From Cecilia Brainard: I am proud to share EILEEN R. TABIOS' short story, RED AFTERBIRTH. This is part of my Love Stories Series featured in my blog. This was first published in a literary journal and then a short story collection. All articles and photos are copyrighted by the individual authors. All rights reserved. This is featured in my blog with permission from the author.
***
BIO
EILEEN R. TABIOS has released books of poetry, fiction, essays, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Forthcoming books include a poetry collection, Engkanto in the Diaspora, and a children’s book (with Mel Vera Cruz and Jeannie E. Celestial), Tata Efren’s Forever Laughter. Recent releases include the novel The Balikbayan Artist; an art monograph Drawing Six Directions; a poetry collection Because I Love You, I Become War; an autobiography, The Inventor: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography; and a flash fiction collection collaboration with harry k stammer, Getting To One. Other recent books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times which was subsequently translated by Danton Remoto into Filipino as KalapatingLeon and two French poetry books, PRISES (Double Take) (trans. Fanny Garin) and La Vie erotique de l’art (trans. Samuel Rochery). Her story “Red ‘Afterbirth’” was first published in dis*Orient. Translated into 13 languages, she has seen her writing and editing works receive recognition through awards, grants and residencies. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
RED "AFTERBIRTH"
Copyright by Eileen R. Tabios. All rights reserved.
Even
this very act of tracing words on paper in order to arrest the expediency of
not remembering constitutes a polemic whose expositions and explications have,
as their sole purpose, that of convincing myself that this tale's elements, in
their intensity and extent, are contained in my own history.
—from "Identifications" by Clinton Palanca
Manila, several years ago:
In the
beginning, I thought to dissuade him because I thought him only a boy. But the
sun's red stain on his cheeks made me linger, made me feel the sun wish to
implode to continue caressing the flesh pulled tightly over his angled
cheekbones. Later, I would hear from others in his village that his complexion
was considered unusual. The sun never darkened him, only deepened the ruddiness
on his skin until it evoked an ember of coal flickering its last breaths. Then he pushed up his sleeves and his
forearms made me pause. In that moment, too, I noticed other muscles rippling
under the weak camouflage of a thin shirt. The first time I looked into his
eyes, I heard a radio come to life and a woman start to whisper, I forgot the horizon is far, is near, is what you
wish but always in front of you.
I forgot one can choose always to
face the horizon
… He spoke slowly
but I couldn't understand a word, hearing only the whispered song and a faint
buzzing. I looked towards the open door, expecting to see bees inebriated with
pollen. A dryness in my throat, I let Mama deal with him and walked away. Mama
asked him to stay for dinner. I don't know what I would have done if she
hadn't. Perhaps I would have stopped, turned and been the one to ask him to
stay for dinner. Perhaps I would have kept walking as I did towards my studio
in the garden. Later he would tell me that he watched a strand of my hair fall
as I left, that he watched it slowly coil itself over the back of a chair and
that he picked it up when Mama wasn't looking.
The canvas
on my easel heightened my restlessness. It hadn't yet immobilized my hand, and
I reached once more for the brush. When I looked at it again after two hours,
the green strokes were completely obliterated by swaths of blood red stains.
Mama was calling me into the house for dinner. As I walked through the kitchen
door, I said I needed to wash myself clean of the paint. I could feel the paint
clinging to my hands, my arms, like lovers' palms reluctant to let go. Mama
said Noel was taking a nap on my bed as he had driven all day to bring news
from my grandmother. That's how I choose to recall first hearing his name, “Noel”—in the context of his sinking
onto my bed, his hair falling against my pillow and his eyes seeing what I,
too, see when I lie back on my bed: a sketch I once drew of a desert's infinite
expanse, the limb of a cactus plant on the foreground and the moon tiny but
undeniably full in the distance of background.
