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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Shock in the Shacks (A short story)


 Calamities are the usual visitors of the Filipino people every year. With broken houses, broken dreams, dead love ones and serious economic problems, we can say that this is a curse a Filipino must pass every year. With this, I wrote this short story. Enjoy....

Shock in the Shacks
by Axle Cano

There’s a hole inside Antonio’s room. No one knows why it’s there, but the only explanation that they know is that, Antonio wanted his room to be cleaned up after the storm surge devastated the shack village a week ago. Her mother screamed indiscriminately in sleeping Antonio, “Antonio! What have you done with the plank-pile!?” He get up as quickly as possible, wear the tattered shorts he had and answered his mother, “Mom, I don’t know, I will not even noticed it myself?” a puzzled kid wandering why there’s a hole.
Underneath the hole is garbage… full of garbage from the neighbors, from the other shack villages, from the near canal establishments carried by the flood. News’ are crowding the airwaves with what’s in and what’s not. For the shack people, what’s in is finding new materials for repairs of their houses. An army of kids below 13 are on their way to find scrap lumbers from the construction sites nearby. Scouring the newly flooded metro is hard, because of the pile of dirt flood has brought. But for them, it’s a new way to find living. All those scraps, garbage, plastics and other spoilage of flood are worth gold in their eyes.
“Tonyo, have you seen istak?” an asking woman around 18 approached Tonyo.
“Nope, not a trace… why’re you looking for him”
“He didn’t come home for the last few days, after the storm hits our boat-house. That is our concern right now.” Nearly sobbing as she continues.
“Hmm I will tell you as soon as possible, anyway got to go. There are so many things to do”
Antonio pushes his cart as quickly as possible. Every pile of dirt, he searches for materials they need, and for him to fix the mysterious hole in his room. After hours of searching, he nearly full his cart with some soaked mattress, few books that are nearly dried, coco-lumbers, tarpaulins of politicians who promised his mother and deceased father some good relocation site (their faces are in better use if they will put it on their shack). All of those ‘knick-knacks’ filled his cart.
On his way home, there’s a crowd going loco about a pile of garbage. Scavenging their way for good ‘trade’, some of them pushing each other in order to get the nice spot, and Antonio is not that interested to get in to trouble. He just continued to walk until he reached his favorite ‘fishing spot’. On that spot, he can get good stuff; the television that they’re using in their house is a big-fish from that canal.
Wandering and digging the petrified garbage is hard if it’s not rainy season, but after the flood, scavenging here is easy. While searching for precious ‘fish’, Antonio realized that the hole in his room is a part of an old oak barrel that his fathered salvaged from the pilings of Manila Bay. After some afterthought, he noticed something’s floating near his rope, the barrel! 
When he lifted the barrel, he saw Istak floating and all swelled up. 

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