Warning: Some offensive language.
Old man Soria gritted his stained teeth close to breakage. His rugged farmer fingers—roughed up by the day’s pickings—dug into the shoplifter’s cotton shirt, when the teenager’s body began to shake, her elbows stiffening as a cardboard and eyes rolled all the way back. When her slender body dropped to the floor, the stern of her skull bounced a few times against the concrete that I caught myself squirmed, picturing a cracked watermelon that had fallen to the ground.
I had only previously read about seizures in my Advanced First Aid, in my first year as a PO1 trainee. The first and only woman in the ranks even eight years since she took her oath, mind you. It was a proud moment to know that not only could I protect lives, I could also save them with my hands. I had sworn on my father’s grave that as soon as I got my promotion, I would put care and sincerity back in police duty to earn people’s trust.
Anyway—seizures—it looks horrifying—demonic, almost. And some people get it hereditarily, yet I never really paid attention to what happens after an attack. Apparently, a person’s head doesn’t really explode, no exorcism is needed, but they could fall heavily unconscious—which was just convenient for someone who didn’t want to experience the wrath of Soria’s dumpster breath from within a few inches.
“Aba, this doesn’t get her off the hook. Wake up, you fucking retard,” Soria said, scowling at the motionless body beneath him.
Soria’s halitosis wasn’t dangerous, not fatal to us at the receiving end. But it was so goddamn awful. And the constant embarrassment from just being in his vicinity, the way people leaned away—was his olfactory nerve completely shot? He’s like the rabid dog specifically chained to a metal gate to scare people off, only he never knew why no one ever came close. So he kept barking. That frustration became anger, and over time that anger hardened into the kind of chronic stress that was now steaming out of his throat. To me it seemed that Soria hated me the most for apparently not being the expected demure lady that bowed to her husband, cooked him dinner, and kept her ass tight.
“Mr. Soria,” I said as I jerked my head further away from his piehole. “Let’s just calm down. Officer Cruz, you got the kid?” I asked the first responder, PO1 Goyo Cruz, who was assigned to man a checkpoint only 500 meters away from Soria’s when the call took place.
Cruz nodded shakily as the word “ma’am” limped softly out of his pale lips. I almost wanted to correct him by saying, “Lieutenant,” but I stopped myself. He then placed the back of his palm in front of the girl’s nostrils to check her breathing. She was still alive based on Cruz’s listlessness.
When I turned to the store assistant, bag boy, porter, fertilizer hauler—him—Isko—he was already pulling his burly boss away from the unconscious girl and the three of us walked out. “Sir, why don’t we talk for a second out here, please?” I asked calmly.
Except for a patrol truck that sat dead in front of the main entrance with the lights still flashing, I had lugged my unbathed, civilian-looking black MiniJP-E five minutes ago to the empty parking lot of Soria’s Farm with less than two hours in my shift to go. As soon as my rhetorical question came out of my mouth, a tinge of regret immediately followed.
“Oh for chrissakes, spare me the sirs and pleases. Your captain ain’t here.”
Soria was my father’s partner in pickup basketball and he had been swearing like a sailor ever since I’d known him.
Biting my tongue, I took a deep breath. “Alright, Rudy. What did she take?” I finally asked.
“That little bitch nicked some of my best carrots!”
“Okay—geez, why are you so upset? Were you saving them to bake a birthday cake?”
“Alona, I’m not in the mood for your sarcasm.”
“But what about the money?”
“She didn’t take no money.”
“What do you mean—I came down here for your carrots?”
“Hey, I know a scoundrel when I see one, arright?”
“Well, you’ve definitely been harboring one.” I smirked as I glanced at the store assistant, who was too dense to follow the conversation.
“Watch it, Alona. Isko is a reformed boy. Plus he’s useful ‘round here, even though he didn’t get no education. So what? You’re waving your diploma around, you think you’ve grown a dick? Nah—y’all still dumb. And the rest of you won’t fool me. Scammers!”
Soria’s got a mouth on him. The man’s miserable and senile, and I never understood how he and my father were ever best friends. He never liked me in spite of and always joked that if I were a boy, Dad would have lived much longer. I never cared for his attitude but the asshole never knew how to brush his teeth, let alone shut up.
“Oh and the little immoral thief—she had bruises all over her arms. And, and you saw her necklace too, right?” Soria rambled. “See? She’s not your run-of-the-mill scavenger. She’s a dirty criminal—probably nicked that off someone’s neck. Almost as dirty as you, sorry excuse for a ‘police officer.’”
I was about to give a stern warning when someone shouted, “Watch out, she’s getting away!”
When I turned, the young shoplifter was on a mad dash out toward the low wooden fence. I executed a tackle move, which was easier since she was one-third my size.
“Cruz—seriously?” I groaned as the girl struggled underneath me.
Cruz’s eyes were all panicked as he finally put handcuffs on her skinny arms. “Sorry, she asked me for some water and I thought she was too weak to get up—“
“What are you, social welfare? Hey, you stop moving down there or I’ll twist your arm.”
The girl kept wiggling under me. She kicked her feet repeatedly, quickly forming a tiny dent on the rough road. She kept trying to rock her shoulders, thinking it was enough to displace me. A few seconds later, I finally felt her body relax from exhaustion. She panted like a dog.
“Call for backup,” I said, looking at Cruz.
“Really, ma’am?” Cruz asked as he helped me grab the girl and take her inside the parked patrol car. “They might be a while. It’s the chief’s 60th. I actually thought no one else was gonna come here except me.”
The junior was beginning to annoy me with his nonstop questions—but he had a point this time. “Fine. Never mind.” I shook my head. “Just get a sworn statement from Mr. Soria, will you?”
“And the bag boy?”
“No need. He doesn’t exist.”
“Huh?”
“Treat him as a distant bystander. Not significant to be a witness. Tsk. Look, you know how fifteen percent of the hired help in Ternate are abandoned children of former rebels, right? Mr. Soria needs Isko off any records.”
“Ah, eh—”
“Punyeta,” I groaned, but Cruz had that confused look of someone who still wanted to do things by the book, much like me five years ago. “Fine,” I said. “You write the report and I’ll sign it.”
Cruz’s lips remained shut but I could almost hear the cogs in his brain turning as he walked away. He’s a rookie, and rookies are notoriously uncomfortable with omissions, cutting corners.
I quickly paced towards the girl, who was now crouched inside the police car. “So what’s your name?” I asked her.
Trying to wrestle the handcuffs off, the young girl, about maybe 13 or 14, looked up to me, her necklace skipping about around her bony chest, and said nothing. I looked at the chain closely, and it had a skull pendant on it. She jiggled and twisted and she paused to breathe, as if resolved in the fact that she couldn’t leave anyway without getting off of the handcuffs first.
“Look. You know it’s wrong to steal.”
The girl shot me a look once more and after the loudest, longest heave of frustration, she slammed her back against the small jeep and finally spoke. “They’re looking for me.”
“Who? Who’s looking for you?”
“Just let me go. I dropped the bag of carrots back in there.”
“You should’ve thought of that before you decided to steal them.”
“I don’t have them!”
“You still committed the crime.”
“I pulled them out of the ground over there. S’far as I’m concerned they didn’t belong to anyone.”
“Soria owns the land. See those fences over there? You entered a private property. And why were you inside the store if you weren’t stealing?
“I wanted to see—more of the lights,” she said, stuttering at the end.
I squinted my eyes at her, unsure of what she meant. To my right was a massive window on Soria Farm’s side and I could gaze at the blinking advertisement screens from there. The ad screens, probably about twenty of them, covered half of the interior walls of the massive produce store. It was imploring you in the most festive, unavoidable way to buy cucumbers at 45 per kilo. Or mung beans at 14 per kilo. Cabbage at 30 per piece. Beet root. Corn. Sweet potato. It said to buy now and you get one free. Or buy a yearly membership, so you get ten off at every purchase. Soria hired real actors for his commercials three years ago; he was very proud of that and was intolerable for two weeks. Now he’s pushing to punish a starving kid for stealing a few of his carrots.
I turned my head back to face the girl and that was when I noticed the bruises in her arms.
“Where did you get that?”
The first and pretty much only guess I had of its origins was that whenever she got seizures she would hit something on her way down, like a table or chair. But closer, the bruises looked like someone grabbed onto her a frail elbow a little too hard. The kid grew silent once more and craned her neck as if she was looking for someone or something to distract me so the questions would stop coming.
I was running out of patience. “What if I tell you that if you tell me your secret, the owner will let you off the hook?” I asked the girl.
As predicted, the neck slowly unstretched itself like an accordion and she shifted her eyes towards my direction, not really making eye contact. Suddenly, I became the flashy commercials she wanted to see more of.
“It’s nothing.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t even hurt.”
“Who is hurting you?”
“It’s over now—”
“Go on.”
“Please, I must leave.”
It took some back and forth with the kid until I figured there was no point because whatever Soria originally assumed about her meant little to the advancement of my full-time detective aspirations. There was no major crime to solve. She was a homeless youngster that got occasional fits, causing her to fall and hit things, which explained the bruises. Now it’s time to convince the reeking victim of how reliably useless the justice system works in our town especially for petty offenses like stealing carrots.
“Look, Rudy. We’ll bring her to the station but she’ll most likely be let go tomorrow.”
“Whatever. Your useless sidekick already told me,” Soria said, talking about Cruz, who just finished taking photographs of the leafy-veggie aisle back inside the store. He inhaled deeply as if to rant some more, but instead he creased his forehead. “Did you ask her about her bruises?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I answered, “but as expected, she’s not really saying much. We can try to interrogate her but I doubt she’ll say more than what she had already said today.”
“You folks are so dedicated to your vocation.”
A faint thud disrupted our conversation. I immediately knew it was the sound of a car door shutting close.
The girl had somehow squeezed out one hand off the cuff and was now making a run for it towards the perimeter fence and large patch of rainforest. Cruz, myself, and Isko, all three of us chased her down. We ran all the way out past the cabbages and the rows of upo trellises, beyond the rice field even, which was really far out about four hectares. We were then met by the wooden fences and at that point we knew we were not catching her as she entered the patch of forest. We tried but the kid was like a fox escaping a pack of coyotes, except the coyotes were lazy and remarkably void of any hunting instinct.
“Fuck,” said Cruz, still panting.
“Yeah, fuck,” I replied as we watched the kid grow smaller and vanish into the trees.
“Putangina. You are both absolutely useless.” Soria’s mouth clapped repeatedly when he finally caught up with us. He yammered so much, the sides of his lips began to froth. You could see he hadn’t gargled for days—morsels in the corners of his incisors had yellowed and his gums were darker than a smoke belcher’s pipe.
“I don’t believe you, Alona. You said you had always wanted to be like your father. But my God, you ain’t nothing like him. He won’t put up with this clownery. And you wanna know the worst part? Your father was the dirtiest of them all—but at least he wasn’t an idiot like you. You’ll never be like him. Better to just give up now, hija.”
Soria didn’t stop there. He then turned to my junior, who now had the most confused look. “Hey you—Cruz, right? Yeah, if I were you, I’d stay away from this woman. Unless your plan is to screw her in exchange for a salary increase. Even that would be a terrible move.”
You could see it in his eyes—the old man with the filthy mouth wanted to keep going, but out of nowhere, his errand boy, Isko, waved both his hands and gestured to his boss to come with him to the back of the store. Cruz and I looked at each other and followed the second they both went.
The shoplifter was there unconscious yet again, this time holding on to a carrot stick.
Soria had enough. He lunged at her, screaming. He was barking hysterically at someone completely passed out, like a watchdog preparing for a kill. Morsels of saliva and God-knows-what splattered all over her face—and his—when the girl, probably awakened by the endless roaring of a madman, finally opened her eyes. In shock at seeing a dark figure on top of her, she stretched out her arm and punched Soria’s gaping mouth—except the punch was a stab, using the carrot she held so tightly.
Soria, with a large carrot sticking out of his head, jerked back and rolled to the side. He coughed and made vomiting sounds.
In an instant, my extensive Advanced First Aid training flashed before my eyes. Screaming rang in my ears but I yelled for them to shut up so I could concentrate. I got on my knees, sat him up, and wrapped my arms around his waist from behind, like I was Jack and he was Rose.
Cough. Wheeze. Gag.
Saliva sprayed out of his gaping, rotten mouth. More gagging sounds. Rudy grew heavy. He fell unconscious, his body dropping forward, then swinging to the side as his round stomach stalled his momentum.
Shit. Is he fucking serious? Was he really dying on my watch?
I straddled his body almost. The left side of his belly pressed against my knees. His color shifted from pink to blue. With my arms stretched out, I put my weight on his center. Slow, repeated thrusting motions—like massaging half-frozen meat to tender.
Rudy was my father’s repugnant best friend—but now he might be expiring in my incapable arms. The asshole was right all along. His foulness had rubbed off on me.
When water clouded my sight, I noticed something skipping out of his jaw. Was it a carrot or a tooth? With hesitation, I lowered my head toward his mouth to check the blockage.
Maybe I should just let him die, I wondered. The man has no family—who would mourn him?
“Please save Boss,” with tears rolling down his cheeks, Isko the bag boy pleaded.
“Why? So he can keep hurting you?” the shoplifter asked.
Cruz and I exchanged a look as I continued to thrust on the convulsing body. I stared at his face and thought about mouth-to-mouth.
“He gave me a place to stay,” the boy cried.
“But he threatened to call her to lock you up that one time, didn’t he?” the girl shot back, pointing at me.
Ack! Ack! Ack.
It was then I realized the two of them knew each other—just as Rudy turned completely dark blue and stopped convulsing, his body all stiff and lifeless, a sour grin frozen on his face.∎
My book Intrinsic: A Novel is out. Grab a copy through any of the links below:
If you liked what you just read, I also wrote a freakish short story on belonging:
We Are All Strange
Kaya’s soul nearly leaped out when she tripped on her sister’s pink bike that laid in the middle of the garden. The threat of keeling over gave a strong jolt to her reflexes and her entire body felt the tingles when the adrenaline came rushing through her limbs.
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