THE LISTENING POST

PORFIRIO MATEO WOKE before the sun breached the jungle canopy, his breath visible in the chill, rising upward into the dimness of the ceiling above. The cot on which she slept, a narrow iron frame with a burlap mattress, creaked as he sat up, joints stiff from sleep, eyes blinking from an overlay of dream. He lit the kerosene lamp on the table next to the cot with a match struck against a floorboard. His quarters weren’t much more than a box of timber and corrugated tin nailed together by men who’d since moved on to other camps on other mountains. He poured water from a pitcher into a tin washbasin on the table, splashed his face, and dried it with a towel. Dew clung to the inside of the windowpanes, blurring the jungle outside into a watercolor of green and shadow. High above the trees, the early morning’s gleam had weight—pale, ghostly, with the broken silhouettes of treetops against streaks of pink light trailing along the shadow of the far hills. From the kitchen shed, fifty paces down the gravel path, came the smell of coffee roasting over woodfire. Someone had started the brew early. But—how odd—there was another smell in the air this fine morning. Was that jackfruit, maybe? Mango? He pulled on his boots, laced them tight, and stepped outside. The jungle rose to meet him, layer on layer, damp green and dripping, the vines hanging on the last margins of the night. Below him, past the barbed wire perimeter fence, volcanic mist curled along the edges of the caldera. Farther down past the mist and the trees, the lake was grey and mirror flat.

The listening post squatted above the ridge. Officially, it was American—an afterbirth of the War with Spain, filed under the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey but cross-listed in Manila under three separate administrative bureaus in exile, none of which acknowledged the others. The station’s stated purpose: to investigate and monitor the seismic temperament of Taal Volcano and its surrounding caldera. Unofficially, it was a jungle perch for the interception of stray radio transmissions, barometric anomalies, and whatever else might drift in from the ether, the lake, or the stratosphere.

The eruption of 1911 had reshaped the land into strange, broken contours for miles around. Porfirio was fifteen when the volcano loosed its long-held spleen. For weeks, the sky had dulled into the color of oxidized copper, and ash fell in slow spirals, coating rooftops, banana leaves, and the backs of fleeing carabaos. He remembered the sound the beasts made the when the fissure finally split open— the high, panicked, almost human keening. The ground-shuddering explosion tore the dawn apart. Ember-wraiths spiraled upward into a roiling ash-pillar that tendrilled into the clouds. He remembered the church bell in Mendez-Nuñez swinging on its own, as if rung by invisible hands. Now, ten years later, he has returned as a technician contracted by the Americans to maintain the seismic listening post they’d bolted together above the lake.

Nobody remembered what the station was before the Americans came. The story was that the outpost began as a Spanish redoubt; another version of the story claimed it was a Jesuit observatory, with mercury barometers, brass sextants, and telescopes trained on fumaroles in hopes of divine portent. Either way, the Yanks stayed longer than planned, seduced by the volcano’s unpredictability and the strange signals that sometimes bled through the radio and seismic equipment. The new geological expedition arrived with a caravan of Filipino mounted constabulary and the certainty that the volcano could be quantified. The bullock wagons hauled mechanical novelties the natives had never seen before: oscillographs and seismographs in padded crates, barometers wrapped in waxed cloth, and a prototype Audion regenerative receiver, its single, glass-covered tuning dial rimmed in burnished brass. A rotating cast of island hands—carpenters, porters, ex-insurrectos with simmering grievances—had refurbished the station using surplus U.S. Army crates, the rusted remains of a Jesuit mission, and a shipment of experimental antennae originally destined for dirigible communication but rerouted to the post by a bureaucratic hiccup involving two government agencies and a drunken quartermaster supposedly on furlough. The whole assemblage looked less like science than séance: wires strung across the jungle canopy and the brush, antennas jutting skyward, their tips blinking red in a rhythm that was, or so Porfirio thought, almost sentient. Around the outpost the jungle breathed in mist and memory, a green cusp between revolution and repose. Children chased wild boars through the underbrush, reenacting the mythic cry—“Tagâ, Itáy!”—that gave the ridge its name, Tagaytay.

From down the path came now the nasal thrum of conversation—uninflected, flamboyant, each syllable more a unit of exchange than meaning. The Yanks were up earlier than usual this morning. They took their coffee -- and whatever they could scrounge for breakfast – around a mess table under the corrugated tin awning of the kitchen shack, where the foliage held back just enough to let a little light in. Already the jungle itself was awake—not in a single glorious burst, but in strata: a lightening of the sky, a gradual brightening of green hues, a crescendo of birdsong and snaps, wings brushing leaves, legs too numerous to count moving among the dew-moist leaves. Under the awning, condensed milk slid languidly from a punctured tin can into Dr. Rollo Harbinger’s cup, where sweet, steaming brown coffee soon began to bubble thickly. Dr. Vincent Gloom was mincing ripe mangoes with a huge Bowie knife, presumably for a breakfast sandwich of some sort, whilst surly Lieutenant Artemus Dwell -- mustache tips waxed into curlicues, a .45 caliber automatic Colt pistol holstered at his hip -- sipped his brew from a cup that smelled scandalously of bourbon.

“Por-feeeeeee—rio!” called Harbinger, his voice stretching across the camp as Porfirio descended the gravel path. “I trust the night didn’t conspire against your rest?”

Porfirio nodded, brushing a fat leech from his sleeve. “Rested enough, Doctor. Though the chill had a mind of its own.”

“Y’all feel that tremor last night?” Dwell said, sitting on a camp chair that had lost its back support. “Little twitch in the ground -- like a dog dreaming of rabbits.”

“Third tremor this week,” said Harbinger. “She’s getting twitchy.”

“Doc,” Dwell said, digging around for a cigarette from a tin marked “Medical Supplies,” “this whole island’s weird and twitchy. Even the bugs here don’t just bite—they take turns. One gets your ankle, next gets your neck. It’s almost like they’re taking turns.”

“Mosquitoes flood to any warm patch of skin,” Gloom said as he chomped on his mango sandwich, one leg draped over the other. “They bite because you’re warm. Because you’re here. Nothing weird about that.”

Dwell, striking a match, scratched at his forearm, where a welt was rising. “Well,” he said, puffing at his cigarette, “you ask me, you can’t get any more personal.”

Porfirio took a tin cup from the bamboo rack, lifted the coffee pot from the woodstove, and poured himself a cup. The coffee was thick, almost syrup, as bitter as the earth from which it came. The Americans had theirs with condensed milk, stirring with the same spoons they used to check for centipedes in their boots. Conversation was minimal—just the occasional grunt or a muttered observation about the heat and humidity, or as was the case this morning, bugs.

“The jungle has eyes, as the local say,” said Harbinger with a grin. “Just ask Porfirio here.”

“Indeed,” Porfirio said, sipping coffee. “Many eyes.”

Like many Filipinos, Porfirio had learned the habit of nodding while thinking otherwise around white men who wore guns and khaki in the jungle. One of his uncles had died in the Tagalog war against the Gringos, shot through the lungs with a .30-40 Krag–Jørgensen by a man named Captain Elmer Whitmore, who later opened a cigar shop in Ohio. His grandmother still spat when she heard English. And yet, he liked them—these three specimens of America’s export-grade optimism; not loved, not trusted, but liked, the way one might like a brand name repeated often enough to become familiar. They were absurd, arrogant, and occasionally kind. Harbinger had given him a book on electromagnetics, which he read twice. Dwell, despite his bourbon breath and paranoia, had taught him poker and had once wept while describing a baseball game he’d seen in St. Louis. During the Great War, American administrators had trained natives in technical fields to serve colonial infrastructure in place of the white technicians who had gone off to fight the Huns. Porfirio had studied engineering briefly at the University of the Philippines in Manila, drilling into spark-gap telegraphy and vacuum-tube circuitry before the colony’s funding dried up and the Yanks decided they preferred local technicians who could be trained on-site. They treated him like a curiosity: a tailless gugu with a knack for wires. He had modified the station’s Audion receiver -- just slightly: a coil rewound, a capacitor swapped, the grid leak adjusted with a pencil stub --just enough to pick up stray signals; enough, perhaps, to let the ether speak more freely.

And speak freely it did. For days now, they’d noticed strange behaviors in the instruments—pauses where there should have been rhythm, clicks where there should have been silence. There were mysterious spikes and dips in the barometric readings, as if the mountain were breathing through a punctured lung. The seismograph, once steady as an athlete’s pulse, had begun sketching erratic tremors that no one could trace to tectonic cause. Even the Audion seemed to stray, dissolving into bursts of noises that sounded like half-formed syllables of human speech. The first time Porfirio heard it, he dropped a coffee mug and gawked at the instrument. The voice was female, maybe, though it had the tonal ambiguity of someone humming through a fan. The second time, Harbinger and Gloom heard it too, but they didn’t hear a voice. What their logic-trained ears heard were the death-throes of a switchboard—some government-issue apparatus wheezing its last through a tangle of monsoon-drenched wires.

“Well, gentlemen,” Harbinger announced presently, tapping a spoon twice against his cup. “Time to hear what the volcano has to say today.”

So, out from underneath the awning went the Yanks, boots damp from jungle dew, coffee half-drunk, eyes twitching from the low-frequency hum that’d been building since dawn, since before dawn, since before memory. Harbinger was already halfway down the gravel path toward the instrument hut before Gloom could gather his mango sandwich, which was presently leaking heaps of bright yellow pulp along the path. Porfirio followed, steam curling from the cup in his hand. Dwell lingered at the mess table long enough to tip a flask over his cup with the stealth of a man who’d dealt with flasks in army barracks, church services, and train compartments.

“I’ll check on our constables,” he said. “Make sure they’re guarding more than just their hangovers.”

“Be gentle,” Harbinger called back. “They’re not used to guarding a volcano.”

The instrument hut had once been a chicken coop. The corrugated roof still bore the faint outlines of talon-scratches and a rusted pulley system that had, in some previous incarnation, hoisted feed sacks -- or perhaps the occasional dissenting rooster. Now it housed a tangle of wires, barometers, oscillographs, seismographs, the Audion receiver, and a ticker tape machine that disgorged cryptic strings of numbers that no one could quite explain but which Harbinger insisted were “statistically significant.” The walls were lined with maps—topographic, seismic, astrological—and pinned with yellowing requisition slips. Harbinger stepped over a coil of wire and trudged over to the calibration table, his boots thumping heavily against the floorboards. Porfirio set his coffee down on a shelf already crowded with unlabeled manila folders. He flicked a switch on the receiver, and the machine sputtered to life, the static blooming like a breath against glass.

“They must’ve packed this in sawdust,” Harbinger said, hunched over the calibration table, wheedling a filament to glow inside a Bakelite casing. He tapped it once with the butt of a screwdriver. It blinked, then held. Gloom, cross-legged on the floor, was threading copper wire through a conduit that had been colonized by a family of ants. He blew gently into it and a few of the family staggered out, dazed. “Diplomacy with a big stick,” he announced triumphantly. “Old American strategy,” he winked at Porfirio. Outside, the wind had settled into a steady breath, brushing the cogon grass and the leaves in long, whispering strokes, while inside the shack the men began to fall into the quiet momentum of habit, each absorbed in the slow, gritty labor of getting the machines up and running. The voltmeter gave a faint tick while Porfirio leaned into the receiver, one hand on the gain knob, the other steadying the headset against his ear. He tuned the dial back and forth, listening for the shift. And there it was again: a staccato of clicks, then a long, dragging purr -- neither static nor code, but something in between, like breath caught in wire. Porfirio froze, hand hovering on the dial. He adjusted the gain, but the signal only deepened in its ambiguity, sounding more and more like a toddler learning to speak.

“Doctor Harbinger,” he said, not turning. “Relay’s misbehaving.”

“Again?” Harbinger grunted from the calibration table, wrist-deep now in a box of resistors. “Which one?”

“The closest, I’d guess. Eastern ridge.”

Gloom glanced up from the conduit, a copper filament curled in his hand like it had questions of its own. “Didn’t we already sweet-talk that one back to life?”

Harbinger straightened, wiped his hands on a rag, and leaned toward the receiver. Porfirio handed him the headset. The clicks had settled into a strange sing-song now—almost melodic, like a Chinese lullaby played backwards.

“Maybe a surge?” Harbinger said, eyes askance, chin tilted toward the ceiling. “Battery hiccup?”

He handed the headset to Gloom, who snorted, “That’s neither surge nor battery hiccup -- with all due respect.”

Porfirio readjusted the gain, and the receiver gave a low hum, almost a whimper, then a torrent of sharp clicks loud enough to make Gloom wince and shed the headset.

“That’s not ours,” Harbinger said, returning the headset to Porfirio. “Not from Manila either.”

“Could be a relay echo,” Porfirio offered. “Bouncing off something damp…”

“I like your optimism,” Gloom said. “But we both know that’s not it, either.”

A brittle titter hopped among the trio. “Must be moisture again, somewhere,” said Harbinger, throwing his hands out in the air. “Or a loose ground. Or just monkeys.”

Porfirio was already reaching for the field kit—pliers, voltmeter, a coil of replacement wire, and the Bowie knife, which the team kept sharpened out of habit than necessity. “I’ll check it,” he said. “If it’s just a frayed contact, I’ll be back right away.”

Gloom stood up, brushing dust from the seat of his pants, “Take a lantern, just in case -- and the red tags. If you need to mark anything.”

Porfirio stepped out of the shack and into the clearing, field kit slung over one shoulder, the morning light catching the fine dust on his boots. He was halfway down the slope when he heard the crunch of boots somewhere behind him. He stopped and turned just in time to see Dwell emerge from the brush, swatting at a mosquito on his neck. His khakis were streaked with mud, pantlegs hiked past his knees, one sleeve rolled, the other unfurled.

“Perimeter’s quiet,” he said, breath short. “Our constables are sitting around playing cards. One of them tried teaching me a game I swear he cooked up right then and there.” Then, curiously, “Where you headed?”

“Nearest relay tower. Eastern ridge.”

“I’d better come with you,” Dwell said, patting the pistol on his hip. “Not so safe out there.”

“Seems you forgot to pull the other sock back on after that bush break,” Profirio said, pointing.

Dwell looked down, blinked, and thought for a moment. “It was slowing me down,” he said dryly.

They left the last tufts of cogon grass behind and slipped beneath the tree line. Suddenly, they were in the jungle, where giant taro leaves and staghorn ferns pressed in on both sides, dimming the daylight to a shadowy green. Overhead, the relay line sagged between poles, the insulators streaked with mildew and dried sap. Dwell tripped on a root, recovered with a flourish, then walked into a low-hanging vine.

“Jungle’s got no respect for rank,” he muttered.

“The jungle – like American democracy – levels every man, Porfirio quipped.

“Is that your go-to line with us Yanks?” Dwell asked with a smirk.

“I apologize,” said Porfirio. “I couldn’t resist the joke.”

The relay tower loomed from the undergrowth like a giant metronome ticking off time in rust. The hundred-foot structure was tethered by guy wires across the wind-scoured bluff. Ceramic insulators, bone-white and faintly luminous in the overcast light, clung to the crossbeams like lichen. The padlocked relay box squatted at the base, humming with stored current. Porfirio opened it with the key and a flathead. The wires were intact, the insulators uncracked, the grounding rod still buried in volcanic soil. He squinted up at the antenna, where a pair of sparrows had nested, their droppings streaking the lower rungs.

“I don’t understand,” Porfirio said. “There’s nothing wrong with it at all, as far as I can tell.”

“Jungle’s reclaiming it,” said Dwell, inspecting the brush the edge of the clearing with a stick. “Give it a year and this’ll be a trellis for orchids.”

Porfirio replaced the lid on the relay box and stood up. “Probably wet with dew,” he said. “Give it an hour and the sun will dry it up.”

They started back down the trail, the tower receding behind them. The jungle closed in on them again, and Porfirio thought—not for the first time—that the real malfunction was usually human. They made their way back through the brush, Dwell swatting at vines with the same stick he’d earlier used to prod vines, now repurposed as a walking aid. His boots slipped twice on the damp trail, once dramatically, once with a distressed grunt.

“Saw a woman,” he said, breath hitching. “Out past the tower. Dressed in white. Long black hair. Just standing there. I looked again and she was gone. Didn’t tell you because I wasn’t sure what I saw.”

Porfirio didn’t stop walking. “My grandmother used to talk about them all the time,” he said. “There are legends about them. Spirits that come out of the jungle. The old folk say you should never follow them into the woods. I never believed all that. You must have seen a local girl. The women around here can be startlingly beautiful.”

Dwell shook his head left to right. “I don’t think that’s what I saw, son.”

Back at the station, Porfirio stepped into the instrument hut, brushed a leaf off his shoulder, and reported to Harbinger. “Relay’s fine,” he said. “I checked everything. No corrosion, no shorts. Just birds.”

By early afternoon the instrument hut had become a furnace. The three men fell into clockwork orbits around their panels. Harbinger flicked the voltmeter’s switch, coaxing a steady readout; Gloom traced the seismogram’s tremors with a pencil. Porfirio rummaged through pegs, valve-pieces, threaded hardware from obscure radio instruments, electronic components of resin and copper that the Great War, in its mad, ever-creative logistics of improvisation, had fashioned in its steel gut and spat out in the post-war years with black smoke and mustard gas. An indio supply runner came with lunch: tins of meat with labels bleached to abstraction, crackers that tasted faintly of mildew and packing straw, and a thermos of coffee whose provenance no one dared trace.

“You notice it stopped?” said Harbinger, spooning a glistening chunk of canned meat into his mouth. “No more noises, right, Porfirio? Soon as Porfirio went up to check the relay, the headset went dead quiet.”

“Mm,” Gloom said, tapping the side of the receiver. “Either our man here fixed it, or he kicked something lose.”

“I didn’t see anything out of place, sir,” Porfirio said. “Everything seemed fine.”

Harbinger glanced at the logbook, then at the ceiling, as if the sound might seep through the rafters. “It was regular, almost patterned.”

“Could’ve been interference from some other station,” Gloom said. “Or the jungle playing tricks again. You know how it gets—humidity in the wires, frogs in the junction box.”

Soon, dusk crept in over the station, brushing the of the sky with glazes of muted violet. Leaves, broad and waxy, caught the fading light in silvery glints. Cicadas began their shift, not in chorus but in scattered spurts across the jungle. Elsewhere in the outpost, men disentangled themselves from the day’s work. The constabulary detail loosened girths and brushed down flanks as the horses steamed faintly in the dusk, the day's last light catching on brass buckles and threading gold in the swish of tails against fetlock.

“Gentlemen, I do believe I hear the supper bell,” Harbinger announced, shifting just enough to make his chair creak, eyes narrowed in mock vigilance. “If I don’t, then my digestive system has achieved sentience.”

One by one, the men drifted from the instrument hut to the kitchen shack, boots tamping down the soft loam, the day's last transmissions still humming faintly in their ears. Dwell had earlier tapped one of the constabulary men—an older corporal with a cook’s patience—to see the seismological team fed before the light gave out. Porfirio had meanwhile lit the lamp early—kerosene, with a soot-streaked chimney—and its glow pooled ocher across the mess table under the corrugated awning. The jungle leaned in, close and botanic, but the kitchen shack exhaled warmth and the smell of newly-cooked rice, tinned beef, and something stewed with ginger and green papaya. A pot of coffee, thick and already cooling, sat beside a large bowl of boiled bananas on the mess table. Chairs scraped, boots thudded. The corporal—his apron stiff with starch and grease—ladled rice. Porfirio poured coffee. Conversation was spare until it drifted to Dwell’s encounter with the woman in the jungle, at which point hilarity ensued, with Harbinger rising halfway from his seat to mimic Dwell’s slow retreat, one hand raised like he was negotiating, “Madam, I assure you, I wasn’t trying to sneak a look down you’re your blouse.”

“She probably took one look at your moustache and vanished out of pity,” Gloom chimed, causing coarse laughter and boot-stomping around the mess table.

“She was there,” Dwell said, wounded. “White dress. Hair like—like a Churchill blackout curtain.”

“You’re sure it wasn’t a monkey with a shawl?” said Harbinger.

Dwell looked up, affronted. “She spoke. Said something about the lake. Or the volcano. I forget.”

Harbinger leaned back, chair creaking. “So now she spoke to you?”

“Yes, in fact, she did,” said Dwell.

The corporal returned, slapping down another steaming plate of boiled bananas on the table. Gloom speared one with his fork and chomped down.

“She could’ve been a local,” he said. “Or a spirit. Or both. You know how it is out here. Boundaries blur.”

Dwell nodded solemnly. “She had a presence.”

They finished eating in a slow, companionable silence, broken only by the jungle’s nocturnal noises —chirps, rustles, the occasional distant cough of or grunt from one of the constabulary men. Then Harbinger rose, brushing rice from his lap. “Gentlemen, I believe it’s time we consult the bottle,” he said. He returned five minutes later with a squat, dark-glassed bottle of Old Crow, its label faded and peeling. Four tin cups were produced from somewhere under the corporal’s sink.

“To Dwell and his jungle bride,” Harbinger toasted.

“To faulty equipment and faultier men,” Gloom added.

They drank. The whisky was sharp, almost medicinal. Dwell drank, coughed, then laughed, then coughed again. “Whoa, boy,” he declared. “That went down rough.”

“Speaking of equipment,” Porfirio said, “I think maybe our wires are moist somewhere down the line – what with monsoon season and all.”

“Or haunted,” Harbinger offered. “Maybe she touched it.”

“Maybe you touched yourself,” Gloom said. “With your boots.”

Porfirio smiled. “I’ll check it again tomorrow. Before the rain comes.”

Harbinger poured another round. “The barograph’s holding steady, at least. Flat as the corporal’s love life.”

The corporal, sweeping crumbs into a pan, grunted without looking up.

Dwell was slumped now, eyes half-lidded, cup dangling from one hand. “She said something about the river,” he muttered. “Or maybe it was the ridge.”

Porfirio stood and drained the last of the whisky in his cup. “Well, my dear sirs,” he said, “I am tired. I must bid you all good night.”

He stepped out into the jungle’s wet breath, the lamplight falling behind him as he walked up the trail into the darkness. The path to his quarters was narrow, overgrown, but familiar. The earth was damp and alive beneath his boots. Somewhere behind him, Dwell began to sing Shall We Gather at the River. Porfirio ducked into his quarters and shut the door behind him. He lit the kerosene lamp. The flame bloomed with a soft hiss. He unbuttoned his shirt, folded it with the care of habit, then sat on the edge of the cot to unlace his boots. He dropped his chin to his chest and felt his neck crack. Face-up on the narrow cot, his hand reached for the lamp. One breath, then another, and he blew it out. Darkness took the room gently. Outside, cicadas pulsed in waves, a kind of sonic low tide. His body, still tuned to the day’s heat and motion, resisted rest at first. Thoughts flickered: the erratic instrument readings, the strange static caught in the Audion, Dwell’s woman in white, the ridge line they’d probably be hiking again tomorrow. Then the sounds began to accumulate —crickets, frogs, the soft whisper of leaves shifting—and his mind loosened its grip. Now there grew among the station’s shacks and rooftops —replacing the smell of whisky and sweat —the fragile, chlorophyllin odor of night: damp, botanical, deep, insinuating more than just starlight on tin, taking over not through brute pungency but by the high intricacy of its molecules, the same conjuror’s trick by which memory, or its sisters, guilt and regret, manages to preserve some trace of a face down ten or twenty years. Somewhere in the camp, a voice—familiar but unplaceable—was reciting a poem. Was that Dwell? It couldn’t have been, Porfirio thought. What it said didn’t matter. What mattered was the rhythm, the way the words echoed through the roots and stones, as if the earth itself was speaking. Where had he heard the poem before, Porfirio wondered as the night’s fingers moved through the corrugated seams above him, carrying a chill that now filled the spaces between his toes. Porfirio stepped from the shack barefoot, drawn not by the sound of static now, not by the cadence of poetry, but by the sudden absence of sound -- a hush that had shape and motion. He strained his ears for the poem. It was gone. Even the cicadas had fallen silent. Leaves hung heavy, slick with dew, and the air moved in slow eddies, giddy with the scent of damp bark. Then he saw her at the edge of the jungle, standing in the grass along a break in the barbed wire. She was staring at him. In the darkness, through the floating mist, her face was beautiful in the way young plants are beautiful — fresh, fragile, tender and full of promise. He moved toward her, but she was already moving into the jungle, pale against the shadows. He followed her into the brush. Vines curled and roots rose to meet his feet. The brush closed behind him like a door. She moved without effort, as if the jungle parted for her. He kept pace, ducking branches, brushing aside leaves.

“You think you’re dreaming?” she said, turning.

“I’m not sure,” he replied. “Am I?”

She chuckled. “Are you asleep?”

The jungle thickened into a tangle of leaves and bromeliads. Trees pressed closer, their trunks wide and furred with moss. Somewhere above, a fruit bat wheeled silently.

“Where are we going?” Porfirio asked.

“Nowhere,” she said. “Nowhere and everywhere.”

He laughed softly. “You sound like Lieutenant Dwell.”

Then they were moving again, descending deeper still into the jungle, until the light thinned and the leaves swallowed the depths of the night sky. Porfirio felt the earth moving beneath him, lifting and rolling with the weight and shape of something enormous and powerful stirring underfoot. Her hand brushed his once, briefly. Around them, vines and flowers looped from branch to branch. She wasn’t walking now so much now as floating like mist. Porfirio trailed behind her, though she no longer looked back. The jungle had ceased to resist him. It opened, absorbed, rearranged. The air grew heavier, the ground damper as they moved past the rusted tower and the dangling relay lines into a hush of bamboo and wild ixora, where the air grew sweet and the ground soft with moss. The morning, not yet awake, curled like an animal in the fog over the escarpment. A branch snapped farther down the slope, and somewhere in the quiet stirrings of the woods around them, underneath the sodden carpet of rotting leaves and bark, the sun weaved its first gossamer threads through the cobwebbed grass. A heron lifted off from a creek, wings wide as the horizon. Porfirio, blinking against the strange light to the east, felt the mountain rock gently now beneath him, and it was as if the earth was breathing, cradling quiet the ghosts of far ago tribes and mountain fires —and he thought, not with certainty but with something close to it, that he must be home.

Carlos Castillo studied English literature and creative writing at the University of Santo Tomas, in the Republic of the Philippines. He published poetry and fiction while in college and has since written for various digital marketing companies. He regularly submits prose for literary magazines and websites. He is presently a speech and policy writer for the Philippine Department of Agriculture.