at a burger grill, until slowly it began to resemble smoked bacon that had been left too long on the hotplate.
He gripped her shoulders hard, rubbing against them so roughly that the skin was raw and bleeding before long. Her crack was bleeding, internally and externally; his wild movements had split open the skin separating the labia majoris from the anus, and a steady trickle of blood was making a small finger-sized pool on his bedsheet. Inside the vaginal canal was a longish tear, and the blood from this wound was lubing his dick with a reddish-brown tint.
"No!" she screamed, trying to push him off. He'd put his entire weight down on her, and was crushing the wind from her. "Stop it! Stop moving! You're hurting me!"
"What d'ya think I'm paying you for, bitch?!" he retorted, slapping her across the face. "You're mine. You're nothing but my meat, so shut the hell up."
"You're crazy!" she screamed, and she lifted her legs up, braced herself and kicked at him. But he caught her by the ankles, and pinned her down, folding her across her stomach, and pinioned her by stabbing her now-bloody pussy with a finger.
"You're going to fucking fight back?" he sneered, as he punched her with his free hand, repeatedly, never caring just how much the woman screamed, not even flinching when one of his blows broke her collarbone. "You're fighting back? I'll fuck you so hard you won't even have the energy to fight back!" he screamed this last part, and rammed himself against her, one hand scrambling at her breasts, ripping the skin, bruising the nipples, while his other hand kept on pounding into her face.
Throughout the morning, the floorboards of his room shook, and if you listened closely, you would have heard muffled screaming, then a light whimpering, then nothing at all.
Later on, the clock on the wall said eight thirty.
The writer was sitting by his window, looking out into the morning sky; the view of the neighboring buildings was hazy, shimmering thanks to the dust and pollution, and perhaps somewhat to the unrelenting midmorning sun.
He was almost out of cigarettes.
The woman was sitting on the edge of the bed, swinging her legs. "Hey, let me have a cigarette," she whined.
"You can't have a cigarette, you idiot," he replied while puffing out smoke rings that floated in the stale air of his bedroom.
"Aww." The woman began playing with her hair, twirling them around her fingers until there was a considerable hair popsicle on her hand. "Was I good?" she asked at length.
The writer shrugged his shoulders. "Any whore's good, so long as they can fuck okay," he replied.
She asked him many more questions after this, but he kept quiet, and watched the horizon as the sun slowly woke up from its evening hangover and poured its drunken wrath on the earth.
His telephone rang at exactly nine thirty.
He picked up the handset, and said a drunken hello.
"Where's the article, you flake?" bellowed his editor from the other line. "Have you even been working on it? The Medical Observer's been bugging me for it for weeks now. Weeks, goddammit! It isn't just your ass on the line here you know. If you fuck this one up, so help me God I'll fucking kill you. Hello? Are you even listening, you asshole?"
"Fuck you," replied the writer, and he left the phone hanging.
He got into his pants and pocketed his wallet, his keys, and his cigarettes. Then he stopped, brought out the pack again, and lighted a stick. Then he returned the cigarettes into his pocket.
"Hey you ass, let me have a cigarette," whined the whore again.
He lit the stick, took a puff, exhaled. "You're a stubborn little bitch aren't you. You can't have a cigarette anymore. Look on the bed and you'll see what I mean."
The whore turned to look behind her. There, almost hidden by a mountain of clothes and bedcovers, was her body, mutilated to the point that it wasn't even recognizable.
"Oh," was all that she could say.
The writer checked his hair on the bathroom mirror, saw the reflection of the bed. All he could see from the mirror was the bloody mass he'd left there. It was starting to reek of blood and body fluids. It would soon smell of rot.
"Hell," he muttered under his breath, "this isn't even a fucking dream."
He stepped into the hallway, locked his apartment, walked down the stairs into the morning hell.
"Seems more like a nightmare," he said to nobody in particular.