Katrice’s Reviews > Accidents Happen and Other Stories > Status Update

It's so much hotter in Metro Manila now...Maybe it's global warming; maybe it's the thirteen million or so people crammed into an area of 620 square kilometers. So many lured to this sprawling, chaotic metropolis by the promise of economic opportunity, only to be let down by the reality that this promise is reserved only for the select few. The rest have to fight and steal and grift and hustle for scraps.

I fell for a snake and soon found it impossible to extract myself from its jaws.

She reminded herself that she was married to a good man; a man who had not swept her off her feet, who did not set her heart racing madly, but who had won her with quiet devotion and then kept her with a calm, clear-eyed, loving steadiness.

We couldn't give each other what wr needed. So we gave each other what we could.

He was simply not the kind of man who married, made babies, grew old and toothless surrounded by children and grandchildrem. And she knew she was the kind of woman who did.

She latched on to him even though he was about two decades older because she liked the thrill of landing an older man and even better, she liked the idea she was attractive enough to break up a long-standing relationship.

In this city, where so many lived hand to mouth and everyone always seemed to be in a hurry, thd woman resisted by living het life slowly. She read books under what trees she could find, waked to the supermarket, took her time in the produce section.

I wrote a story. That's all I could do. But here she is. And here we are.

The love triangle, however farfetched, seems to me the motive of choice to which most provincial police officers attribute violent crime, second only to small-town political ideology -- he's a Communist -- and drug dealing.

A musical genius...and the phrase didn't mean anything to me. Well now I know what that is: someone who can tyrn sorrow into sound.