***
At midnight, every night for months, my Lola dressed in her finest Spanish gown, went out on to her front porch, and screamed for her husband to come home. No one tried to stop her. See, her generation wasn’t unfamiliar with visits from the dead. A young woman calling out into the humid, Philippine night, was pitiable, but not beyond the bounds of reason. My grandmother’s family and townmates shrugged it off, until the night the screaming stopped after only a few moments. They rushed outside, afraid she’d hurt herself, or worse. Instead, they found her standing on the porch, smiling.
“He heard me,” Lola told them. “He came home.”
***
“Life After Wartime” by Don Pizarro is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
