Something knocks on the door. Esther, dreaming, would like to ignore it. Instead, she blinks awake and grabs her shotgun, because dead things typically call for bullets, not spell work, and whatever wants inside her home is certainly dead.
Today Mrs. Farling asks me about the Bee Thing and whether it’s permanent. I say, I don’t know. Probably not. She says it’s just a shame, because I really had such a pretty face, and now I don’t.
She says: Last night was a husker night, my darling.
He doesn’t know. He says: I thought I wasn’t ‘darling,’ only you. A husker night?
She: My dear. My dear, I’m cold.
“Have you seen the DEATH/GRIP Challenge meme?” Benito Oliveira said.
“Yeah, it’s pretty funny,” she said.
“It’s people pretending not to kill something with their off hand,” he said, as though she hadn’t responded.
Mara wouldn’t let us turn on the flashlight function on our handcoms because it would “alert the Martian advance scouts.” And obviously I one hundred percent didn’t believe there were any Martians, because the grown-ups had done a bazillion scans for life-forms not to mention digging into the rock for like twenty years.
But why should the average Manila foodie come to the diwata’s café, when there are so many other choices? Why should anyone try the café’s simple but delicious Filipino-Spanish hybrid cuisine, when historically, humans have been unable to stomach mythic food without physical, psychological, moral, or magical consequences?
