Philippine Speculative Fiction (11 page)

By then, Oscar had flourished somewhat, his leaves glossy with nutrients. Occasionally, small butterflies would rest with him before continuing their search for prettier gardens, and at night,
the moths hid from hungry bats by lurking behind his leaves. His daughter had at one time climbed onto the windowsill with him and planted an earthworm in his pot of soil, and Oscar welcomed its
friendly intrusion with relatively plant-like mirth.

“Why is she so dirty, Yaya? Did you let her out into the garden?” Oscar’s wife shrieked. She was very rarely home these days, eliciting the sympathies of friends and neighbors,
so adept at it that she gave up her previous job of selling soap in favor of selling tears. The maid, young and new and idle as she was in a house without both her bosses, had taken to letting the
small child loose in the garden while she went neighboring, exchanging chatter with the maids of other households. Oscar would, somehow, sense a deep looming loneliness, for as a plant all things
around him grew more apprehensive, the stillness never betraying signs of life. Ever so often his daughter would come into the house and feed herself handfuls of mushed banana on the windowsill
with him, as if feebly aware of his transformation. She said nothing, for she had always been a quiet child; unnervingly so, from birth, and had only learned to speak when forced to in the special
school she went to before. When she took a nip at one of his leaves or dug a few of her fingers into the soil, Oscar would recollect, briefly, how her stillness disturbed and saddened him, and also
feel a kind of delicious warmth that his former internal organs and human capabilities had denied him. But now he understood her predilection and they would sit together in silence, weighed down
with unknowing, mutual affection.

ALL THE MONEY ran out within months. The comfort of money was a false security, and without Oscar, his wife knew she would be reduced to nothing in a matter of weeks. She
became a fixture at the police precinct and local radio stations, pleading into the mic for a husband she secretly wished would not return, and a daughter she openly used to gather pity. Oscar
would recognize her voice, bristling with the strange residual human emotion he knew was guilt. Whatever it was that had remained of the human Oscar in his plantly incarnation struggled against his
cellulose skin, and as it rained again that night, he was awash with regret. A great pungent pain surged through him like a current, resting on his leaves that were closest to the soil, burned and
soon felt alien, like they were no longer a part of him, a series of dead extremities that, as dawn broke, sloughed off of him like a dead shell.

OSCAR FOUND NO relief when the sun finally came out; the maid had come up to the plant on the windowsill to splash it with half a
tabo
of water as she did every
morning, and discovered earthy bills pressed among the newly moistened soil. She backed off a couple of steps, saw that a handful of them had made it to the floor, and in her grand astonishment
could only think of screaming, “
Ate! Ate! Ate!
” in varying pitches, and scurrying in small circles as if her shock had confined her in that small a space.

“What in god’s green graces are you screaming about?” Oscar’s wife rattled back, but the maid was not to be silenced. Emboldened in the face of startling peculiarity, she
tugged and pulled— and were it physically possible, thrashed her Ate about, babbling and pointing—Oscar’s wife soon pieced the signals together, and reacted similarly, albeit with
more screaming.

AND THAT WAS how the nationwide search for Oscar was abruptly discontinued. The sorrowful wife declared that she had to, unfortunately, give up, and returned home with a heavy
heart. She was careful of all outward appearances, and had the maid swear on her life to secrecy. The money tree was to be their salvation, however withered and ugly it was, and so greedily guarded
that they sought no expertise on its strange manner of shedding money—actual cash, approvable, non-forfeited bills—caring naught about myths and legends and the implications of an
actual money-bearing plant. This money tree was a gift, and that was all it was.

Oscar shared in this disbelief, a faint idea of it, but he derived no pleasure in this new ability. He found himself constantly and indiscriminately sprayed with pesticide, its irritating
bitterness tainting the smoothness of his daily nourishment. His peaceful tenant, the earthworm, whom Oscar had grown very fond of, was murdered one day with pliers, cast aside with his lesser
leaves, whose only fault were not being as vividly green as the others. The butterflies and moths stopped visiting him, finding their feet and tongues burned by the persistence of chemicals; and
now not even aphids or ants dared come near, whose company Oscar would have readily welcomed. By now it seemed that the only person who shared in his distress was his little daughter, who let out a
whimper as she took the pieces of the dead earthworm and buried them in the garden. Nevertheless, Oscar would continue to shed, as if on schedule, twice a month, and at times his wife would pause
in her retail therapy to harbor thoughts of this strange schedule as being eerily similar to when her lost husband would hand over his paychecks. It was at these times that she was at the very
verge of realizing, somehow, that her husband and the plant were connected in some way, but it was too fanciful a thought to dwell over and she would quickly forget, immersed too devotedly to the
tending of things she thought actually mattered, like a new paint job so that the house could stand out from the hovels her neighbors called houses, or to transform the garden into a veranda where
she could host friends.

Oscar, meanwhile, found himself dozing further and further on into the sentient indifference of plants. The movement of humans seemed quicker to him now, their voices a shrill and steady thrum
delivered to him in waves. Hours were minutes to him, and everything else a haze; the only things slow or still enough were objects that had remained as such for longer than he had been a plant:
the house, the furniture, the garden; the prickling of new grass, the grim intensity of the acacia in the neighbor’s yard. The only things that mattered now, were the welcome heat of the sun,
the acknowledgement of rain, and the consistency of air. Once or twice though, he would come to, and almost regain that same platform of consciousness, of being, of human-ness, but it would be gone
in an instant, swift as a passing thought. He grew more oblivious to the growing tensions at home, which in the rare times that he sensed, he chose to overlook. He would only catch on, almost
readily, whenever his daughter touched him, stroked a leaf, or moved around the soil with her fingers. She could not visit him as often as she pleased, as the tending, care, and harvesting of the
miraculous money tree would be left to Oscar’s wife and the maid, exclusively. Whenever she tried, she would be pushed away, led outside into the garden to occupy herself with other plants.
On rare visits, in the dead of night, she would manage to speak to him, a word or two, and Oscar despaired at the gift of sentience, for he was not able to hear, only feel in low, significant
vibrations in the air, what his daughter was trying to say.

TWICE A MONTH, Oscar’s wife and the maid would take the plant into the kitchen, and seal all the doors and windows, and begin harvesting. Oscar would be roused from his
reverie, fully conscious, accustomed to the gathering of money; it was the only time they were ever gentle with him. On these days his wife and the maid would talk about the bills, renovations, and
new things to replace the old things—a new television, a new fridge, perhaps even a new air-conditioning unit. Oscar would recall conversations like this from a time that seemed to him so
very long ago, from which he was always excluded because of his weakness with calculations and aversion to the luxury of new things. They were all just words to him now, a dull thrumming in the air
as they went about their business and it would only be a matter of time before they set him back by his peaceful windowsill and he would drop out of their callow world once more. It was something
that he could live with; after all, did they not only bother him twice a month? Did they not always return him to his place by the window, with the sun and the rain? Would he not always forget
every time he was not in it, eventually, as plants care so little about remembering? It was an arrangement that benefited everyone except the little girl, however, and in the flurry of new
excitements she was no longer the priority of the house and the people within. Her mother would leave it up to the maid to care for her, and the maid, giddy with her new freedom, abandoned her
duties to cavort with the water boys and
istambays
of the neighborhood, and it could easily be theorized that one day she would run off with one of them, never to return, telling her
grandchildren wild stories about plants. The little girl would only be fed whenever the two older women would remember to eat, or cook, or bring home a meal, and that was not very often, as they
would instead feel nourished and content by merely buying new things. At times the little girl would venture a taste of the mulch that had accumulated in Oscar’s clay pot while Oscar, aghast
of course, with as much of it as he could recall, sat by, with nothing to even feed his own daughter.

The day came when Oscar’s wife discovered the little girl trying to eat Oscar’s precious leaves, and she flew into such a panic that she pinched the girl’s cheek until it drew
blood. But the girl held dangerously on to the plant, throwing her thin little arms around the pot and thrusting her head against the stem as if to seek protection from beneath it.

“You little
bruha
! You’re going to break it!” shrieked the girl’s mother. The commotion brought Oscar to his senses, the heaving and shaking and the confusion of
what he knew to be voices, and a constriction around his being that he recognized as his daughter’s. It did not take long for him to understand, as much as a plant possibly could, and for a
moment he thought he was to become human again with such a rage streaming through his boughs that he felt inclined enough to lash out, to protect the little girl from his wife, the maid, the world,
and he could feed her again, care for her again. But there was nothing, and he was still a plant, motionless, thrashing inwardly to no avail until all the struggle around him ceased and all was
silent again. Later, he would sense the salt of his daughter’s tears as they ran deep into the soil, the price of a wish fulfilled, the iron taste of it as it spread swiftly through his
roots, his stem, his leaves. He thought then that he should not forget, as he soaked up the bitter memory of this girl with the vacant eyes, and so with all his strength he strained against his
stillness, but there were no hands to reach out, no voice to speak with.

After a week of heavy rain, it was time for Oscar to shed again; and this was done by him with much discomfort as it required of him to shed limbs. He would shed at the break of dawn, and the
women of the house would harvest at breakfast: too early and the money would crumble into soil. Somehow it felt different this time, and there was no sharp pain of his leaves drying up and falling,
no: this time there was a sweet tingling between his leaves and boughs and soon they grew heavy with a new borne weight. Before light, his daughter who had managed to sneak out and visit him, found
the strangest little fruit on the plant by the window, all in different stages of growth: some minute and edged with pleasantly green petals, some as large as grapes. She took one to put in her
mouth, crush with her teeth, and the sweetness of it led to another, and another until all traces of the fruit Oscar bore was no more.

Soon he would remember nothing but the dawns in which he bore it; the rest of the time it would feel like a deep sleep stirred by faint dreams of faraway movements and voices. The deeper he
slept, the less money he shed, the more fruit he bore. It did not take long for Oscar’s wife to notice, blaming it on the expensive brand of pesticide or the lack of sunlight and later, the
maid of stealing, and the child of eating the bills until there was no one left to blame, eventually persuading her to return to selling beauty projects and to forego the renovations to a further
date. Little did anyone notice however, the fruit that grew in place of the money, for it grew in the dark, in the middle of the night, whenever the daughter would cosme. And every time, whenever
she visited him, her speech grew more constant, her fingers quicker. She would now dare to wait until the fruit ripened before picking, and if she caught a stirring in one of the rooms she would
hide them to eat later in the day. They loosened the joints, put strength into her bones, and over the course of a month her eyes began to harbor signs of life, darting from one object to another,
her stares a little less vacant every day.

At times, she would speak quietly to him about plants. Oscar could not understand a word, but the feel of her breath comforted him. Everything was a dream now, vacant, distant dreams that meant
nothing to the great deep slumber of plants, where there were no memories, or thoughts of the future. But she would speak to him still, turn the soil until it was moist and pleasant and soft.

One morning—barely morning, as it was dark still—as a slight fog hung over the city, Oscar felt his daughter climb onto the windowsill; an uneven shudder, and a warm, faint breeze
that was her breath as she spoke to him again, from so far away it might have been the wind passing through the leaves of another tree. With the last that remained of Oscar—the man, the
worker, the father—held rapt, as she told him stories of men that turned into plants, feeling his soil turned again and again by the knowing warmth of small hands. Slowly, he drifted farther
and farther away, settling forever into a blissful sleep, into a netherworld of only the permanence of plants, their faintness of being.