Song of the Mango and Other New Myths by Cruz-Borja Vida

Author:Cruz-Borja, Vida [Cruz-Borja, Vida]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Publisher: Ateneo de Manila University Press
Published: 2023-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

The Perfect Boy and the Fan Girl

She feverishly writes up her perfect boy in her notebook with a fancy fountain pen and the ink from the mangkukulam. She has read enough manga, watched enough anime, and played enough Japanese dating simulations to know what she wants.

His slender fingers caress her hair the moment she finishes.

She tilts her head back, gets no chance to exclaim over how solid and there he is—or how wicked his smile, how his half-open white shirt defines his shoulders and reveals his broad chest. (She even wrote in sadness in the corners of his smile, just to add a mysterious air about him.) She does, however, get to marvel over how soft his lips are, feeling at last like a shoujo manga heroine.

He keeps track of her period, has dinner ready when she returns from meetings with clients, picks out clothes with her when shopping, watches bad romantic comedies with her, entertains her friends but doesn’t flirt back, massages her back precisely after three hours of her hunching over her keyboard have passed, and beta reads her drafts of the cheesy Tagalog romance novels that provide their supplementary income. He is always clean, well-groomed, and only goes out in thoroughly washed and immaculately ironed button-down polos and black jeans.

She gushes, “You’re perfect!” often and forbids him from touching only two things: her notebook and inkwell.

He says one morning, in the middle of reading a new draft featuring a goody two-shoes schoolgirl and an inked bad boy, that he finds tattoos fascinating.

She is alarmed. She insists she likes him the way he is.

He calms her down and asks why he cannot get one.

Her words fail her. She forbids a second thing from him while leaving to meet a client and hates herself for sounding just like her mother.

He sidles to a tattoo parlor when she leaves for an appointment at the nail salon, but every needle breaks over his unblemished skin.

She asks him how his day went when she comes home.

He answers, “Fine.”

She tells him she has two business trips coming up in the next two weeks—for site inspections and interviews, she hopes he understands and won’t be too sad being here all by himself.

“Don’t worry,” he says.

She goes to bed troubled. She gives him the second of her two cellphones on the morning she leaves for her first business trip, the number of her first phone already saved in the directory.

He goes to more tattoo parlors over the course of two weeks until he’s been to every one within a two-kilometer radius of their apartment, but each time, the needles snap in two and his skin remains flawless—in fact, after his final visit to a seedy parlor along EDSA, he trudges into a bar-bookstore and slumps at the bar. He cheers up a little while chatting and having a drink with a nice girl with an inky braid and a book of Greek myths, however.

She calls and asks how he is and why there are voices in the background.

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