The Third Floor Window
During my sophomore year at Meridian State, our Communications professor assigned a group project: create a short film. Each group had to pick a unique theme, and my team, Team...
During my sophomore year at Meridian State, our Communications professor assigned a group project: create a short film. Each group had to pick a unique theme, and my team, Team...
The engine of our battered service van coughed its last breath just as the coastal road gave way to the town’s main strip. It was the third week of February,...
Aunt Rosa came to stay with us in our creaking old house on Acacia Street that sweltering August. She was finishing her doctorate in Manila, but the summer break brought...
In the sweltering heat of an August night, Friday the 13th, sleep eluded me. I lay in my narrow bed, listening to the ceaseless drone of cicadas through the thin...
The day we moved into the Cascade House, the truck got stuck on the gravel drive, and my father laughed it off as a bad omen. I was sixteen then,...
The house we moved into in 2014 was a fresh start, a testament to resilience after the old one had been lost to a fire that had taken everything but...
In the autumn of 1994, my mother and I moved into a two-bedroom flat on the fourth floor of a pre-war building in the city. The place had a musty...
My primary school, St. Aldric’s Academy, perched on a hill above the old mill town of Greyhollow, was a sprawling Victorian relic that had once been a cholera hospital. By...
I never believed in the word ‘gift’ until the summer I spent in the coastal town of Port Blossom. My name is Mira, and I had taken a temporary position...
In the autumn of 1987, my mother and I left our small coastal town for the sprawling, rain-slicked capital. It was a sixteen-hour bus ride, and I spent most of...
The old farmhouse had been in our family for three generations, but by the time my sister Lena came to stay, it was already groaning under the weight of decay....
It was the autumn of 2008, and the small coastal town of Duncaster had settled into its quiet routine. I was twelve, and my mother, a marine biologist, had taken...
I grew up in a small, one-story house at the back of a compound in a city that never truly slept. Our house was a gift from an old landlady,...
It was the first Sunday of November, and the air had that sharp, pre-winter bite that made the old farmhouse feel even more hollow. My grandmother, Nan, had sent me...
It was the summer we all learned to keep our windows shut at night, not for the heat, but for the thin, keening sound that drifted from the green house...
I had been living in my grandmother’s house for four years, a sprawling Victorian relic that creaked and groaned like an old sailor. We were a full house: my parents,...
The first week at the Amihan Grand Hotel passed in a haze of jet lag and the humid embrace of Cebu. I’d chosen this hotel for its proximity to the...
My grandmother always said that the old house we lived in was a sieve. It let things in, she’d whisper, and sometimes it let things out. I didn’t understand her...
The morning sun poured through the lace curtains, casting a honeyed glow across the linoleum floor of our small kitchen. I was nine, and the house on Cedar Lane was...
The sun was a pale smear behind the sawtooth ridges of the Cordillera when my father and eldest brother, Mang Enrique, left for the weekly market in the lowland town...
I’ve always been a pragmatic person. Ghosts, spirits, the supernatural—those were things for campfire tales and cheap horror movies, not for my orderly life. That changed three years ago, during...
The house had never felt so vast. With my sister in the hospital, my parents’ presence gone, and the silence like a held breath, the walls seemed to expand, swallowing...
Eight years had passed since I first saw the thing in the mango grove, but the memory remained as sharp as the broken glass that once littered our driveway. We...
In the sweltering summer of 1967, in the dusty farming town of San Isidro, the Ramos family mourned the passing of their patriarch, Don Alejandro. He had been a stern...
Listening to the woods...
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