TRAVELS (and more) WITH CECILIA BRAINARD: Fossil by Angelo R. Lacuesta

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.

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FOSSIL

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.

I am trying to remember if I felt put on the spot by this, if I felt any bit of remorse for having dragged my adviser all the way from London—or for that matter, for dragging myself back homeward. It was odd enough to head back home to complete my studies abroad. Odder, too, to return to the heat I had sought to escape. In Cebu, in the summer, it seemed to solidify out of thin air. It made me restless. I felt it would wrestle me to the ground and eat my insides if I stopped moving.

I do recall that at that moment I was swept with feverish nostalgia—for London’s quietness, its sense of order, its museums and its libraries, its language, and even the winter that I had loathed so much when I was there, with its eight dark hours of daylight. I had been there only two years, but in no time at all the city had made itself familiar to me by being so easy to navigate and understand.

My first view of London was a postcard cut into the shape of the Tower of London, filled with happy cartoon people waving from the castle windows. It was sent to me by a friend who was touring Europe with her parents. She had thoughtfully drawn in her own face among those of the passengers, round, with hair like drawn curtains, and freckles. I finally saw the real thing twenty years later, with the Pinoy friends I had made in London—storeclerks, nurses, factory workers. I was on a postgraduate scholarship, but they probably saw me as a medical technician on a work contract. There was hardly any difference. We ate at the same places and watched the same teleseryes on our phones.

I had known everything about it even before setting foot inside. In the courtyard a theater troupe reenacted swordfights, beheadings, and medieval humor. Plaques and placards invited you to shake your head in awe at the stones and the ravens, themselves born of a long and royal lineage, four feet tall, larger and blacker than I had expected them to be. A sign on the grass cautioned visitors from approaching the birds too closely. Inside, you stepped on a conveyor belt and looked at the jewels embedded into the crowns.

I went to Madame Tussaud’s, alone, troubling the tourists for full photos of me with The Beatles, Einstein, Kylie Minogue, and Barack Obama. The last two were still alive so they were twice as convincing. At the lab the next morning I showed the photos to Dr. Hill, dropping their names as I swiped through them. I was appalled that he had never been to Tussaud’s. I found it so fascinating I wondered why we had never done it back home: I would have loved to take a selfie with Rizal, the Lunas, or Quezon, or, now that I was thinking about it, Bea Alonzo and John Lloyd Cruz.

“I think I saw the Queen today,” I told him a few months later. I had been walking down one of those quiet sidestreets and a convoy of black cars zipped by. In the middle car there was a woman in a green dress going through her handbag in the middle car. Dr. Hill snorted but the tabloids confirmed it the next day: in the photos the Queen was in a dress of that very color. He bent the corner of his mouth and told me he saw that there was a chance but he remained skeptical, that on any given day in London there were probably a thousand women in green dresses out and about.

But scientists live and die on facts, not hand-drawn myths, and so the tooth fragment became the unmythical center of our mystery. The lack of fossil record or history of any scientific exploration of the area has made it difficult to place the specimen’s age. There is also very little information on the island’s geological history.

As I laid the tooth fragment out in the full fluorescent light of his hotel room, we talked of bone, fascia, and flesh. And on top of that, skin, scales, feathers or hair. It was only later, when I was alone in the hotel, that I could dream about the larger form that collected these details: a large bird of prey, a monitor lizard—each a private leap of speculation.

Having performed cursory atmospheric and geological assays, I squatted on the red-brown earth and looked at Dr. Hill as he scoured the lot with a dusty gaze. I imagined how stiff and red his shoulders were under his denim shirt. It wasn’t just the heat and the dryness. It was everything else—our squalid lodgings, the lack of facilities, the local government. The students were no help toward the operation, either. The only thing they did well was cordon off the dig, with plastic straw rope strung on bamboo posts. Only he and I were allowed inside this perimeter. We threatened to expel the entire student team if anyone dared violate this rule.

Dr. Hill and I had been seeing each other every day, from sunrise to late. I had always had a crush on him, since that day chose him, quite randomly, as my PhD advisor. When I realized, soon enough, that looks and wits like his were a dime a dozen in that part of the world, I liked him for his walk and his talk and his humor. The age difference between us was equivalent to a person in full who could have children of their own; it was a person he had very much been: he had two children, estranged, along with their mother, and he hardly spoke of them. I felt strangely protective of him when he lectured, stiff and stooped at the podium as though he were shielding his soft parts.

Two weeks into our dig, were rewarded by a protuberance of mere millimeters in the white dust. Feverish, we pretended to suspend operations as we had previously worked out between us. Citing rising salinity and oppressive heat, we sent the volunteers back to the university. They had been doing useless things, anyway, measuring dissolved oxygen and performing biological assays at a nearby creek. We gave them further assignments: map the weather disturbances fifty years backward, and extrapolate them twenty years forward; conduct interviews among the village folk. In the rewarding solitude we set to work. In a few days, our trowels and brushes finally uncovered what he quickly identified by its curve and girth as a very well-preserved femur.

The discovery submerged us into silence; we spoke only when necessary, and worked until it became too dark. We reserved our excited talk for his room, which held our entire library of reference books, files and photos. We spent our after-dinner hours there, discussing what promised to be, pending our final observations and analyses, “a reasonably important Southeast Asian find”—as described by Dr. Hill himself, in the broad, understated terms scientists customarily like to use. He told me that he had already composed the first few paragraphs of the journal article in his private notebooks, further describing the fossil, continuing the trend of false modesty, as “something possibly of great value to the taxonomic index.”

Over the week that followed, we made a field jacket for the bone, applying consolidating agent and layers of tissue paper, burlap, and plaster. We worked on the bottom of the bone, isolating it from its anchor of dust. When we were done with that, we closed off the field jacket at the base. The resulting object, smooth, oddly-shaped white sculpture, was about four-foot long and weighed as much as a person, told nothing of what it held. I volunteered my unused sleeping bag and repurposed it into a stretcher. We waited for night before we rented a tricycle and hustled it back to the hotel, where we deposited it directly into his room.

Later, in his room, faces made shiny by the day’s travelswhere, he surprised me by taking out a longneck bottle of Tanduay that he had saved for the occasion of our discovery.

“It’s not single malt, but it’ll do,” he said. He presented the last of the rum to me label up, as if it were a specimen bottle.

Through the brown liquid I saw his hands, so white and so pink where the skin pressed earnestly against the glass. I had a fascination for this, the physical part of him, not simply his presence but the flesh of that presence, like a football or a rugby player’s.

He took me to a rugby match once. I was fascinated by how their knee socks gripped the contours of their calf muscles. At the match I told him about something that had happened to me early in my stint. I’d just seen a show at the West End and had been in tears after calling home from one of those red phone booths, getting no answer at seven in the morning Manila time. At the edge of Chinatown, right outside the tube entrance, I’d squinted at the street signs to read them. A man had crossed the street, swinging his big arms, just to tell me: “Oy! Go back to your fucking country!” This angered Dr. Hill to the point of helplessness.

“Sleep with me,” he said, as he brought me to my student housing after the game.

I can’t,” I quickly answered. “I’m Catholic.” I laughed at his profound lapse in logic, and I let him laugh at mine, and we knew I had forgiven him, as quickly as I had forgiven the unnamed hooligan.

I switched off the lamp and slid beside him on his bed. I felt him trembling. I turned to him and opened his lips with mine and probed his mouth with my tongue. He opened his eyes briefly—I saw, in the dark, a look of surprise and fascination. I dug my knee into the warm, tender space under his belly. I slid my hand down until I had him in my soft grip.

He had told me once, early in my first semester, in front of the entire lecture class, how I didn’t possess the paleontologist’s mind because I preferred to think of possibilities rather than take on the facts. He then hurriedly explained that it was a compliment, that he meant I was too clever to be a scientist.

I looked at the white shape on the floor and watched vague, loose images gather in my mind without real shape or detail: a massive lizard blowing out a cloud of poison gas, rot of partially digested food and internal fauna; a lost precursor of the crocodile, dragging a belly full of prey; a reptile that walked upright, a swooping and birdlike figure with a precise beak and highly evolved talons. I saw human figures, dancing, cheering, praying to it.

We bound the specimen further in a layer of bubble wrap and marked with instructions on how it should be stowed and handled on its trips to Cebu City, to Manila, to Singapore, to London. “The end of our trip, and the beginning of it,” Dr. Hill had said as he logged the shipping details and printed out the QR codes on sticker paper. We grunted as we slid the jacketed bone under the bed.

Dr. Hill wanted to do a bit of sightseeing before we flew back, so we made a trip to the city the next day. I took him to Magellan’s Cross. I told him of the only version I knew of the Lapu-Lapu legend, the five-minute storybook tale in which Ferdinand Magellan, leading a contingent armed with swords, crossbows and muskets, engages chief Lapu-Lapu and his men on the shores of Mactan island. Magellan, about to complete the final arc of his voyage, has his helmet knocked off and his knee injured, and is quickly speared to death.

I took him to the Sto.Niño Church, but found it clogged with Sunday devotees. Fort San Pedro was unbearably hot and the downtown streets were uninteresting. We ended up hailing a taxi to the mall. The trip took us through two hours of traffic. At the mall there were hordes of us there, couples who fit the stereotype: the tall, middle-aged, underdressed Caucasian and his brown-skinned companion, hip against waist, hand in hand, affecting a nonchalant stroll at the tourist sites and in the handicraft stores.

I took advantage of the two-hour taxi ride home to fill him in on everything he needed to know about the Philippines, which is what every Filipino I know knows: that it’s an archipelago of 7,107 islands, the current tally of which depends on whether the tide is low or high; that the Filipinos are a tough, smiling lot, eager to please and easily pleased, treasured all over the world for their hospitality toward foreigners; that we were occupied by the Spanish for 300 years, during which we were briefly fought over by the British and the Dutch, after which we were occupied by the Americans and the Japanese, and the Americans again. I also told him one of our islands was sold for one golden salakot (“native headpiece”—I translated) and the entire lot, much later, for 20,000 US dollars, pre-American times.

I told him of how the Pope halved the world, so newly spherical, in a Solomonic gesture, making it easier for the Spaniards and the Portuguese to navigate and colonize. I told him we were named after King Philip the Second, making the V-sign with my fingers.

“I had a Belgian aunt named Philippine,” he said, not for the first time. We were at a Chelsea pub the first time he first said it, killing time while we waited for samples to be ready in the autoclave.

Days later, the weekend pages of the Freeman featured a story on an “American” scientist and “his Filipina student” planning to take a mysterious specimen to the USA. It came with photos: Datoy’s etching, a college graduation photo of me, and a photo of Dr. Hill taken from his online university profile. The article shared space with tabloid news—unsolved murders, frustrated rapes and news of a UFO sighting near the coast. The news wasn’t hard to spread. Nothing much happened in this town. One of the students had done it, of course. One look at them and I knew they couldn’t be trusted to shut up, about the dig, about the discovery, about him and me.

An intern at the paper texted me, asking for an interview. I asked him where he got my number, and immediately knew before the reply came: the old man Datoy and his great-grandniece. He had looked easy to fool, and she’d looked hungry enough for attention.

“Give them a tour of the site,” Dr. Hill said. “Show them we’ve got nothing. Show him the pottery!”

I went to the site and kicked excavated earth back into the space left by the bone. I gathered the bits of Chinese pottery we had encountered on the upper layers of the dig. They were from fairly recent times, buried close to the surface by residents during Japanese times, and their condition made them insignificant.

He was scared of leaving his room, now ours, its walls drenched a fierce orange by the sun every afternoon. I went out to buy more Tanduay, lining up the bottles in the closet where he kept his field notebooks, tightly bound together by rubber bands, off limits even to me. I remember the postcards he had sent me once, when he was away from school and vacationing with his ex-wife. He had written them to me on the sly. For whatever reason, he didn’t have the courage to mail them. He kept them in his notebooks and gave them to me when he returned.

I let him talk himself out. Tanduay helped him get a bit past the fear, of being photographed, of being named and shamed, of being detained at the local airport, of being shot in the street. He saw threats everywhere: the local government officials who gave us a building permit because there was no such thing as an excavation permit, the student volunteers and their leftist orgs. Everything pointed to something that could happen.

I told him of a giant pearl that had been discovered by a fisherman in Sulu some years ago. A video of it circulated on Facebook. Experts studied the footage and pronounced the pearl, monstrous and misshapen, to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the news had been forgotten in a week’s time, overtaken by other happenings, a political scandal or a bombing.

“But what happened to him?” he asked me. “Where’s the fisherman now? Maybe the bomb was a diversion!”

I scolded him: “If people thought that way all the time here, we would never be able to live our lives.”

We discussed how to get the specimen past the hotel lobby and past airport security. There were many scenarios and many dead ends. We could hire a private boat, take a Superferry to Manila, try to outrun the news items and the blog articles.

That evening Dr. Hill pounded me so hard I could hear the sound of his pelvis smashing into mine. His grunts barreled into the hollow of my shoulder and his hair flew into my mouth. I felt his musky sheen on me, giving off a smell I had never smelled before. I realized why the sight of foreign men and Filipinas together particularly offended me. I was fucking a country of rugby players, conquering knights, the Beatles, and royalty; he was just fucking me. I gave in to one ugly thought after another.

Then he slipped out, suddenly soft. He blamed his anxiety and I nodded with my eyes still closed. Dr. Hill was, after all, 67 or 68. He was silent and careful now as he retreated and stretched out beside me. Within a minute he was asleep with his mouth open. I could smell his old man’s breath, I could smell him rotting inside.

Sitting there, fixed and suspended under layers of plaster and plastic, ready to be shipped to where it could be opened and made more sense of, the specimen had made absolute sense of everything that had happened before it got there. My curiosity remained unbroken, whatever the creature would turn out to be: a newly discovered extinct species, a common animal, or an elaborate fake.

Restless and bored, I lifted myself out of bed, the sheet shedding itself from my body. I fled, crossing the lit hotel hallway fully naked, to my room, where the news had been playing to a made bed: a low-resolution blowup of a vertical YouTube video of Datoy crowing to the phone camera, in near-perfect English, about the discovery that had been his elders’, and his elders’ elders’. In one bent hand he held the block of black wood like it was a bible, and in the other, swinging in and out of view, he held an open bottle of gin. The next clip, in full HD, was a live interview of his great-grandniece, who told the camera that had taken the video herself and uploaded it. The lighting was stark and direct; it showed where the whitening makeup ended on the edges of her face and how the outer corners of her eyeliner, teased upward into wings, had caked into hard points. The camera backed up; there were microphones and cellphone cameras aimed at her. She wore a halter top with a brand name done in glitter. She reminded me of the girls I’d seen in the mall with their white men.

This was the diversion we needed. I packed my things, mildly surprised at how quickly it took to gather two months’ worth of stuff, and dragged my suitcases to his room. I switched on his bedside lamp, startling him with its light. I shook him awake and his head jerked upward with a kind of dying gasp, his face drained further of blood, his eyelids twitching, his unshaven jaw thrust upward at an unnatural angle, his hands and his tapered fingers reaching for the air.

I switched on the room light. “Let’s go!” I told him. My nakedness and my anger thrilled me with their urgency. I pulled him out of bed. He was naked, too, but bony and stumbling and smelly. I told him to pack his things.

I clawed out all the clothes from my daypack and slid the bubble-wrapped specimen inside, lining it with blouses and shirts until it looked sufficiently stuffed. I clicked the fasteners shut and drew the straps tight.

I put on a bright colored bra, and over it a singlet with spaghetti straps that I had worn through college and refused to give up. I put on panties and a pair of denim short shorts I had never had the courage to wear. The rest of the clothes I dumped in the closet where we kept our stores of Tanduay, canned goods, and instant noodles. It looked like a grotto heaped with a bunch of random offerings to the gods.

In the bathroom I slathered on thick layers of lipstick and foundation and threw myself a look at the mirror. “Hold my hand,” I told him, and I led him out.

The paper proposes a morphology and fine structure of an avio-reptilian macrofossil, based on a recent discovery in the “white subcliff” area of Cebu Island, in the Visayas region of the Philippine archipelago, located in the South China Sea. The partially lithified sediments in the area, 216.2 m above sea level and approximately 15 kilometers inland, are seen as positive factors that have contributed to allow the preservation of a particularly good specimen, revealed after disaggregation in >99% acetic acid. The first preparations of the specimen were performed to the specifications of Glauber’s Salt Method, at a temporary laboratory the team established in the town of Nueva Florencia (pop 6,000+), about 500m from the excavation site. Cebu (10.18N, 123.54E) is a volcanic island about 400km south of Manila in the Philippines, an archipelagic nation in South East Asia. The initial survey and observations were performed by the writer of this paper, Joanna Marie Belmonte, under the guidance of Edward George H. Hill, PhD, RSGP, of the London Museum of Natural Science, under the generous sponsorship of the Department of Paleontology at the London University of Natural Sciences.

Dr. Hill smiles at me, at the thought of returning to London. A couple of hours into the flight, to help us adjust our body clocks, the LEDs embedded in the ceiling glisten like stars and the windows turn themselves opaque so we cannot see the light changing outside.