The Hollow Fruit

The summer I turned twelve, my grandmother gave me a small, carved wooden box. Inside was a single, dried seed the color of a bruised plum. ‘Plant this under the old acacia,’ she said, her eyes clouded with something I couldn’t name. ‘It will grant you a friend.’ I was a lonely child, desperate for companionship, so I did as she asked. I buried the seed deep, watered it with my tears, and whispered a plea into the dark soil.

That night, I dreamt of a girl with hair like spun moonlight and eyes like empty wells. She called herself Ani, and she promised to be my friend forever. When I woke, I found a small, white flower blooming on the acacia, a species I had never seen before. My grandmother smiled and said, ‘She has come.’ But my mother, seeing the flower, turned pale and immediately called my grandmother’s sister, a woman known for her sharp tongue and older knowledge. She stared at me for a long time, her gaze making my skin prickle, and then she muttered, ‘The veil is thin for this one.’ She gave me a small pouch of herbs and told me to wear it always, but I lost it that very afternoon while climbing the acacia.

From that day, I began to perceive the world differently. It started as a subtle unease in certain places—a cold spot in my bedroom, a faint, sour smell in the kitchen, a persistent feeling of being watched. Then, the sensitivity deepened. I could feel the residue of intense emotions: joy, sorrow, rage—as if the air itself was saturated with them. I would walk into a room and know that a bitter argument had taken place there hours before.

By the time I was sixteen, the true horror began. I started to see the dead. Not as ghosts or specters, but as glimpses of people who were about to die. The first was my great-uncle. I saw him standing at the foot of my bed, his face gray and hollow, his eyes fixed on some distant point. The next morning, word came that he had suffered a heart attack in his sleep. Then it was a neighbor, a young woman who had always smiled at me. I saw her walking along the roadside, but she was translucent, and her smile was a rictus. Two days later, she was killed in a car accident.

I tried to block these visions, to scream at them, to ignore them, but they came with relentless frequency. I saw my cousin drowning before the family trip to the lake; I saw my schoolteacher struck by a sudden illness; I saw a stranger on the bus with a bullet hole in his forehead. Each vision was a prelude to a real death, a horrible, private knowledge that I could not share. My family grew wary of me. My mother began to burn herbs in the house, and my father, a man of few words, stopped meeting my eyes.

The worst, however, was seeing the ‘not-quite-dead.’ These were the souls that lingered, tethered to the living world by unfinished business or sheer denial. They were not malevolent, but their presence was a constant assault on my sanity. They would mimic the living, sitting beside me in a chair, standing in a corner, their lips moving soundlessly. I could see through them, faintly, but they were solid enough to cast a shadow. One such presence, an old man in a tattered raincoat, followed me for weeks. He would stand outside my window, his mouth open in a silent scream, his hands clawing at the glass.

In June of that year, my university organized an outreach program in a remote mountain village called Sitio Lindog. We were to distribute school supplies to the children. We stayed in the house of a local barangay official, a kind woman named Aling Rosa. Her home was a modest structure of bamboo and nipa, perched on the edge of a ravine. The first night, as I lay on my sleeping mat, I felt a familiar chill. The room was filled with a presence. I turned on my flashlight and saw a woman standing in the corner, her face half eaten away by rot, her eyes glowing like embers. She was pointing a long, bony finger at the ceiling.

I was terrified, but I felt a strange compulsion to follow her gesture. Above me, the bamboo rafters were stained with something dark and viscous. I crept out of my room and into the main hall. The entire house was suffused with a sickly green light. In the center of the hall, the floorboards seemed to pulse, and I could hear a faint, rhythmic tapping from below. I pressed my ear to the wood, and a chorus of whispers rose up, overlapping, desperate, and hungry. They were speaking in a language I did not know, but their intent was clear: they wanted me to join them.

I fled the house, running into the night. The air was thick with the smell of decay. I stumbled through a banana grove and fell into a creek. When I looked up, I saw them—dozens of figures, all as gray and hollow as the ones I had seen before. They stood at the edge of the water, their eyes fixed on me. One, a child with a missing jaw, held out a small, bruised fruit. I backed away, tripping on a root, and scrambled up the bank. I ran until my lungs burned, until I reached the main road, where the headlights of a jeepney blinded me.

I returned to the house after dawn, shaken and sodden. Aling Rosa took one look at me and clucked. ‘You have seen them, haven’t you? The Hollow Fruit bearers?’ She explained that the village had been cursed years ago, after a drought. The people had prayed to the old gods for rain, and in return, they had offered a bargain. The gods sent rain, but they also sent a blight that turned the fruits hollow, and with the hollow fruits came the hungry spirits. Those who ate the fruit became the vessels for the spirits, but some, like me, were born with a connection to the other side. ‘You have the sight,’ she said. ‘It is a burden, but also a gift.’ She gave me a cup of bitter tea and told me to leave before nightfall.

But the spirits would not let me go. As the jeepney took me away from the village, I saw them lining the roadside, hundreds of hollow-eyed figures, their mouths moving in a silent chant. They followed me all the way back to the city. They are with me now, as I write this. They stand in the corners of my room, they sit on my bed, they watch me from the mirror. I have tried to exorcise them, to cleanse myself, but nothing works. The seed I planted has grown into a tree that bears only hollow fruit, and I am its sole keeper. I have become the bridge between the worlds, and the dead will never let me cross back. My name is Lira, and this is my story. But it is not over. I see their faces now, pressing close, and I know that soon, I will become one of them.