My BFF's Aunt is a Monster

I want to write scary again, soon.

I am in the thick of revising (nay, rewriting) my historical novel, and I keep wanting to put ghosts in. Alas, its plot won't have any in the way of ghosts unless I put in a nightmare scene.

Anyway, about this story itch.

I keep thinking back to this trip I made with my girlfriends between high school and college. What if my BFF's aunt was a monster?

Mmm.

Friday the 13th

Are you superstitious about Friday the 13th?

I'm not. But when I was growing up in the Philippines, my family was superstitious about some other things.

For example:

Don't sweep uncooked rice or you will sweep good fortune out the door. (As a child, if I spilled uncooked rice, I had to pick up every grain.)

If you bite your tongue, someone is thinking of you. Name a letter and a person's name starting with that letter; they are thinking of you. (This is a fun game I do with my kids now.)

Jump at midnight on New Year's Eve and you will grow taller. (Didn't work too well for me.)

Serve round fruits and long food (like noodles) on New Year's Eve to ensure prosperity for the coming year.

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Are YOU superstitious?

A Grave Tradition

No pumpkins, no trick-or-treating, no costumes.

Halloween in the Philippines, as our family celebrated it when I was a young girl, was called "All Soul's Day" or Todos Los Santos on October 31st.

The first scary thing about the holiday was...the traffic jam created by all these cars lined up to go into the cemetery, Loyola Cemetery, where my mom's parents were buried. I remember the smell of candles and garlands of this fragrant flower called Sampaguita which vendors hawked along the way.

Once we got in to the cemetery, it was time to settle in for the rosary (I was Catholic then, LDS now). Usually one of the elder aunts recited it for us to follow along. It was really hard to concentrate because...

...sometimes I would see a hand rise up from behind the grave markers.



(photo by yveslecoq on Flickr)

Well, I imagined one...

It was also hard to concentrate on prayers because all around us was a big party.

Music. Loud laughter. Food spread on top of people's graves. The whole place blazed with lights from candles.

I thought then how rude of these people to not be solemn this day commemorating the dead.

But now that I think back, perhaps it was good to be celebrating the living, too!

***
If you want to see how I celebrate Halloween today, come by my scary photo post (that needs a caption) on my blog "Pink Ink".

The room down the hallway

When I was eight years old, my family moved to an old two-story house in the San Beda area of Manila, Philippines. It was crafted in the Spanish style, with a tile roof and a stucco stairway that led from the driveway to the second floor. My father worked for the government and made a decent living, but apparently it was not enough because I remember moving from rental to rental until this house. It could also be that my father never got along with neighbors.

It was a huge house, the kind that a child could happily get lost in. Our widowed landlady lived on the ground floor and operated a store; we lived on the upper floor. There was a spacious living room with a hardwood floor and two large picture windows that looked out onto the other houses. Saturdays, the maids would polish the floor with coconut husk and floor wax until it gleamed. We didn't have any furniture in it, which suited us children just fine. I would lay on the floor next to the window and watch dust motes float in the sunlight. Next to the foyer, there was a room rented out to an Iranian student named Irwan whom my brother, sister and I would tease: "Irwan! Two! Three!"

We occupied the kitchen and the room next to it, both of which lay just past the living room. It was a very interesting sleeping arrangement. My family (my parents and three kids) slept on one mattress on the floor. I can't remember if the maids slept on it, too, but logic says otherwise. I mean, is there a mattress big enough for eight people? I don't know, but I remember all of us sleeping in that room, with a urinal to use in the middle of the night tucked in one corner.

Like I said, very interesting.

Past the kitchen was a hallway which had more bedrooms, most of which were unoccupied during the year or two we lived there. We set up the sewing machine in the first one on the left. Through that bedroom window, I could see the top of a tree and into the dirt, fenced compound of the neighbor whose dog chased and bit my brother. Across from this bedroom, there was the bathroom, with old-fashioned spigots and a tiny window that let in little light.

At the end of the hallway, there was a little room with a door that opened like an accordion.

Now this is where it gets even more interesting.

Someone told us, in that room, a nurse had committed suicide.

I didn't know if that rumor was true, or the product of someone's imagination. But as an eight year old, I believed that with all my heart. When I went down the dimly lit hallway, my eyes were riveted to that door, half-expecting it to be open and then:

A corpse in a nurse's dress would be swinging from a rope at the rafters.

Just thinking about that, these many years later, gives me goose bumps all over again.