The Miracle

 

THE MIRACLE

By Ben Crisp and Rose Flores

 

The coffee was still too hot, so I cradled the foam cup between my knees and lit my last cigarette. 

My last ever, I promised myself, as I had done the day before.

The park was mostly empty.  The sun had not yet crept above the horizon, to burn the dirty greyness from the dawn sky, and it would be at least an hour before the rest of the city left the their homes to brave another miserable taglamig day outside.

There had been reports of another journalist shot in Manila.  I had long grown used to such news, acknowledging it with a kind of postured indifference that my ex-girlfriend had found no comfort in.  It didn’t matter to her that I was relegated to the smallest sections of the sports pages; I was white, and besides, could not an outraged sports fan be just as violent as a vengeful gangster or deranged terrorist?  She was probably right.  Still, I found comfort in my own sense of insignificance.  Speaking barely a word of Filipino, and – some had argued – only just enough English to get by, I would never rise to the ranks of martyrdom like my braver, more talented brethren.  I may have been white, but with no money, no connections and no friends I was worth nothing to anyone.

A familiar figure appeared from behind the trees that formed the arched entrance to the park.  She always wore yellow dresses, or perhaps the same yellow dress, that danced beneath her knees.  She was pretty, or at least she gave an impression of prettiness from across a distance too far to know for sure.  She meandered, indecisive, between the benches scattered beneath pines that brushed the air in the morning breeze, before choosing the one she always chose.

It faced the statue of the Madonna that stood upon a plinth in the centre of a small pond.  It was a simple carving, as they all were; achieving no greatness in aesthetic or skill.  The virgin’s head tilted to one side, serenely, eyes opened wide and her hands stretched out in blessing - not, as it had always appeared to me, shrugging as if to say: what?

To the pinay in her yellow dress she was captivating.  She sat before the statue, alternating between long, lingering stares and moments with head bowed, eyes closed, I guessed, though I was too far away to know.

I sipped my coffee and watched her watching the Madonna, killing time as I waited for my day to begin.

 

There was no place to go, but here. 

I was raging as always, to imperfections. As such, at least, be perfect in front of this holy woman. 

Something stirred into my memory, while I uttered chants I couldn’t even understand.  So, this holy woman people called their mother, and the Catholics believed to be the mother of Christ, had always stunned me.  No, she did not stun me like ghosts scared, but her benevolence scared my sins and inspired me to hope.  At least, in this way, I could re-organize my undecided life.

At least, I’d be prim in front of her, confident in front of her; complete.  Apart from my whoring affairs to get money, I wished some guy would come back for me, as my yellow dress meant waiting.

In a few weeks, my boyfriend, a married man, would decide whether to marry me and annul their marriage, or leave me for his wife.  Of all the men in my life, I just got into material quests so I could sustain my falling business, but this married man was different because he thrilled my every need, other than desire. 

We’ve been on and off this love affair for two years now, and I could see how he craved for my being, because of his maid wife. “My wife compared to your diplomas is only good for a housekeeper,” he told me.

And so, I summoned him.  “You must choose between me and your wife.”  In a few weeks, I hoped, he’d be back to cuddle me and present me a diamond engagement ring.

A yellow dress would be good to wear all the time!  I’d go for this good luck hype.  

“Oh, would you always come back for me, Madonna?” 

In my thoughts I chanted, “My boy friend would come back for me; heaven might let the maid wife curse me, but what can I do?  I have to steal something to love me, or else I won’t stop whoring.  Who would come back for me?  Maybe, a thousand other men, to prance on my neck and mark it ‘Hey, I’ve got your ass, too.”   Will I be punished for ruining a sacred matrimony or stealing a father?

In this place, was something more real and tender.  “Love me tender, love me sweet…  Oh, my love complete,” I hummed.  After my love affairs, here was the only concrete and beautiful thing.

Across the benches, of this, which I called a sanctuary, were a few others who breathed solace like me.  Perhaps.  One could be on a fitness program, another read a newspaper, and still another guy, sipped his brew.  This guy, sipping his brew, could be thinking nuts like me.  Or could he be thanking the magnificence of another day, while he looked up the sky, bowed low for his cup, and darted again, in front this Madonna? 

Or would he look at me, too?  His gaze was flaming hot.  For what thoughts, he could have sensed my urgent pleading to this holy statue, sublime in simplicity and honesty.  “Well, we’re flesh and bones, but if for moments, we could be holy,” an old priest said that during the mass I had attended when I was younger, so once in a lifetime I had been serious in the temples; so once pure, I was, before I came into this labyrinth.  Would my pleadings echo around? 

I caught him looking into nothingness, unconscious maybe, when he glanced into my space and my confused efforts.  That time, when he raised his cup, swallowed and sipped again, I thought he was a handsome bum. 

 

It must be nice, I thought, to have some sort of certainty in life.

To be able to look to a faith to guide you when reality – that deluge of chaos that tears at the flesh and soul – is inescapable.  Or maybe she just liked the statue.

More people began to trickle into the park.  The illusion that this was my place began to fade, like it always did, as the sun drew long shadows on the ground; soon it would be time for work.  Once I had enjoyed the anonymity of living in a big foreign city.  Now, I feared, solitude was decaying into loneliness and I felt myself disappearing into the crowds that lined the streets each day.

She finished or paused whatever thoughts had held her and stood up to leave, as though in a sudden hurry.

Was this my life?  Watching others from outside a window like a child at a pet store?

It took a moment for me to notice the sliver of yellow beneath the bench.  Curious, I stood and walked slowly across the park to the space in the front of the statue.  The impassive Madonna did not turn to look at me as I entered her periphery, and when I stooped to inspect I saw it was a silk summer scarf that had fallen from the bench; that same canary hue of the woman’s dress.

She was already at the end of the park, turning left out of the gates without looking back.  The scarf in one hand, my other reached into its pocket to retrieve my phone.

come dwn sick.  mybe flu.  srry.  tlk 2morrow.

I had taken three sick days in four years.  Whatever else that devotion to such a badly paying job might be called, I reasoned, it wasn’t the symptom of a well man.

I quickened my pace not quite to a jog and scanned the streets when I reached the gates.  For a moment I thought I had lost her until I spied a flash of yellow amidst a crowd of pedestrians moving across an intersection two blocks down.  The traffic closed after them like parted waters and I waited, tense.

Overloaded trucks and bikes whined past at high speed in the dangerous dance of weaving engines that only the Filipinos can survive.  A group of wiry children aligned at the curb next to me, chattering like squirrels, watching the road with unblinking eyes and gesturing to each other with their hands.  They were preparing to cross.  I watched them watching the cars, and when they darted out I sucked in a breath and ran with them.

Horns blared all around me, and I felt the thundering slabs of steel rush by close enough to feel the heat from their choking and spluttering motors, but after a few terrifying moments we were across safely – the children giggling and pointing at the idiotic white man.

The woman had vanished from sight, and I spent a few moments striding between street corners, standing on the tips of my toes as I scanned the faceless crowds for her.  Then the yellow dress peeked out through gaps in the crowd ahead of me, and I moved again in her direction, pushing my way past the suits and the sneakers and the cell phones and sunglasses.

I followed her to a street lined with townhouses – the angular, rendered townhouses for people with the money to pay others to choose their tastes for them.  I had gained enough ground now to call out to her from the other side of the street, but I caught myself when she stopped in front of a high stone wall to push the button on an intercom panel.

She spoke for only a moment and waited for a response, then the courtyard door must have been unlatched from within because she pushed it open quickly and stepped inside.

I was alone, on that lush and empty street, the scarf still wrapped in my hands.

THE MIRACLE

Final Round

The Miracle

 

by Ben Crisp and Rose Flores 

 

 

 

“Yes,” I said, gesturing pointlessly down the street as I crossed to her.  “I… you left it at the park.”

“Thank you,” she said, reaching out a hand to take it.  She brushed a loose strand of hair back and squinted at me.  “I have no money, sorry.  But thank you.”

“No, you don’t… I didn’t want a reward.  Are you alright?  You look upset.”

She turned away, and I wondered how I could be so direct to this perfect stranger.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I’m inquisitive.”

“OK,Yankee Steve.  I have to go now,” she said, and started to walk.A stupid, mad chuckle escaped my mouth and I caught it quickly in my hand as I chased after her. 

“No, not… it means I’m nosy.  I’m curious, sorry.  Like a cat, you know.”

She stopped and squinted at me again, as though wondering whether to smile at this insane white man or not.  Then she pointed at my nose.  “Curiosity kills the cats.”

“Yes it does,” I said, nodding.  “Do you want a coffee?”

She turned and started walking again.  “If I had money I would give it to you, but thank you for bringing my scarf.”

I chased after her.  “No!  No, it’s nothing to do with… I want nothing from you.  I just thought you looked like you could use a coffee.”

Her squinting tortured me.  I had no clue what was going on behind those stern brown eyes, and not knowing this little thing was vanishing all that I did know; every instinct was fading from me.

“I’m a journalist, I’m not…” I said helplessly, and shrugged. Not what?

She shrugged back.

 

“Your boyfriend’s house?” I asked as we sat at a table beneath a red canvas umbrella.

“Why do you think that?”

“The locket.”  I pointed at the little golden heart turning restlessly between her thumb and forefinger.  She snapped it into her palm defiantly.

“The scarf is from my boyfriend,” she said, pulling it from her neck and resting it on the table as our coffees arrived.

I tore open a sugar packet and tapped it into my cup.  “I’ll bet you chose it.  It matches your dress.”

She checked her phone and did not answer me.  I was right.

“You drink too much coffee,” she said at last, after she had sighed and tucked her phone away again.  “Caffeine is bad for the heart.”

I shrugged again.  “Everything is bad for the heart these days.”

We sipped from our cups and ventured into the silence that filled the air around us.  Empty, silent air; it choked me more than smoke.  Was that why my fingers reached for last cigarette after last cigarette after last cigarette?

“May I see?” I said, and held out my palm.

She stared at me through steam rising from her coffee, a cradle of warmth between her two soft hands; then lowered the cup, unfolding her fingers to proffer the locket.

It was of the yellow gold I had never admired, adorned with rubies that might have been real, or might have not; and not knowing made them seem worthless.  A tiny clasp unhinged its two halves, splitting the fragile little heart in two, revealing a miniature biscuit-tin print of the veiled Madonna.

“Lucky charm?” I asked.

“She is pure.  Perfect.  Everything else is dirty in the morning.”

“Nothing’s quite as pretty as Mary in the morning,” I sang in my best Elvis voice, but she did not smile. A digital chirrup sounded beneath the table, and she withdrew her phone swiftly, reading the message with that same familiar squint.

“Boyfriend?” I asked.

She reached out and took the locket back, standing as she did so.

“I have to go.  Now.”

Her voice had a tiny tinge of urgency to it.  I stood too.

“Thank you for the coffee,” she said as she started to walk away.

I was about to remind her that I hadn’t actually offered to pay for her drink, but changed my mind and dropped a handful of coins on the table instead, following her.

“Your scarf,” I said, offering it to her.  She snatched it from me with a little noise of annoyance – at herself or at me I was not sure.  “It’s Michael, by the way.”

“Violeta,” she said.

She began to murmur underneath her breath as she quickened her pace.  I was almost jogging just to keep up with her, my hands in my pockets as though we were just two friends in a mutual hurry.  She was praying, I realised; every other word of the rosary filtered from her lips through the noise of the traffic – into which she suddenly stepped, waving her hand at a Corolla with barely readable taxicab printing that skidded to a halt beside her.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

She glanced at me like an impatient schoolteacher as she grabbed at the door.

“Hospital,” she said.

 

“Then Michael hop in!  Or would you leave now?”  So we boarded the Corolla. 

I didn’t know what this guy wanted from me, but I didn’t care less because my thoughts were horrible.  I knew something would happen, and whatever fate again would present to me – as to my friend Hannibal’s wisdom was to be happy and free.  I assured myself that what could happen to my boyfriend was reality, like the shifting of clouds – we just couldn’t stop their movements, only God can.  The next thing I felt our hands were tightly locked, and Michael’s gaze trying to seize my brokenness.

     “Is there something I can do?” he asked.

     “Nothing.  Thank you.”

     Lane upon lane, track upon track; my mind whizzed the clouds, the nothingness, the coldness of my fright, the fallen hopes, the waiting, my single life of faith. At this time, the locket...

    “Don’t worry. We’ll get there.” Michael asserted.

     And then, in my bag the phone buzzed again.  I grasped the phone firmly, but my hands were weak so the phone dropped down the cab floor.  Michael got it and read the message. 

     I did not mind his resolve.  The driver was silent with only the twist of his wheels.  The air was cold and my heart pounded heavily like rocks on my chest breaking for mercy.  “Oh, Maria!”

     Silence in the cab, in the air, near the afternoon...  Michael didn’t say any word, but searched the locket for me and put them in my hands.  He held me close and I did not resist the comfort of his arms around my bereft shoulders that needed warmth and flesh. 

    “We’d go to the back office of the hospital, Violeta.  The staff will give us instructions...”    

I paid the driver as she sprang from the taxi.

            My only thought during the ride was that I could not remember the last time I had hugged someone out of the simple instinct to comfort; when had the act of touch become so foreign?

            Please hurry.

            That’s all the second text had said.So whatever disaster had befallen him had not restricted his use of a phone.  I hated myself for the unkind thought.  Had my ex looked as Violeta looked, whenever I had told her I was ill?

            The nurse at the back office desk glanced at the clipboard hanging by her side.  Emergency. Bay 212.  Violeta hurried ahead and I followed, helplessly, at a distance.  I thrust my hands into my pockets and peered through the gridded windows on the doors as we walked the length of the corridor, my lungs filling with the smell of disinfectant.  The figures in the beds looked so small and vulnerable.  As Violeta stopped ahead of me I realised they were children.  The realisation shook in me, and my fingers closed around something in my pocket.  The familiar scratch of a paper curl on skin. A forgotten cigarette.

            I stood behind her. Through the window in front of us I saw a dimly lit room.  A woman leaned forward in a chair, her back to us.  Her hands were clasped around the hand of a boy who lay motionless in the hospital bed.  From where I stood I could see his eyes were not quite closed, fine red lines crossing his face around them.  Machines surrounded him, their cables disappearing under his sheet, electric green and blue lights winking and flickering softly.

            Across the bed from the woman stood her husband.  I recognised him.  I had seen his face in newspapers; a politician, maybe.  He was short, dressed in a dark business suit.  His hands were deep in his pockets and he stood, slumped, staring at the boy with a strange look on his face.  It was the look of a man for whom the curtain of life had been pulled aside, and he saw nothing behind it.

            His glassy eyes drifted from the boy across the room to the door.  He saw Violeta.  He saw me.  I glanced at Violeta, her eyes now welling.  Across the space, through the glass, the two of them were sharing a look filled with all the sadness, the sweetness, the tenderness and heartache that I had ever known love to be about.  It was then I felt alone, as the lonely will do, rain soaked neighbour to the world of the loved.  A world for those who felt the warmth of others even when parted, and who felt another’s pain.

            I felt pain.  I felt Violeta’s, as she felt her lover’s, as she felt and he felt the pain of his son, and the mother did too, and I; all of us there in the chapel of pain, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Hospital.

            He looked to his wife, and Violeta turned from the window, her hands to her mouth, eyes searching for some solace in mine.  I curled an arm around her shoulder and walked her to the stairwell at the end of the ward.  As we rose, step by step, I heard the rooftop doorway humming a mellow chant between the cold conditioned inside air and the free and humid day outside.

            On the roof we stood and stared, listening together as the yellow scarf fluttered in morning eddies, and I saw… I saw, across the avenue, beyond the cries and howls and mirth of the city streets, through a border of bricks and bolts and steel, perched on a plinth in the centre of a pond, the concrete Madonna.

            Perhaps love was not pure, but stained.  Perhaps love was not harmony, but discord.  Perhaps love came in all the shades of earth and grime, and in the moist and dirty breath of the taglamig air that brushed our faces on mornings such as this.

            Violeta prayed in silence beside me, and I lit my last cigarette.

 

   My last ever, I promised myself, as I had done the day before.

 

 

 posted by rosevoc2

at July 15, 2016   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outer Banks

 

In August. From Netflix/You Tube. OUTLANDER

 OUTLANDER

Depicts genuine love of family, loyalty to friends and vows, charity for the unfortunate.  Congratulations to the book author Diana Gabaldon, to the production and staff, to the actors/actresses commendable endeavor! Outlander is stunning and educational!  

Love After Heaven, Parts 11-15

Love After Heaven, Parts 11 to 15

2015/08/13 FICTION IN PROGRESS ONE COMMENT

by Isagani R. Cruz

Julie allowed her mobile phone to keep ringing. She had put it on silent but vibrating mode.

It was the twelfth time in the last hour that Frankie had tried to reach her. Not that she was counting. Okay, so she was counting.

Burning her husband in the crematorium had shocked her into rethinking her affair with Frankie. It was one thing to enjoy sex with her lover while her husband was at work or at home. It was quite another thing to see her husband being fed into the oven, with the flames rushing up to devour him.

She cried then, not the tears she pretended to shed in the funeral parlor, but real tears, tears of repentance, tears of guilt, tears of – yes – love.

She loved her husband. Yes, she did. It was the sex that made her cheat on him. The sex he never really gave her.

With him, it was always let’s do it, there it’s done, good night. With Frankie, it was always let’s do it, yes, but later, much later, meanwhile let’s kiss, fondle, touch, talk, enjoy the moments before I enter you, before I give you what you’ve been asking for for a whole hour now. With her husband, it was him loudly snoring immediately after, but with Frankie, they were always awake for yet another hour, talking about things that seemed to matter at that time though she could not really recall them now, except that she would reveal to him all the childhood anxieties she had, how she hated her parents, how she thought that they did not bring her up secure and happy, how they denied her all the pleasures of childhood, how she wanted to take her revenge on them by being principal of an elementary school that was secure, predictable, and solid because it had not changed at all but had stuck to the old ways of doing things, the way she herself had been brought up, how she had turned away anything that would disturb the universe of her school, like all those newfangled ideas about why children should be allowed to be themselves and about how the classrooms should not be designed like a college classroom with the professors talking down to students who would dutifully take down notes, how she had kept the school alive through her insistence on the old and time-tested values, how her job was her life, how Frankie was now her life, how she wished she had not married so young or at all.

She didn’t remember anything that Frankie told her, except that Frankie talked about killing her husband and then killing his wife and then the two of them going away to Hong Kong where they would live happily ever after.

She thought that it was just idle talk after one of their simultaneous orgasms.

Then Frankie did it. He went one day to the fourth floor of the parking garage of their condominium, waited until her husband had opened the trunk to put in his briefcase – which was what he did every day without fail on the hour – then stabbed his neck once, then his back, then when her husband managed to turn around, his chest, repeatedly, surgically, unhesitatingly, coldly.

Frankie left the parking garage as quietly as when he had walked through the fire exit from the second floor, where he had parked his own car. The guards thought that he had come to pick her up again as he usually did on Saturdays or on days the husband was away on a business trip. As the car exited the parking garage, they did not peer through the heavy tint to see Frankie’s hands all covered with blood. Her husband’s blood.

The driver of another car came upon the bloodied body of her husband. Miraculously, her husband was alive when he was brought to the emergency room. Alive, of course, was a figure of speech. He was in some sort of coma. He was kept alive by a multitude of tubes and drugs. The doctors argued about his being clinically dead, but Julie was too distracted to make the decision to pull the plug. She had to attend to a number of other serious matters.

She gave the guards a couple of hundred thousand each to keep quiet. She said that she did not want a scandal. Not the scandal of a murder, but the scandal of a prim and proper school principal having an affair with a married man.

She asked her two maids to give large envelopes of money to cops if – when – they came around to ask about the murder.

The case was not even reported in the newspapers. The police reporters got their share of the cash given to the cops.

Even the reporters stationed at the emergency room received gift certificates redeemable in appliance stores.

Only the doctors and nurses could not be bribed, but they were too busy with too many patients to worry about one stabbing victim.

Eventually, the line on the electrocardiogram went flat and her husband was pronounced dead, really dead.

The coroner erased the cause of death written by the doctors (“internal bleeding secondary to multiple stab wounds”) and simply wrote “cardiac arrest” as the cause of death. A month later, he and his entire staff went on a Mediterranean cruise.

The funeral parlor received a huge grant for its satellite building.

Everybody had been hushed up. Nobody else found out about the murder.

But today, after going to confession, she felt strangely peaceful. There was something about the voice of that priest. She couldn’t see him well through the perforations in the confessional box, but she heard his voice. It was a soothing voice. Almost familiar.

* * *

It was the usual regimented quiet after the Monday morning flag ceremony. Julie had trained her teachers well, and the teachers, in turn, had trained their students even better. All the students queued as they were supposed to, alphabetically within the grade levels, and walked to their respective classrooms in the kind of order that she wanted. No getting out of line, no talking, no veering away from procedure. Nothing to disturb the school universe.

Procedure. This was how Julie called the discipline she required of everybody in school. The teachers had to submit their lesson plans for the week two weeks in advance. The students had to be on campus ten minutes – not earlier, not later – before the bell rang. The parents who had brought their children to school had to be out of the campus five minutes – not later than that – before their children lined up for the opening assembly.

There was always an opening assembly. She wanted the children to know that, on Mondays, there would be a flag ceremony, where everyone would put their right hand on their chest and sing the national anthem, recite the patriotic pledge, and sing the school hymn. Yes, the school hymn with hand on chest!

On Tuesdays, everyone would do calisthenics. Sound mind in a sound body, Julie would keep repeating over the public address system, counting from one to eight and backwards to one.

On Wednesdays, everyone would pray. Julie was nominally Roman Catholic, since she was baptized when she was an infant, when she had no religious freedom. She went to church every Sunday, because her husband wanted her to. She did not really understand why people had to stand, sit, kneel, sing, nod at each other, or whatever, but she wanted her husband not to know that there was something wrong with their marriage. Besides, it was good for the parents to see her being pious.

Pious she was not, but during the times when there was no one in the principal’s office, she would read the Bible. She had read the entire book once, from cover to cover. Nowadays, she would play a game with herself. She would randomly insert a bookmark, point her right index finger with her eyes looking up at the portrait of the school’s founder – a young mother back in the fifties who wanted to have more children than the dozen she already had – and read the verse that her finger landed on. She used that verse as others used a horoscope or a fortune cookie.

She also knew that people had to have their faith or they would, as a Russian novelist once put it, be allowed to do whatever they wanted to do. She could not have that. She believed with her entire being that, if students and teachers and parents followed procedure, the world would be a better place in the future.

The Wednesday prayer was not Catholic, but ecumenical, all inclusive. Julie would intone, “Lord God, Yahweh, Allah, Jehovah, you have many names. We call on you to guide us in following procedure. Amen.” That was it. No long, memorized prayers that no one really understood. Nothing that she felt would offend anybody’s religion.

On Thursdays, everyone would stand silently for three minutes (no more, no less), thinking of whatever they wanted to think of. Julie would have preferred that they thought of nothing at all, since that was what she learned from a television show about meditation, but she didn’t know how to impose that, particularly on teachers who had to think of what they would do the moment the children would be inside their classrooms. So she contented herself with the three minutes of silence.

On Fridays, everyone would do what professional singers and theater performers did before performances – vocalize. She once tried having everyone do what she read on the Web –massage the temporal mandibular joints, stick out the tongue, yawn, sing “Ahh” going up and down the scale – but too many students ended up laughing. She now merely asked everyone to shout as loud as they could, then to whisper as softly as they could, then to sing the first two verses from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. Five Hallelujahs made her Fridays. Even if they were sung off-key. Even if they were not exactly the lines of Psalm 117.

Saturdays, of course, were not for the children but for Frankie. She would tell her husband that she had to catch up with work in the school, but she would really either spend the whole morning in bed with Frankie or watch a movie with him on the days she had her period.

Sundays, after the obligatory Mass with her husband, were for pretending to like pottering around the house.

There was one thing she liked about her husband, though, that she did not get from Frankie. She and her husband would have seemingly endless arguments about some verse in the Bible. Like her, her husband loved reading the Bible. Unlike him, she looked at the Bible as a literary text and not as a religious document. Their intellectual debates were the closest she got to having simultaneous orgasm with her husband. In fact, it was the closest she got to having an orgasm at all with him.

Julie was beside herself. Everything had been planned, all details had been agreed and written down, the school was ready for the recollection.

She had convinced the parents who were not Catholic that the recollection would be good for the children. She had told the priest not to insist on anything remotely peculiar to the Catholic religion. She wanted merely that the children would learn to pray to some transcendent being. The objective was spirituality, not religion.

With barely an hour to go, the priest called in sick. He was profuse in his apologies, but Julie wouldn’t hear of it. She implored the priest to come in, even if he had very high fever and some rashes. What did she care if the priest died of dengue or lupus or whatever it was that he had caught? She needed a warm body to stand in front of the children in the auditorium and make them pray.

The priest said, not to worry, he was sending a priest who was certain to give the principal what she wanted. His name was Father Romy.

http://isaganicruz.com/2015/08/13/love-after-heaven-parts-11-to-15/