“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?

Another moonstruck advisor from last night’s lunar viewing party stumbled onto the factory floor in the middle of our shift. All of us factory girls paused, watched, telescope pieces in hand.

Elja’s tea-fish was aging, and with it, she withered. Her branches creaked as she walked the outer gardens of the temple, checking that all was in readiness for the ceremony. The leaves on her forearms, now gone brittle, shivered in the morning breeze. Her tea-fish lay quiet at her core, conserving its dwindling energy–until a scream broke the stillness.

See, I tell my students, the happy life requires wisdom.

“I’m Rosie,” she says. But I just call her the kid.

If half my kindergarten cohort was dead by the time I hit sixth grade, I would be mopey too.

The Wi-Fi is shallow, a miracle drizzle that broke the heat wave blockade. They say in 10 years the internet will never flow here again.

It was winter when she returned, hauling herself up the rocks from the sea, slippery with new skin, dimpled with fat.