Never Have I Ever

Isabel Yap

Description

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"Explore a world where the supernatural is an accepted element of everyday life and the horror is mined from the realities of existing." — New York Public Library Best Books of the Year

World Fantasy Award finalist
British Fantasy Award finalist
Ladies of Horror Fiction Award winner
Crawford Award shortlist

“Am I dead?” Mebuyen sighs.
She was hoping the girl would not ask.

Spells and stories, urban legends and immigrant tales: the magic in Isabel Yap’s debut collection jumps right off the page, from the friendship and fear building in “A Canticle for Lost Girls” to the joy in “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” to the terrifying tension of the urban legend “Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez.”

Excerpted from Isabel Yap’s “Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez?”
It all started when Ms. Salinas told us about her third eye. It was home ec., and we were sitting in front of the sewing machines with table runners that we were going to make our moms or yayas do for us anyway. I was pretty anxious about that project. I knew Mom was going to tell me to do it myself, because she believed in the integrity of homework. “Mica,” Mom would say. “Jesus expects you to be honest, and so do I.” I was wondering how to get Ya Fely to do it for me behind Mom’s back when Ms. Salinas started blabbing about the ghost on the bus.
“You see, girls, most ghosts are very polite. At first I didn’t even notice he was a ghost, and then I realized the woman sitting next to him couldn’t see him, because she looked at me with this suplada face and said, ‘Miss, are you not going to sit down?’ Then the ghost shrugged, like, it’s okay with me. So I had to sit on its lap, while at the same time sitting on the bus seat, and that felt so . . . weird.”
Ms. Salinas was young and super skinny, which made up for her ducklike face. On the scale of teachers she was neither bad nor good. She liked to wear white pants, and a rumor had recently spread about how she liked to wear lime-green thongs and was therefore slutty. We amused ourselves during home ec. trying to look through her white pants every time she turned, crouched, or bent.
“Miss S!” Estella piped up. By then we had realized that if we kept her occupied, she might forget to give us our assignment. “When did you open your third eye?”
“I was born with mine open,” she said. “My dad had it, and so did my Lolo. Oh, but my Kuya had to open his. He just forced it open one day by meditating. It’s really easy as long as you know where yours is.” A snicker from somewhere in the back made her look at the clock. “Girls, don’t stop sewing.”
We obediently hopped to work. I stepped on my machine’s presser foot and stitched random lines through my table runner. Someone tugged on my elbow. “Help,” Hazel whispered. She gestured at her machine: the cloth was bunched up in the feed dog, the needle stabbing through it at random points. I reached over and jerked one end of the cloth until it came unstuck. It was now full of micro-holes. She made a face. I smirked.
“You trying to give your cloth a third eye?” I asked.
• • • •
Anamaria Marquez was a student at St. Brebeuf’s, just like us. One day she stayed after school to finish a project. At that time the gardener was a creepy manong, and when he saw her staying in the classroom all by herself he raped her. Then, because he did not want anyone to know about his crime, he killed her and hid her body in the hollow of the biggest rubber tree in the Black Garden. Nobody found out what had happened to her until after the manong died, when finally a storm knocked over the rubber tree—that was years ago, it’s grown back now, duh—and the police found her bones.
If you look at the roots of the tree at night you might see Anamaria’s face, or some parts of her naked body. If you stand in the Black Garden and stay absolutely silent you will hear her crying and calling for help.
But you shouldn’t go near, because if you do she will have her revenge and she will kill you.
• • • •
It was fifth grade, a weird time when we were all changing. It seemed like every week someone was getting a bloodstain on her skirt, and sobbing in the bathroom from shame and hormones, while her barkada surrounded her vigilantly.
At the start of the semester we had a mandatory talk called You and Your Body! We were given little booklets with “chic” illustrations, diagrams of the female reproductive system, and free sanitary napkins. We spent a lot of our time vandalizing the chic illustrations. Lea found an ingenious way to turn a uterus into a ram by shading in the fallopian tubes, and we took turns drawing uterus-rams in each other’s notebooks.
I held a slight disgust for all of this girl stuff, though I couldn’t explain why. Maybe it was because I only had brothers, and some of their that-is-GROSS attitude rubbed off on me. My skin crawled whenever Mom or Ya Fely or the homeroom teacher made some reference like, “You are now a young lady. You are developing.”
Our barkada had decided that we would tell each other “when we got ours,” and that would be it, no hysterics or anything. I was more afraid that someone was going to get a boyfriend. Bea, the class rep, took every chance she could to tell people about her darling Paolo from San Beda. I was fine with Bea having a boy, and Bea was my friend too, but she wasn’t part of our group. If any of us got a boy, I knew the dynamic would change so much we’d be screwed.

Sujets

• Anthologies
• Literary
• Collections
• Science Fiction
• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Literature
• Ghost
• Fiction
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Small Beer Press
• Date de parution: 23 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781618731838
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

never
have
i
ever

stories
Isabel Yap
Small Beer Press
Easthampton, MA
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
Never Have I Ever: Stories copyright © 2021 by Isabel Yap (isabelyap.com). All rights reserved. Page 303 of the print edition is an extension of the copyright page.
Small Beer Press
150 Pleasant Street #306
Easthampton, MA 01027
smallbeerpress.com
weightlessbooks.com
bookmoonbooks.com
[e-mail]
Distributed to the trade by Consortium.
Barbara Jane Reyes, excerpt from “Having Been Cast, Eve Implores 2” from Diwata. Copyright © 2010 by Barbara Janes Reyes. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Yap, Isabel, 1990- author.
Title: Never have I ever : stories / Isabel Yap.
Description: First edition. | Easthampton, MA : Small Beer Press, [2021] |
Summary: “Spells and stories, urban legends and immigrant tales: the
magic in Isabel Yap’s debut collection jumps right off the page, from
the joy in her new novella, “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” to the
terrifying tension of the urban legend “Have You Heard the One About
Anamaria Marquez.””-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020049102 | ISBN 9781618731821 (paperback) | ISBN
9781618731838 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PR9550.9.Y37 N48 2021 | DDC 823/.92--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049102
First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Paper edition s et in Centaur MT. Titles in Goudy Old Style.
Paper edition printed on 30% PCR recycled paper by the Versa Press in East Peoria, IL.
Author photo © 2020 Meg Whittenberger.
Cover illustration “Serpent’s Bride” © 2020 by Alexa Sharpe (alexasharpe.com). All rights reserved.

For Mommy, Lolo, and Carlo Santiago:
you taught me how I want to live

Good Girls

You’ve denied the hunger for so long that when you transform tonight, it hurts more than usual. You twist all the way round, feel your insides slosh and snap as you detach. Your wings pierce your skin as you leave your lower half completely. A sharp pain rips through your guts, compounding the hunger. Drifting toward the open window, you carefully unfurl your wings. It’s an effort not to make a sound.
You’re a small girl, but it’s a small room, and though your boyfriend is snoring you can’t risk being caught. You look back at him, remembering how he’d breathed your name a few hours ago, pouring sweat as you arched beneath him— Kaye, baby, please. You wonder if he’ll say it that way when you eventually leave.
The half you’ve left behind is tucked in shadow: gray, muted pink where your intestines show through. The oversized shirt you’re wearing hides the worst of the guts that hang from your torso as you glide into the sticky night air. You suck in a deep breath as the living bodies of your housing complex flood your senses. A girl sobs in her bedroom while her father hammers at the door. A pair of elderly foreigners lie in each other’s arms. A stray dog licks its balls outside the iron gates while a security guard dozes in his cramped sitting room.
Manila is a city that sleeps only fitfully, and you love it and hate it for that reason.

The first thing taught at the Bakersfield Good Girl Reformation Retreat is the pledge: “I’m a good girl. A good girl for a good world. And while I know it is not always easy to be good, I promise to at least try.” The girls are made to repeat this three times at orientation, and one girl seems moved enough to shout “Amen!” at the end. Or she could be mocking it; Sara can’t tell. The girls on either side of her are listless, mouthing the pledge without care or conviction. One scratches her knee then digs underneath her fingernails, puckering and unpuckering her mouth like a goldfish. Sara suspects she’s wearing a similar expression. She frowns and squints at the clear blue California sky, the same one from the home she was just forced to leave.
Afterwards they’re herded onto the field for physical exercises and split into groups. Sara’s group starts running. She quits on the second lap out of five, short of breath and thinking nope, not worth it. She jogs off the field and is trying to disappear someplace when Captain Suzy, who is in charge of PE, catches sight of her. Captain Suzy frowns and starts heading for her, except the flag football team erupts in a hair-snatching free-for-all. Captain Suzy surges into the brawl and flings girls away from each other, so that by the end mud and grass is strewn everywhere and more than one girl has fainted from the heat.
Later, Sara learns the fight was because of a butterfly knife that someone had snuck in and stupidly showed off. Lots of girls wanted it.
They’re given Exploration time after lunch, with the stern reminder that they have to be prepared for Group Sharing (4:30 PM), followed by Journals (6 PM) in their respective rooms before Dinner (7 PM). After leaving the dining hall, Sara surveys the abandoned schoolhouse where all Good Girls are forced to stay. It’s mostly dusty classrooms with chalkboards. Tiny white bugs swirl in every sunbeam. Most chairs and tables are child-sized, and colored mats cover the floor. A mesh-wire fence circles the entire yard, and past it, a tall rusted gate. Beyond them lie endless fields, roasting under the sun. The fence is too tall to climb, and Sara is neither agile nor motivated. She heads back to her room and decides to Explore her bed.

There are meals all over the Metro, so many routes to explore. You’ve mapped them out over years and months of nightly travels: countless delicacies, different treats for different moods. The only difference is your start point, your end point. You never last more than a few months in the same place. You always need to find someone new to take you in—to believe you’re human, just like them.
Tonight your hunger is confusing. You don’t know what you want, what will satiate you. You decide to start upscale and work your way down, so you veer towards the part of the city with its lights still on.
Music pulses loudly from a club. Three high school girls totter out on four-inch heels, standing awkwardly on the carpet to avoid the potholed road. One of them is holding a phone to her ear. A car comes up; a maid hops out of the front seat and opens the door for the girls, and they climb in, unsteady from lack of practice or too many vodka Sprites. You think about dancing, about what it’s like to occupy the skin of a beautiful party girl, something you can do with ease—slipping into a bar with confidence, slipping out with someone’s fingers twined in yours, ready to point at the stars and laugh then lean in close for a kiss.
They can never smell the blood and sputum underneath the liquor in your breath. Humans make up wonderfully intricate rituals, pretend to have such control—but they easily devolve into animal longing, just heartbeats flaring in their cage of skin and bones.

Something is knocking at Sara’s door. A monster of some kind, an overgrown baby bleeding from the chest. Its clawed fist is tapping in a way that’s supposed to be quiet, almost polite—then Sara realizes she’s asleep and scrambles out of bed.
She opens the door. It swings into the hallway and bumps into the girl standing there. “Sorry,” Sara says. Her shirt is soaked in sweat.
“No worries. I’m Kaye! Nice to meet you.” The girl’s hand is cold and dry in Sara’s gross sticky one.
“Sara,” Sara says. “So I guess we’re roommates?”
“Yep,” Kaye says. She is petite and gorgeous, with shiny black hair and flawless honey-colored skin. Asian, but Sara can’t guess which. She wears an easy, friendly grin as she wheels in her luggage. She stops to note which bed Sara has occupied, then throws her backpack onto the empty one.
Sara shuts the door and sits on her bed. She picks up her regulation Pen + Diary in a halfhearted effort to prep for Group Sharing, but ends up watching Kaye unpack instead. Kaye unzips her overstuffed luggage, displaying piles of neatly folded clothes and small colorful snacks: Sweet Corn, Salt and Vinegar Chips, Boy Bawang. Notebooks and papers are wedged between socks and shoes in plastic bags. Kaye fishes out a pair of slippers and slaps them on the floor triumphantly.
“So what’s your deal?” Sara asks, as Kaye peels off her shoes and socks and sticks her feet into the slippers.
“I eat fetuses,” Kaye replies. “If I feel like it, I eat organs too.”
Sara frowns and shuts her notebook. Kaye doesn’t elaborate, and starts sorting clothes on her bed. Sara leans forward so that she can better inspect Kaye’s luggage. There are stickers all over it. One says Fragile; another says Delta Airlines; three are written in Chinese characters; two read Wow! Philippines. They’re faded, the edges picked off as if someone with long fingernails was extremely bored.
“You came from abroad?”
“A few months ago.” She opens a pack of chips and holds it out to Sara. Sara peers in; they look like shriveled corn kernels. She shakes her head.
“So you were flown all the way out here to stop eating babies,” Sara repeats. Her gut churns, and a voice in her brain goes no, no, no.
“ Unborn babies,” Kaye clarifies. “But it’s not like I can help it.” She starts laying out her clothes on the bed, methodically. “I would tell you what they call me, but you wouldn’t be able to pronounce it anyway.”
“Try me,” Sara says.
Kaye smirks and rips out a page from her regulation Diary, then scribbles something on it. She holds it up for Sara to read.
“Manananggal?” Sara