something i've been encountering in my dreams for quite some time now

a character, loosely based on a former househelp. i've been promising myself to write out her story. but i don't want to be all feminist about it. an interesting woman's narrative is all it is.


The name is Marietta. Seamstress. Resides in a shanty, squatters’ area, along the Maqueda Bay.
Hails from southern leyte. Had a husband, a soldier, who went off to war in Cotabato, and who did not communicate with her for four years. During those four years, the family lives in abject poverty, one child dies from a swimming accident, another is buried with their house in a terrible mudslide. She decides to leave. She meets a truck driver who plies the Southern Leyte – Tacloban route. She hitches a ride with him to the city with her children. The man is married, but promises to help her out. He introduces her to relatives living in the squatters’ area. Marietta rents a room with one of his cousins, who makes a living as a seamstress. She helps out in the small business, to earn her keep. Her children start school in Rizal Elementary School.

Eventually she is able to buy her own singer sewing machine, have her own little shanty by the sea. One of her children is finishing high school. This girl is quite pretty, has strong healing hands, known in the community as a good “masahista’. Her mother is afraid for her, that people might take advantage of her. Marietta is trying to take the courage to ask one of her clients to sponsor the girl’s college education, preferrably in Manila.

Marietta has also had two failed relationships since marriage, one of which was inevitably with the truck driver, the other with a quiet Muslim who has since left the city to go back to Cotabato. She still pines for her first husband.

The scene opens with her drinking Tanduay all by herself, contemplating on her life. She just had a fight with her daughter who ran off with a neighbor of theirs. Her other daughter has not come home for two days, lately been hanging out with the bad sorts, along Magsaysay boulevard. She is quite drunk when a client, who needs an emergency repair of a wedding gown, comes knocking on her door, catching her singing an old Visayan love song to herself.

The scene ends with a bloodied wedding gown, and a pair of scissors glinting in the dark.

Mwahahaha.