Hot Cement

By: RDV


In house number 44 lived a girl whose name was Irene. She wished too many people to die she would’ve been a worse dictator than Hitler, a more murderous bastard than Mao Zedong. One of her many ambitions in life was to scheme the perfect assassination plot of Hollywood director Howard Shore, which she would carry out in the year 2008, the fifteenth of March, on the very birthday of her childhood friend and second cousin Monty. While she was busy daydreaming on a beige leather couch, a baby rat could be seen sniffing the leftover food which was her breakfast, which she still hadn’t placed on the sink where dirty dishes were bubbled, rinsed and orderly kept in the dish closet. The animal sneakily kidnapped the fat of the crispy bacon in the now cold sandwich. Successful in its mission, it swiftly ran off to go back to its hole, which was just beside the electricity outlet. Outside the house was a sunny day. Marla, Anton’s ray of sunshine, was too engrossed in the clothes she was scrubbing to notice the disturbingly violent scuffle that had been rapidly progressing among the boys, age ranging from seven to ten, who were playing basketball. The basketball no longer bounced; it was now forlorn, ignored by the boys who were apparently more interested in bloodying each other’s nose than trying to get the ball through the net. Rosario, Marla’s sister-in-law was picking up a petty chatter with the policeman’s wife, Coreen, two houses away from where Marla was scrupulously laboring. They were squealing about who won last night’s card game and who went home neck-deep in debt. The person who went home neck-deep in debt was called Benny. Benny lost his job as a car dealer and since then his only means of income was gambling, and owing. Yesterday was obviously a bad day for him, and so were countless others. His son, Abner, was taking their mongrel dog for a walk. Lately it had started to show signs of being insane; but the family had refused to take it to a vet because the estimated fee was absurd. Now Abner was tolerating the slobbering, half-sound dog which was now struggling to get free from its collar and tether. His grip tightened and tightened and tightened. Nelly jumped up when Abner and the dog strafed by. She was peacefully receiving the sunlight with her back on their family car, a Toyota Revo, when the dog snapped at her. It missed her by an inch. She swore. She could still vividly recall when last week the dog, upon its temporary release, did the same thing to her. She gave Abner a menacing look and stomped back to their house where her father was repairing his jogging shoes. He was squatting in the garage, with maddening concentration as he applied rugby on the portion of the shoes where a sole piece had been. Their next door neighbor, Gregorio, was in his sister’s bedroom vandalizing her Biology book. The previous day, she mischievously removed the scientific calculator from his school bag, which he was supposed to use for his convenience in his Physics test which was to be held on the same day. Gregorio was sure he failed the test. Now he was venting his anger and exercising revenge. His girlfriend Ashril was still snoozing. It was six minutes past twelve in the afternoon. She slept miserably late last night on account of an exacerbated flu. She didn’t take any medicine. She forgot; she was too busy brooding on the chaos surrounding her existence. Her grandfather, stationed in the room one floor above her, was also pondering; about the imminent end of his life. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer, in its mortal stage courtesy of Dr. Chua, and had been in and out of the hospital these past few months. Each time he was discharged he felt worse than when he had been admitted. Recently he had begun taking on a colorless behavior which made him agree to everything anyone said as though it was his job, being moribund, to be nice to everyone. One of the people he was especially kind to was Samuel. Samuel was his poker friend. As Ashril’s grandfather suffered, he was currently watching a championship boxing match between a Filipino and a Puerto Rican some little houses away. The Filipino was losing by a landslide, his punches hardly connecting and his defense visibly falling apart. Samuel had let loose set after set of profanities at which his five-year-old grandson, Kenneth, wondered. Kenneth swerved through the kitchen where his mom was preparing corned beef for lunch. Instead of asking her where babies come from, he asked what shit meant. Dismantled from what she was doing, she ignored him. A little earlier she had borrowed a cooking pan from the neighbor across the street whose daughter, Sheila, had recently started abhorring her mother as though she was a piece of trash. Sheila didn’t want her to be around her and would often complain of oxygen shortage when her mother came to her within two meter radius. Her mother would frown, marching off. Her other daughter, Kaye just broke up with her boyfriend of seven months, Carl. Kaye was hurt, but victorious. Her mother was hurt too, but not as triumphant; she liked Carl, loved the times when he and her exchanged a quip or two about her daughter, and out of loyalty she wanted to preserve the pain. She sighed at the youth of that age to which she bore witness, the youth who knew nothing aside from screwing, raping others, getting wasted and being the typical youth of that generation. She sighed. All of them sighed. The sun would reach tiptop, sink again, gradually, until it turned to something large and orange and less bully and vanished below the horizon. It would be night again and rain would probably fall, threatening the occasion on which regular dipsos would make a traffic nuisance of themselves by setting a table and several plastic chairs on the streets. There they’d carouse the night away. In the morning the cock would crow, resulting in a medley of curses from the whole neighborhood, and the clockwork, prearranged, would commence once again, uninterrupted, vibrant in its repetition.