Illustration by Anderson x. Lee
1. (n.) the ancestral home you’ve never seen before
In the public square, there is a stage lined with Christmas lights. Tinny music blasts from a loudspeaker, and Tito Benny tells us there are fireworks planned for this evening. I ask what the fireworks are for. Christmas is still a week and a half away.
“‘Still’?” He laughs. “No. Only.”
He parks the van in front of a closed iron gate across the street from the public square and honks four times. A minute later, the gate unlatches and a Spanish colonial silhouette flares against the white sun. We’d driven thirty minutes from Iloilo International Airport to get here—down narrow roads, past turquoise water and slopes of rice paddies. With the windows down, the whole town waved as we drove by. Tito Benny knew everyone by name.
It’s 11AM and thirty-two degrees. The van is airless, baking us into the leather seats. The weather is worse than the first two weeks of our visit, during which we spent time in Manila with Dad’s side of the family. The humidity had made me useless, too dizzy to sit forlornly under the AC at our cousins’ house. I’d caught a cold, which gave the rest of my relatives a good laugh for being too Canadian for the heat.
Mom turns around from the front seat. Aloud, she says, “We’re here. This is the ancestral home.” In her eyes, she says: Smile and behave.
The house is an egg-shell white. A balcony, held by smooth columns, overlooks a well-tended yard with a stone fountain as its centrepiece. Relatives pour out the double doors, and I watch my parents greet each one—titos and titas, cousins, and house caretakers Mom has known since she was a girl.
Carla, whose patience for hot weather is thinner than mine, has already seated herself in the shade of the wide porch. Her ears are plugged with AirPods, which I helped our parents buy for her birthday last month. She’s moody tired from our early flight, but Mom lets her get away with it. She’s the youngest. It’s my job to be pleasant enough for both of us.
I force out a long series of ‘hellos,’ then join my sister on the porch steps. From the loudspeakers across the street, the tinkling-bell intro to Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas is You starts playing. Palm trees loom above us, fanning into the columns, completely still. I wait for a breeze to come and cool my skin, but it never does. A headache somersaults somewhere between my brows.
“Tito Benny said this place is a hundred years old.” Carla cranes her neck up at the house. “What’re the chances it has air conditioning?”
I don’t answer. Someone else does. A young woman sprawled out on a bench behind us, her long fingers holding a worn paperback. The text across the cover is in Tagalog. I hadn’t noticed her; it’s how she sits, so leisurely and quiet like she’s part of the house. In her lap is a plate of sticky turon, fried dark golden.
She tips her sunglasses down the slope of her nose. “There is air conditioning. Internet, too, if you can believe it.” Her curly hair bunches around her chin in slick ringlets. She’s dressed fashionably, in a gauzy white blouse and frayed denim shorts, and she looks like the most modern thing I’ve seen in a ten-mile radius.
“Kind of hard to,” I say, joking, but maybe I don’t smile enough. She cocks her eyebrow at me. It’s heavily pencilled in, Crayola-like, under the sun’s harshness. “I’m Mary-Anne.” I pull an AirPod out of Carla’s ear. “And this is my sister, Carla.”
“I’m Esme,” says the woman.
“Ate Esme?” I ask because I can’t tell how old she is. Certainly not old enough to be ‘tita.’
“Probably,” she replies. I wonder what makes her decide I’m younger than her. She extends the plate of turon. Carla and I shake our heads in unison. She gives us a once-over and shrugs. “Come inside.”
2. (n.) the family who are strangers
The house feels smaller inside, crowded with early twentieth-century furniture and relatives I didn’t know I had. The marble floors are sticky and cool through my socked feet. It smells of heavy spices and fried oil, blown into the foyer by a plastic fan revolving in the dining room, cycling lukewarm air.
Esme introduces us to her mom, Tita May. I still don’t know how we are related, and no one stops to tell us. I wonder if the labels fall away once you enter the house.
Tita May walks over to a basket by the door, plucks out two pairs of tsinelas, and places them at the feet of Carla and me. She smiles and says something to us in Cebuano, a dialect we don’t understand.
“She said you both have very big eyes,” Esme translates. Maybe she can tell I have no idea what to say to that. So she explains: “It means you’re pretty.”
Mom comes in from outside and fits Esme into her arms. “Esmeralda! You were here when I last saw you.” She gestures with her hand at her waist and Esme laughs; it’s a sweet sound—smooth like a spoonful of honey mango.
In Tagalog, Tita May says, “Bring them upstairs, Esme.”
To get upstairs, we have to walk down the hall, into the dining room and through the bustling kitchen where the house help is setting out a bowl of crispy pork rinds—chicharon—banana chips, and a pot of champurrado, reheated from breakfast.
The deeper we move into the house, the more it ages. The narrow staircase crackles with each step, leading us into a floor-to-ceiling hallway with uneven, crowded shelves—my nose tingles from the dust. Photo albums are piled haphazardly over faded books and old gadgets from the 80s and 90s—disconnected landlines, portable radios, walkmans. I reach out to touch one of the leather-bound albums, and the spine falls apart between my fingers.
We round the corner down a new hallway, and mom points to a row of framed, colourless photographs mounted on the walls—distant memories from her childhood summers here. I listen to her and Esme converse quickly in Cebuano and can’t catch a word. Esme tells a joke, presumably, and Mom laughs until she’s teary-eyed.
After Esme shows Mom to her room, she brings Carla and I down the hall.
“Do you live here too?” I ask.
“Only in the summers. I do my graduate studies in Manila,” Esme replies. “But year-round, it’s Lolo Manuel and the house help. Tito Benny lives next door. He makes sure the house is, you know, holding itself together.” She pauses. “Well, not just the house. The whole town.”
Our room smells like fresh laundry and citrus air freshener, strong and heady enough to unsettle my stomach, still woozy from the airplane food that morning. I fall into the bed, testing its bounce. The springs are stiff. Carla looks at it apprehensively. We’ve never had to share a bed before or even a room.
“We can find a spare mattress if you want,” Esme says, watching us.
“That’s all right.” I glance at Carla, and her frown rearranges itself. “We’ll manage.”
From the backyard, there’s a flutter of wings, shrill squawking. I look out the window and spot an overflowing chicken coop, its metal fencing bent and crooked. Beside the window, the AC unit shakes and howls like the deep bellows of a robot.
The cold air rustles the curtains, raising goosebumps on my bare legs, and Esme quietly slips out of the room.
3. (n.) the dinner your body rejects
On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Lolo Manuel leans across the table during meryenda and says, “Have you ever watched a cock fight?”
He phrases it in slow, clipped English. It’s how everyone has been speaking to us all week, even though I’ve explained—every time they stop translating a word through Mom—that Carla and I understand Tagalog just fine.
“I haven’t,” I reply. A spread of rice snacks is laid out on the table—colourful puto, a steaming pot of sweet ginataang and suman swaddled in thick banana leaves.
Dad laughs through a sip of his San Miguel. “They’re vegetarians.”
“Oh, no,” Lolo Manuel says gravely. “We can’t have that.”
Later, he gathers the neighbours for the cock fight, and Tito Benny plucks two chickens from the backyard coop. I stare at my sandals the whole time, the dead grass skimming my toes. I don’t breathe through my nose until it’s over.
After the fight, Tito Benny snaps the neck of the losing chicken and hauls it into the kitchen. Carla trudges up the stairs to our room. She throws up three times in the toilet. Mom has the house help bring her a bowl of molten hot lugaw and then Carla falls asleep before sunset. I sit on the edge of the bed for a minute, watching her a bit enviously, before joining the dinner table. The chicken sits there on a silver tray, crisp and perfectly roasted.
“Have some,” Lolo Manuel says.
“I’m all right.”
“It’s fresh,” he says. “It’s good.”
Mom taps her fork against my plate. “Mary-Anne,” she says, and it’s no longer an argument. “A bite.”
I engulf a sliver of chicken breast in a mountain of rice, and when it’s halfway down my throat, I chase it down with water when Lolo Manuel looks away.
4. (n.) the ghosts who listen
After dinner, I opened the window in our guest room while Carla was sleeping, and the ledge was just wide enough that I could swing one leg up comfortably. Below, the backyard is done up for late-evening drinks and dessert. The last sunlight winks out behind the palm trees and into the black skyline.
I watch Dad and the other titos drag plastic tables onto the grass. There’s a long one for the adults and a small round one for the younger kids. I’ve been too old to sit at that one for years now, and with every family gathering, I’m reminded how much I miss it. At the adult table, they only talk about two things: the past or the future.
Remember when you used to be so polite and shy, Mary-Anne? Or—what kind of major is that? What jobs will you apply for? Or—so you say you have a girlfriend, but what about marriage?
Kids are different. They only care about what’s right in front of them, and sometimes, I think that’s all I can handle.
“You going to be sick?”
I turn to find Esme hovering over my shoulder. As usual, she’s as silent as the walls. She looks at the sliver of space on the window ledge, and I slide my leg back wordlessly to give her room.
“There’s no hiding in this place,” I reply.
“There’s not,” she agrees, joining me. The breeze comes, and I catch a whiff of her sunscreen. “Even if you tried, we have ghosts here.”
“Ghosts?”
“Ancestors,” she says.
In the backyard, Mom sips a beer beside Tita May. Their heads are close together. For a second, Tita May’s eyes flick up at us in the window. In Esme, she’s got a daughter to brag about. I wonder what Mom’s got in return.
“Carla’s sick,” Esme says. “So you don’t have to feel bad about it.”
Don’t I? I think. Our weak western stomachs. My cousins had made that exact joke over the dinner table in Manila. The following day, before we’d boarded the plane for Iloilo, they’d warned us about the cock fights—said we probably couldn’t handle it. It bothered me then. It bothers me more now that they were right.
The heat has dulled into a thick, soupy wind. My thighs start to stick to the wood of the window ledge. I shift a little.
“You don’t like me.” I say it like a guess, or like how someone at a party might declare a ‘truth or drink’ statement—stilted, nervous, a feeling thrown into the air. “I mean, my other cousins, they think I’m a diva because I’m picky, and I can’t endure an hour of direct sunlight without getting a headache. They think it’s funny.”
“It is funny. But I don’t think you’re a diva.” Esme laughs. “I think you’re holding your breath here, even though you don’t have to.”
“I’m trying not to,” I say honestly.
“Try again. I didn’t get it on my first try either.”
“What? Tolerating them?”
Esme shrugs. “Appreciating them.”
A harmonious cheer erupts from below. Lolo Manuel hobbles up from his chair to help Tito Benny drag a projector and a pair of speakers out from the living room. The younger cousins follow close behind with a stack of ringed binders in their small arms. Even Mom sets her beer down to get closer.
“What are they doing?” I ask.
“The best part of the night, of course.” Esme throws one leg back into the bedroom, then hops down from the window, swatting the curtains aside. “Let’s go.”
“I don’t know.” I glance at Carla, tucked away in the bedsheets. “Maybe I’ll stick with the ghosts, after all.”
“You know,” Esme says, “this place was built in the 20s.”
“So?”
“So,” she tilts her head, “do you think you’re the first person in this house who’s wanted to run away from that dinner table?” She smiles. “Come on. You’re not special.”
I laugh, and something in me lightens up. “Am I not?”
“Not even a little.” When she offers her hand to help me down, I take it.
5. (n.) an apology; a second chance
In Esme’s words, the best part of the night is a karaoke machine hooked up to a mid-2000s speaker system and a washed-out projector. It flashes with stock images of vacation photography and the Magic Sing logo splashed across it, as the song binders circulate the backyard.
I claim an empty stool at the corner of the adult table. Tito Benny and his youngest daughter, Angel, sing first. She’s six, with lilac bow clips holding her pigtails together, and they sing a duet of Puff the Magic Dragon while the rest of us clap off-beat. When it’s Esme’s turn, she holds the microphone with both hands and belts A Whole New World like an off-broadway star.
The chair beside me shuffles back, and Mom sits down. She has a sealed container in one hand and her half-empty San Miguel in the other.
“Carla’s fine,” I tell her before she chews me out for leaving her alone. “She’s knocked out cold.”
Mom wipes the condensation from her bottle. “How is your stomach?”
“Fine,” I say. She looks at me, her tiny mouth pursed in a frown. I can see it in her face—she’s about to pester me for barely eating during dinner. “I’m not hungry.”
Esme bows when she finishes her song. The Magic Sing screen behind her ripples into a bright sunset, forming an orange halo around her hair. The night smells of sweet-fried banana, pineapple juice and damp mud.
“Mag meryenda ka man lang.”
Mom says it sharply, off the end of an exasperated sigh. Have a snack, at least. There’s no tenderness in the words, but there never is. I look over at her. She’s turned away from me. Her eyes are like mine. Black, shrewd, stubborn.
She opens the sealed container and slides it toward me without a word. It’s an array of sliced mangoes, cut the way I liked them as a kid—thin, a touch underripe, the perfect amount of sour.
Angel appears in front of me, places the thick ringed binder of karaoke songs into my lap and exclaims, “Your turn!” with a broad, gap-toothed grin. Her small hands touch my knees, and she gazes at me expectantly.
I feel my family’s laughter echo in the nighttime breeze, the nip of mosquitos on my bare ankles, and the swelter of Iloilo’s heat pulling me close.
Just for a second, Mom glances my way. Maybe she smiles, but I don’t know for sure. She hides her expression in a swig of her San Miguel.
I pluck a mango slice from the container and choose a song.
K. M. Fajardo is a second-generation Filipino-Canadian writer born and raised in the Toronto suburbs. She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Global Business and Digital Arts degree before working in the tech industry. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Augur Magazine, and her debut novel, LOCAL HEAVENS, is forthcoming in Fall 2025 with Bindery Books/Inky Phoenix Press. She lives and writes in the city with her rescue cat, Clementine. Find her online at kmfajardo.com.