Dr Jenny Ortuoste was an award-winning essayist, fiction writer, editor, teacher and communications specialist from the Philippines. Five of her short stories have garnered Nick Joaquin Literary awards. Her stories have been published in Philippines Graphic and other publications, while her creative nonfiction has appeared in academic journals. UST Publishing House released her first collection of short stories, "Fictionary," in 2016. 

Winston lay in his coffin in a green barong looking ridiculously handsome.

He had cheekbones after all; in life he'd sported a sparse mustache and a formidable belly built by chicharon and beer. He was well-padded all over and when he smiled, his eyes disappeared into his face, like raisins pushed into a mound of cookie dough, but illness whittled away at his bulk until all that remained of him was skin stretched tight over a framework of elegant bones.

“I’ll go on a diet—next week,” was his usual refrain. It was ironic and sad that only death restored the good looks that in life he’d buried under layers of fat applied by mouth over time.

He was only forty-eight when he died of colon cancer. I say 'only' because I was forty-six myself; there but for the grace of God and my abstemious (and fearful) lifestyle go I. Emily, his widow, was my high school classmate. What made the wake even more depressing was that this year was the thirtieth anniversary of our graduation from high school. Winston would have been whooping it up with us—an honorary member of our batch.

I didn’t like him when I first met him. I resented the partners and spouses my classmates brought with them to reunions; I wanted my friends all to myself. I wanted to be able to tell stories we could relate to without having to explain with long backstories to the strangers among us, like Winston. But he was ingratiating and charming and, I had to admit, after a while and begrudgingly, that he was fun. Our reunions were livelier with him around.

“Smile,” he’d tell me. “Eat. Here, try this pancit.” He’d pile food on my plate, or top up my drink, or pull my wide ears for luck.

He'd chosen the grass-green barong himself before he died. It was after a chemotherapy session; he had been walking around with Emily at the men's department of an SM Department Store in Makati when he pointed at a mannequin. "That's what I want to be buried in," he told his wife.

"Shush! Don't talk like that! You're inviting misfortune!" she said. He insisted on buying it. Emily pushed it to the back of the closet when they got home. But she remembered what he said four months later, when his shrunken body lay cooling beside hers on their marital bed.

At the wake, Emily was resigned. Winston had been sick for nearly a year, and the end, when it came, was a blessing. "He's not suffering anymore," she said. “He was in agonizing pain.” Her eyes were dry.  There were six of us high school classmates of hers who went to the wake, and she chatted with us in her usual jocular fashion.  We talked about the deceased.

“Remember that time Winston grabbed the mic from the emcee and started singing...?”

“He was drunk.”

“Yes, but he had a great voice and everyone started whooping it up after he broke the ice.”

“He also broke a couple of glasses and a bottle of Fundador.”

“Yeah, but he was so funny the bar owner sent over another bottle for free.”

It was when we got up to leave that Emily told us what to do after visiting a wake.

"Don't go straight home from here," she said. Her grip on my arm was tight. "Pass by a restaurant. Starbucks? Jollibee? Wherever you want. Sit and eat."

"Thanks," I said, "but I'm not hungry. Don't worry about me. You have enough to think about."

She shook her head, impatient. "This is not about hungry. This is so that if something follows you from here, it will think the restaurant is your house, and stay there."

I didn’t understand. Emily saw the puzzlement in my eyes. “There is a superstition that the souls of dead people, or perhaps evil spirits, follow people home from a wake, unless they first visit some other place—a restaurant, a gas station, the mall, it doesn’t matter. What’s important is you mustn’t go straight home. It’s bad luck to do so. You have to pagpag—shake off—any curse that might attach to you.”

“Emily, I don’t believe in all that. But thank you anyway.”

“You were one of Winston’s favorites,” she said, pulling away. “But, please, there’s no harm in indulging me on this.”

I nodded and left with my former classmates. The family members of a dead person do not see visitors to the door at a wake.

I am not superstitious nor were Winston and I particularly close. Emily’s grief had gone to her head, I decided. That, and living with Winston, who was of Chinese heritage and followed old customs without question.

Don’t put your handbag on the floor, Emily would tell us, Winston says that’s unlucky for business. Ay, don’t use the numeral ‘four’ in your password—that means death! You’re having a manicure tonight? But trimming your nails after dark will call wandering spirits to you!  

“You don’t have to obey those pamahiin—you’re not Chinese!” we’d tell Emily.

“It doesn’t matter,” she’d snap back. “You won’t lose anything by following them!”

It was late and I thought it would be unsafe to take a cab, so I rode a jeepney home. A weak yellow light barely illuminated the faces of the few other passengers and failed to pierce a thick shadow at the end of the jeep behind the driver.

When I got down at my stop, I sensed a motion behind me. I whirled. No one else had gotten down. I didn’t see any cats or other stray animals that I might have sensed from the corner of my eye.

I did not feel alone.

There was a McDonald's near our apartment. It was brightly lit and there were many people inside queued up and waiting for burgers and chicken with rice meals and ice cream cones. The security guard held the glass door open for me.

The only vacant table was right under the stairs. The overhead fluorescents, glaring everywhere else in the store, could not dispel a thick shadow crouching in a corner.

I could barely chew my chicken nuggets and pushed away the watery Coke. I didn’t need a cold drink, not when my spine felt like someone was running an ice cube up and down it. I am not superstitious, I repeated to myself, but I was hungry after all. Perhaps Emily was right—that I needed a snack. I recalled I didn’t eat anything at the wake, not the Skyflakes nor the apple juice in tetra packs.  

I fancied I saw, on the edge of consciousness, the shadow in the corner move.

My handbag was on the floor; I lifted it and placed it on the empty chair beside me.

I finished my food as slowly as I could as the chill in back spread upward to cover my neck and shoulders like a grim shawl. I felt a light pressure on my left ear; I rubbed at it.

Perhaps I was grieving too, sharing my friend’s sorrow, regretting the loss of someone of my generation, feeling my own mortality as death claimed one by one those close to me and mine, its arrival as unavoidable as life and its attendant pleasures and miseries. Superstitions are among our feeble attempts to manipulate life to our advantage, but one can only stave off the inevitable for so long.

After some time, I put down my plastic fork. I rose and dusted myself off, with my hands flicking unseen dust from my hair, clothing, and skin. I did it twice, thrice, each time more forceful than the last.

I forced myself not to hurry out the door. Once outside, I turned and looked back through the plate glass windows.

At the table I'd just left was a glimmer of grass-green.