Arrest

Stephanie Shi

After an Infraction

comma

Write your full name.

comma

who piously array the altar and the tabernacle

comma period comma

must never forget that I myself carry God within me by the grace dwelling in my soul This divine presence makes not only of my soul a holy temple period period comma but also of my body

I will not lose my piety and sense of shame like cultured period I am aware of my duty period I

women have

I will not be like them

must repudiate exaggerations of fashion who invent them and then of the world comma modesty period

comma period

which spring from the corruption of those I am not ignorant and I never should be

because ignorance can explain the deplorable popularity of fashions so contrary to comma which should be the most beautiful adornment of the Christian woman comma so I dont go so far as to enter the church

I realize what I am doing comma

indecently clad period

to appear before those who are the natural and authorized teachers semicolon they perfect it period

Conscience and grace do not destroy nature

They place in the soul a sense which renders it vigilant against the dangers threatening purity period period This is especially a characteristic of the young Christian girl I must be like Vibia Perpetua period semicolon period I embody it

my first thought and action should also comma comma I must ask myself cultured comma

always be to cover my body

Before I put on a dress period I can be modern

what Jesus Christ would think of it sporting period comma

full of grace without giving in to all the vulgarities of an unhealthy fashion comma a

I preserve a complexion that knows no artifice like the soul it reflects period

countenance always reserved my purity period

I must pray for the courageous and active defense of

The Pope recommends I be devoted to the Blessed Eucharist and to the 1

Immaculate Virgin Mary comma comma comma period behavior familiar

comma

to whom I am consecrated comma

period

My action

in service of the Church

is battling against the dangers of immorality colon the field of fashion and dress

fighting in whatever field is open to me of health and sport comma

in the field of social relations and entertainment comma my example comma my courtesy and comma only too

My weapons will be my word period comma

The Church does not intend to paint the sad picture of the exaggerations I perceive about myself comma

colon

dresses which

hardly suffice to cover the person they should rather conceal comma

or others which seem designed to emphasize what sports which are performed with such clothing

semicolon

such exhibitionism and in such company as to be irreconcilable with even the least semicolon dances comma films comma

demanding standard of modesty

illustrations from which the mad desire for entertainment and pleasure derives the gravest dangers period The Church desires to bring to mind once more the Christian principles comma period guide my steps and conduct Virtue lies in the middle comma

which in these matters must enlighten my decisions comma course and inspire and sustain my way of the spirit period

What God asks of me is to remember always that fashion is not comma the ultimate rule of conduct for me comma comma semicolon

and cannot be

that beyond comma

fashion and its demands principles superior to fashion

there are higher and more pressing laws and unchangeable comma comma

which under no and before which

circumstances can be sacrificed to the whim of pleasure or fancy must bow the fleeting omnipotence of the idol of fashion take precedence over that of my body good of the soul of my neighbor comma period

The good of my soul must

and to the good of my body I must prefer the

period

Some young ladies may remark that a certain form

of dress is more convenient or even more hygienic proximate danger for the soul reject it Cecilias will I period comma comma comma

semicolon

but if it becomes a grave and

it is certainly not hygienic for the spirit hence I must

The salvation of souls made heroines of the martyrs like the Agneses and amidst the sufferings and tortures of their virginal bodies their sisters in the faith comma comma in the love of Christ colon comma and in the

esteem for virtue

not find at the bottom of my heart the courage and strength to em dash a physical advantage No comma comma em dash to conserve safe and

sacrifice a little well-being pure the life of my soul period If comma

question mark

I will find strength and courage a bold fashion does not leave them

as some women say comma

with any evil impressions others evil question mark question mark

how can they know anything of the impression made on

Who can assure them that others do not draw therefrom incentives to I do not know the depths of human frailty nor what blood drips from the comma with its ignorance in the intellect comma and its and this to

wounds left by Adams sin in human nature comma its malice in the will comma

its ardent desire of pleasure

weakness towards the perilous attractions of the passions of the sense such a degree that man comma comma close quotation open quotation

semicolon

sees what is better and chooses what is worse comma like lead

because of that weight which always period

drags him down to the depths

If some Christian women could only suspect

the temptations and falls they cause in others with modes of dress and familiarity in behavior comma Faster. which they unthinkingly consider as of no importance period comma they

would be shocked by the responsibility which is theirs responsibility now more than ever semicolon therefore comma

I am aware of my

I will not let myself slip from the

perfection and transcendence for which I am

just as I shall not have the hem of my

dress

comma

ever comma

comma

above my knees

semicolon

the strap of my comma out of

undergarment place comma

which should always be either white or beige period

let alone slide down my arm

I am always careful and will comma of an elegance

ascertain that I am to respect the norms of decency and good taste sanely understood and perfectly honest period In brief comma

instead of following the comma I

materialistic and lascivious current which leads so many people astray today deliberately put myself at the service of spiritual ends period

Write me three copies. Sign it.

Projectile

The signs of life here are that of death. Little spiders that throve on the bugs that found their way in the room, the mosquitoes that suddenly buzzed by my ears, the little insects that crawled on the leaves of books, all smashed dead by my hand. The bodies of mosquitoes are on the window, the blood still there.

People have asked me where I live sometimes out of whim, others out of necessity for flood updates or picking me up and dropping me off. I cringe whenever I say Biak na Bato; it feels so coarse in my mouth, as though I were chewing rocks as I say it. I dont have the leisure of saying I live in Intimate Street, Calypso Street, Paraiso, or Third, Sixth, Seventh Street like my friends and other relatives do. For proms and balls, there was no evading the question unless I went on my own to the hotel or country club, or just stayed at home. I had to go, though, because my mom said so. She had the pleasure of putting make-up on me, dressing me up, and fixing my hair, loved having my date go in the house and opening the bedroom door to show me off. I always just led the boy out as soon as I could, awkwardly tugging his suit to the direction of the stairs. Going down the stairs or on the way to the parking lot, the date would comment on the house: how traditional Chinese it was with the workplace on the ground floor, and that my family had not yet outgrown it while his did; how difficult it was finding the street, and then the apology for the slight lateness because he got lost. One pointed out the stench, another laughed at the plump lantern torn apart by time and still blackening like a rotting pumpkin as it hangs in the warehouse. I was right to have expected those, but being right didnt make me win a thing. I was convinced saying Biak na Bato turned people off, so I took to answering with Banawe, a mistake every time as the customary reply was Rice Terraces? which made me feel like I belonged nowhere, was only cast into unfamiliar space. I asked my brother if his circle of friends thought of the Terraces upon hearing Banawe; he said no. His peers knew it, and even had a term for all those living in the vicinity: Banawe Boys. I wondered if my cousins next door felt some sort of shame in the unknown street name, but it seems like they didnt. They have friends over, so certainly they gave out the address.

Whatever is framed becomes permanent, for example, the sunset at my bathroom window. The bars that crisscross over the glass impede the view; and should I take my camera for a picture, they become part of a composition that shows nothing is ever clear from where I stand. The first time I drew my curtain to the side at night, I jerked in fright to see a person staring at me when I expected houses. I recognized myself and my room through the window, and still I laughed.

The convenience of things is in the nearness. Twenty-six steps on the staircase separate the ground floor to the dwelling; twenty-one between my grandparents place and mine. I live on the second floor, my room beside my brothers, both above the office. A door at the fourth floor opens to the playground with swings and seesaws. I once frolicked with my brother and my cousins there, bruised my right knee, and twisted an ankle. To view the sunrise or the sunset, one just has to go up the spiral stairs to the fifth floor, the rooftop. Uttered for me: There is no need to immerse myself and endure the stagnant traffic of vehicles for whatever reason; Im comfortable here. See me climb stairs to dine with my grandparents every meal.

I once had two moles beside each other on my lower right cheek. My grandmother and my mom wanted them cauterized, since its believed that a woman who has moles in the path of tears will become a widow. They rubbed my cheeks hoping to erase the pair; it remained. I am keloidal hence the doctor discouraged cautery. He suggested surgery instead since scarring there would be far more minimal; surgery it was. The skin along the area, though, itched weeks later; acne formed soon enough. While my mom blamed my laziness to constantly wash my face properly, I pointed out to her I was undergoing puberty, that the irritation would not have happened if it werent for the surgery and her belief of superstitions. My mom then accused my grandmother for pressing the need for clear skin.

Light insists honesty: The spotlight is turned on every six in the evening, off every four in the morning. Its there underneath the kitchen window of the second floor overlooking the parking lot and the gate for us to see who knocks, who has just come home. A few years ago, my father and I conversed right underneath the orange pool of light. Sub-text was prevalent: my head down, his hands on my shoulders. Attached to the slide where I used to play on, the basketball hoop rusts. No net hangs from it. It remains unmoved no matter how turbulent the wind against it may be. I used to look up to it from the bottom end of the slide. The sun finds its way in slowly and carefully unlike the ball my brother and my grandfather released upon flicking their wrists. A cousin two years younger than me waits with a boy at two in the morning for the gate to be opened. I see them sometimes from the kitchen window when I happen to be awake and hungry enough to look for food in the kitchen instead of surrendering to bed anticipating breakfast. He smiles when she is let in but manages to turn to him and wish him a good night. She walks right beside the part of the lot where a garden used to be.

10

Shadow occupies space and is shelter from heat and observation. You are under a roof, you flick open an umbrella because of its conception. Even the smallest and most fleeting of things have a science. A postulate: The length of a shadow on the ground is proportional to the cotangent of the suns elevation angle. A shadow is not an image of an image that distances you from truth but a form of its own that people see just as they see their reflection on the glass door they push open. A shadow cast on a wall is natural. It is most noticeable on a clean, clear wall.

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What is it about figures that people should tend to them? Some cast shadows on the wall before me. Prettier are the prisms. They remove my focus from the wallpaper I wish I could rip. Easiest at the seams. I dont because of the figures. The cost per square meter. How many square meters are there? People. Someones taste multiplied at least thrice, hence too this-and-that for every generation. Give me a number for timestart and endfor mass and volume of objects labelled 1 to n, for cash-on-hand and expenses to get to the difference. Figure out what makes a person. Measure the likeness of that persons blood and the percentage of proneness to a lung problem to mine, and perhaps you will arrive at a digit for singularity.

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I dont have friends over; the ground floor consists of scattered piles of boxes. Across the ceiling dangle cobwebs, nestling every insect and bug whether predator or prey, dead or alive. My grandmothers employees spend most of the day on a stool. Their bent bare backs glisten with sweat. They polish and sharpen parts of vehicles. The area is dim save for the light that plunges its way through where the garage gate should be, and the intermittent sparks. The sound of metal: a canon of hammer pounding nail, endlessly rolling grinders scratching away like a gramophone on a steady 78. A silver tube tossed, crashes in a box filled with others like it. The scent of boxes too putrid; a waft stabs the sinuses. Once during a typhoon when the local government officials opened the dams to release water to prevent them from breaking, the warehouse got flooded. A monsoon rain three years later resulted to the same mess: a collapse of the towers of stocks, pieces of metal jutting out the soggy boxes like fractured bone pushing against skin. The greying walls from years of dust became bistre with the addition of mud that swept across the place. The odor of mud, boxes, and rain altogether lingered for a month, and so did the germs on every speck of each surface. My grandmother was occupied with her drenched stock of auto supplies and the boxes for them. She ordered men around the house to go one way to dry things, another to pack them, and then another to pile them high up once more. I worried about my health. I found myself holding my breath and rushing past the muddle of brown every time I got home from schoolI gasped for air never mind fresh or not as I movedquickly turning the doorknob to let myself out of the warehouse and into my grandparents office. Its mint blue bubblegum walls attempted to console me, but with the undeniable stench and the tingling sensation on my fingertips from contact with the knob teeming with filthy microscopic life, I stormed to my room where I took time to wash my hands. I shivered in the warm water. One day I heard that the walls and the doors that had been submerged were scrubbed clean. I wondered what moved my grandmother to consider sanitation only to find out that my dad had scolded her workers for thinking of their salaries and work hours instead of health.

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The contrivance is found in the absence of choice. Choosing is in human nature, but nature itself contests it. That a person is older means that he knows better and makes decisions for the younger, and no change will happen until the young replaces the old, when, by this time, his own tastes will be dominant should he insist the communal lifestyle. Maybe the uniformed fleur-de-lis wallpaper will be torn down for one color of paint; windows to be without bars. For now, time unpermitting, things remain.

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My brother and I used to pretend we were ninjas or spies, creeping down the stairs, sprinting through the warehouse and work place. Sometimes, when I was ahead of him, I would hide behind one of the many stacks of boxes. Id jump out in time in a thump; hed shriek, occasionally nudge me. With stifled giggles we continued. Standing by his shoulder, I watched my brother open the side door of our aunts house slowly, put his left hand into the darkness to gather the chimes hanging by the doorknob. He then further pushed the door open to let me go through, then himself while closing it slowly behind, gingerly opening his hand to release the chimes that coyly swayed without a sound. We would creep through the living room and up the stairs to surprise our cousin in her bedroom. We invited her to play with us. It was only us three at the time. When exhaustion claimed the best of us, we strolled on our garden, even plucked little red flowers. My cousin sucked what she said was honey; my brother and I gave our humble bouquet to our mom.

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I told my mom I wanted a maya bird, and she had the cook catch one for me. The cook was in our living room; the maya bird happened to be there, too. It was then only a matter of her stretching out her arms and jumping to clasp the frenzied animal in her fingers. The birds impulse was certainly to dart to the wall not because it has no intellect to know a wall cant be passed through but that the wall is there and encloses as it should. Theres no escape at a corner; the cook finally caught the bird there. My mom got a big rectangular basket and inverted it to serve as the cage. The bird was chirping violently, still frenetic in its limited flight. My mom got a stick and pushed it through one of the open spaces of the basket. The bird finally had something to perch on and fell silent. I ran to my dad when I saw him, pulled his pants to follow me; I was going to let him meet my pet. Free the bird, he told me after seeing the makeshift cage and the bird. I didnt want to, especially not after I saw the difficult task of grabbing one by hand, the almost impossibility of it all. What if you were the bird and someone caged you? But Im not. Youll let it die. I asked my mom if that were true; she confirmed it. Later that day, I was at our parking lot with the cook; the maya bird was in her hands. Realizing I had not touched it yet, I asked if I could pet it before we let it go. The cook let me have the bird; she told me I should be the one to free it. The claws of the bird hurt my palms as it kicked itself loose from my grip. It wanted to be as far away from me as possible, if only because that was the natural course of things.

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Viewfinder
A1

To the traveler, it is only the image of the image of humanity in ordeal, not yet the proof that the natives

were triumphant. If the stirring from underneath the brushstrokes will inform her where the dragged naked body of the gladiator leads, if anywhere, then to her there is truth to the works significance.

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A2A3

There are always adjustments, always still an inconvenience over another then the choice to take the

lesser evil between, say, kneeling or crouching, letting the knee or possibly the bum scrape the ground for the sake of a photograph. She has settled to standing to take a picture of the second floor of the house, its two windows, from which slide wooden panels with squares of capiz shells on them arranged neatly nine by eight, are cut in half by the viewfinder.*
3

She can never sink further into the ground that looking up would have stretched the view. She can never

sink into the ground as it resists her weight, so she no longer attempts to.
*

A degree to the left or the right, and the next house would be included in the frame. She refuses to have

its walls, greying with pale yellow paint peeling off and infested voraciously by lines of cement, mar her composition of the windows.

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A4

They know more than she does, opening the door of the house* for her as if their own but really just

amidst theirs. She thinks she could have figured it out on her own, mustered the strength to either push or pull. Refusing acknowledgements, she keeps her gaze down. Alert should a shadow dart toward her.
*

A historical and architectural attraction, where, outside, little boys chase one another barefoot after

sliding slippers on the pavement. Their palms just as laden with dirt as the balls of their feet.

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A5A6

5 6

Her palms, hence the difficulty in considering that a life line is, that a heart line is, that a head line is. She can only guess the afterwards, if at night they see or reach heaven, mistake a claw of dust for stars

from where they retire, assuming they do.

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A7A8

Time begins to stop inside the house. In the process, she frowns. No one did the necessary retouches

when the norm is instant time travel without trace of a travelers present. Each must be pure.*
8

The improbability of seeing how things once were, and the satisfaction of every visitor will be

impossibility. It goes without saying that some will take a jab at her country and culture.**
*

The top of the Maria Clara dress is off-center the mannequins shoulders. It is blue, grey, and white all

at once as time does to it what time does to truth. The strap of the silken inner blouse has loosened, plunging the neckline to barely cover the chest.
**

The course of her blood has always shunned what she proclaims as hers. See in their skin the filth. See

how dust disperses then falls, indolent. See how the light of gold projects itself up, outward.

The contrivance over the natural course of things, as people know what it is they look for in order to

have it and then proceed.

Birthmarks of those closest to earth who shape it and on it rest, where the dust of cremated bodies are

poured.

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A9A10

On the streets: A man carries an electric fan on his shoulder, a towel on his head. Beside him a man

pushes a cart full of ripe bananas. Two little girls half her height help each other carry a bag of rice, both holding either side of the handle. One of them passes a plastic bag of ripe bananas to the other.
10

Its inevitable for her to trust the stranger who told her to be careful.* She takes her caution around the

plaza,** recalls how the natives abandoned their ancestral lands where their forefathers were buried. For convenience, language, too, allowed itself to be borrowed: araro, diqueSpanish.
*

Children here slip little rosaries around peoples wrists, and they would have to pay for them. Locals crowd the stalls right outside the church, some buying fruits, others flowers.

**

Granted, there is timelessness in the repetition of the mundane: the setting up of the tents, the buying

and selling, the officer standing at the sides, the church bell sounding every noon for Angelus. Throughout the day, some have their palms read; some still come back.

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A11

11

The church* as seen on her LCD display. The colors she sees with her own eyes and through the

viewfinder dont follow through on the photograph. On the one hand, it is the sun; that she smears sunblock again on her face and her arms lest her skin should darken attests to the flare. On the other, she knows well that her lens overexposes her subjects. What is the cost of another perspective?
*

Granted, too, that a green fence where a tarpaulin hangs and boldly states NO PARKING blocking the

entrance will be cropped out.

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A12

12

The closed hand. She wishes that answers be in front of her, read by someone who can, and told to her

honestly. It would then be time to assess which between fate and freewill exists in order to witness direction, if futures can be walked away from and approached.

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A13

13

She smiles at the sight of the museums pillars, posts, vases on display by the driveway.* The brass

knobs, the letters NM, glisten from the wooden door. The NM isnt to her liking, the typeface unnecessarily wavy; that she is there removes all other complaints.
*

Where she skipped over a puddle where candy wrappers and slim yellow leaves float, distorting through

ripples the reflection of the building.

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A14

14

Free admission; the lightness of feeling.

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A15

15

The staircase down the hall* leads her up to a floor** full of rooms.

Its walls are cushioned by webs, the floor she can hardly see with the dim fluorescents taking a while to

pervade from the high ceiling.

**

Planks of wood holding a large blue cloth taut blockade the other side of the corridor. She enters where

she can.

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A16A17

16

The absence of color in a painters works who drew the natives sailing, planting, dancing to place their

identity during another colonization. Only these doodles and drafts, framed, hang on the walls of the exhibit room.
17

The absence of that painters paintings of his countrymen.

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A18A19

18 19

The absence of the painting. What she cannot feel: the absence of feeling.

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A20

20

Perhaps if one were to listen closely, one would hear friction: the peoples deep breaths against the

curves of their mouth, the crumple of the brown paper bag; the childrens cupped hands sliding against the window, the same hands that take steel bars from trucks. Perhaps, then, there wouldnt be a need to search for things* and, should they not be found, add to the tremble in the air.
*

Through the directory on her left that has numbers corresponding to the names of halls without

indicating what they exhibit, she notes that even You Are Here is missing.

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A21

21

That which is elsewhere she wished to see.

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22

22

The elusive definition through the years: Do not do unto others. Do unto others. The quality of being.

As things should be.

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