Manila, Arizona
Kai spots the sign first: “Manila Wash.” I pull our U-Haul onto the shoulder of I-40, a welcome break from Kai’s assurances that I too will love Santa Fe. I step outside to find not a stream, or even a creek, but a strip of pale, cracked earth and patches of yellowed brush. “You’re right!” Kai shouts from the truck. His phone confirms that this wash, and the town it drains, is named after the capital just south of where you grew up, in Pampanga, long before you settled in California and met Dad, long before you—and home—became memories.
You spoke of waking as a child to geckos, whose blinking eyes watched you from your bedroom ceiling. You spoke of Good Fridays, when Lola shut the blinds to the road of bloody penitents, men who whipped themselves to feel Jesus. You spoke of the crosses you and Lola wove from palm leaves and how she tacked them, as protection, above each door frame. And you spoke of the time a typhoon struck, ripped your neighbor’s roof clear off, and how Lola credited those crosses for keeping your home in one piece.
I pick two straw-like blades from the brush, and in this desert town, my fingers remember the folds you taught me. Every bend and tuck of the sturdy grass reminds me of the strength and flexibility that kept your home in Pampanga intact, that eventually enabled you to build a new home in a new country.
Kai shouts again, “Babe, you okay?” A scene flashes: clouds churn, rain pours, and winds lash, ripping me away. But I weather the images back toward the truck. I thumb the cross’s folds through each wet gust and slick of mud so that, by the time I reach Kai, I can turn the ignition and say, with confidence, to him, to you, and to myself, “Yes, I’ll be okay.”
Matthew Torralba Andrews is a queer writer of mixed Filipino descent. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Apogee Journal, South Carolina Review, BULL, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. He has received support from the Tin House Writers Workshop and the Community of Writers Fiction Workshop. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University and lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he is at work on a story collection.
