From Cecilia Brainard: I am proud to share ANGELO R. LACUESTA'S short story, FOSSIL. This is part of my Love Stories Series featured in my blog. Fossil first appeared in Sarge's collection CORAL COVE AND OTHER STORIES (UST PH 2017). It was also published in Santelmo Journal (2025). All articles and photos are copyrighted by the individual authors. All rights reserved. This is featured in my blog with permission from the author.
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ANGELO R. LACUESTA is a fictionist and novelist who also writes screenplays and essays. He has written more than ten books and two screenplays, and has won many national awards for his writing. He has represented the Philippines at numerous literary and film festivals and conferences. He is the current president of the Philippine Centre of PEN (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) International.
His most recent book is the novel JOY, published by Penguin Random House SEA in
2022. In 2024 he wrote and produced the film “An Errand,” based on a short
story he wrote, for the Cinemalaya Film Festival. It was selected as part of
the Bright Futures section of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).
His upcoming novel IRÔ (Milflores, 2025) was selected as one of 10 novels to be
presented for possible film adaptation at the “Books at Berlinale” section of
the 2025 Berlinale Film Festival. In 2025, “Song of the Fireflies,” a
film he also wrote and produced, had its international premiere at the Manila
International Film Festival in Los Angeles, California.
FOSSIL
Copyright by Angelo R. Lacuesta. All rights reserved.
WHENEVER EMILIANO DATOY was drunk he stood up and declaimed in straight English how he had served, as a young boy, at meetings of town elders during the years before the war. The elders he had served themselves had served at the councils in their younger years, in Spanish times and then American times, entertaining traders, envoys and soldiers passing through Nueva Florencia, which had always been a dismal halfway town between the busiest of the island’s ports.
But I remember that when he was sober, Datoy spoke only Bisaya and could not even eat unattended, and he saved his feeble voice for when he needed it to carry from the veranda where he liked to sun himself, across the second floor living room, to his great-grandniece’s bedroom.
She appeared shortly, a dark young girl in her teens dressed in a batik house duster, carrying with two hands a thick, heavy, rectangular thing wrapped in the kind of velvet they used to cover statues on Black Saturday. Upon the old man’s croaked order, the woman swept the velvet curtain aside to reveal a block of black, stony wood bearing the smoothened etching of a winged figure. Dr. Hill drew a small gasp of awe from his throat and we bent forward to inspect the image, our heads softly colliding in the process. There were other things: vertical shapes etched around the figure possibly representing humans, and below it an inscription in badlit.
“Pre-Hispanic,” she said, when the old man nudged her ribs with an arthritic knuckle, which then pointed at the inscription. “The dragon of the swamps,” she translated, and Datoy’s folded hand sprung into a triumphant V and dropped to his side where he’d kept a bottle of gin handy, which he seemed intent to nurse into the afternoon.
Dr. Hill remained silent but I know that by now he had begun to harbor a distrust toward the situation, his voice caved-in with exhaustion when he followed up with the old man about the tooth fragment. I was sure it was the heat, too. Datoy barked and sent the girl swishing out on bare feet to return with what looked like—and was soon proven to be—a two-inch tooth fragment. This she surrendered to us, depositing it into a piece of bubble wrap we had prepared specifically for this purpose.
Dr. Hill inspected
the specimen while trying to express all due respect. It was Datoy himself who had
started everything. He had seen my photo in a press release in the Daily
Freeman announcing my scholarship in London and cut it out, A photo of the
tooth-chip was stapled to a letter, written by the girl, explaining how she had
discovered it while she had been playing in the dusty hillsides that surrounded
their town.
