“Badlands South Dakota in Pink” © Robert Fleming

 

Pesos

The teller at Banco de Oro called me Coco, even though my ID said Conrado. He never once looked down at the card. My father called me Conrado whenever he rang to ask for money.

I wired fifteen thousand pesos to the Dinagat slums on the first of every month for seventy-two months to keep him alive. All he left was forty-three loose coins in a Nescafé tin and a smell that had not worked out he was gone yet. The room measured nine feet by seven beneath a corrugated iron roof, trapping the midday heat. Other people pray in times like these. He taught me to count on the jeepney to the market, fish first, then the coins. The arithmetic was simple. Every year, there was less of him and more of them.

Paint sealed the window against the alley, and the door lacked a lock. A lone bulb hung from a stripped wire above a rice pot, black crust welded to the steel. His foam mattress was worn brown in the shape of a man, and above it hung two shirts on a nail and a wall fan that did not turn. By ten, the heat sat on my chest, and the sun was a creditor with all afternoon to wait. A thousand pesos was all that reached him. They took the rest, built a shrine on an island and called it heaven, and my father gave them fourteen thousand pesos a month for a photograph of the Master above his bed and a nickel ring.

Next door, a woman boiled pagpag, and the smell came through the plywood before her shadow did. Vinegar, stale frying oil, and meat gone sour in the heat, cooked down too many times to still behave like meat. It sold for eight pesos a plate. My father ate it on the days the thousand ran out before the month did.

The pot was boiling when I arrived, and it would still be boiling when I left. By noon, the smell had moved to the back of my throat and built itself a home there. The alley outside ran a meter wide and carried the street’s water down its center in black runoff, and children played through it as a radio somewhere pushed out a PBMA hymn.

The Philippine Benevolent Missionaries Association calls the faithful to remember in His light.

Lord, keep the name within Your light
Let no forgetting reach him where he rests under Your care
Bless the offering carried each day, small but faithful in Your sight
Bless the hands that send, the hands that receive, the island that does not abandon

I am not sure if the prayer is for him.

Money bought distance. I left as a boy with nothing but a suitcase and came back a woman with a salary. Each time I tapped confirm, the screen flashed its approval, and thousands of miles away, he hovered over a cracked phone waiting for the balance to climb. He knew nothing of the hours that funded those digits. All he knew was that when the money landed, he ate.

The peso had found that island before. When my mother was sick, my aunt in Boston sent eighty thousand pesos, enough for the operation. My nanay had no account to put it in. The only one of us with papers was my father, four years gone from the house by then. It went to him, and he agreed to come to Manila and take her to the hospital. The surgeon set a date, and my father did not board a plane that day, or any day after. He stopped answering, and she never got the operation. At the funeral, he told us he had donated the money to the PBMA because an angel told him our mother’s soul was past saving.

Afterwards, the household did not grieve so much as re-route. Six siblings still needed uniforms, medicine, rice, and somebody to sign the cheque when the landlord came. I was sixteen when I became that person. The ID still said, Conrado. I mothered them anyway. That is what mothers do in this country. They save up and send their children away. I learned that the day I turned nineteen and took a job keying invoices in a back office, where the glass towers run the air conditioning so hard the cold hits you at the door like a second city. Outside, the boys sell cigarettes one at a time, and sleep under the flyover at noon because the pavement holds the heat until midnight.

The exchange rate lived beside my pulse. I budgeted around the peso’s moods and the country’s weather and was never, not once, late. On the wall where another man hangs his children, my father had hung a PBMA calendar, the Master looking down in his white suit, every feast day inked in his careful hand and the first of each month circled twice. This was where it went. Forty pesos of metal, and he had worn it past the bone, a wedding band to a god I was not asked to share. I put it on my thumb, where it spun loose, and took it off.

Under the bed lay the rest of him. Strips torn from a school notebook, every line crammed with the same block capitals.

THE EFFEMINATE SHALL NOT INHERIT THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

Forty pages of it, pressed so hard the pen had gone through to the page beneath and the page beneath that. All written in a room I paid for, on a mattress I paid for, by a bulb I paid for, and he had kept it dry like something worth preserving. The notebook left my hand before I decided to let it go. It hit the floor, and the laminated prayer card came out from between the pages, the Master’s face looking up at me from the concrete, a hotline on the back, and an account number. The PBMA collects by bank transfer, the same as any utility.

One million eighty thousand pesos. Nineteen thousand dollars, on a bad day for the peso. I put my phone away and picked up his shirts. I had a flight at nine. The estate was one room. I gave it an hour.

Someone knocked on the tin wall twice, the knock of a man who already owns the place. He filled the doorway, and the room went dark, which was the only kind thing it had done all day. White short-sleeved shirt ironed to a blade, soaked through at the navel. His ring was the same as my father’s, and he held a folder under his arm, gone soft at the corners.

“Ma’am. Good noon. I am from the Philippine Benevo—”

“I know who you are.”

“I came for Tatang Conrado.” He untucked his shirt and dragged it across his face. “A faithful man—”

“What do you want?”

He stopped wiping. He looked at me properly now. “Who are you, ma’am?”

“I’m his daughter.”

“Tatang had no daughter.” There was nothing unkind in the way he said it.

I kept my voice flat. “What does he owe. I’m his next of kin.”

He took that in without a flicker, and the smile came back a degree warmer.

“No, ma’am. Tatang settled in full.” He said it with pride, as if the achievement were partly his. “I’m only here to close the file. One last maintenance payment. Four thousand pesos, due today.”

“Maintenance for what?”

“The plot. There’s a maintenance fee.” His hand opened toward the walls, as if the heat and the stain in the foam counted in his favour. “We settle the clearance, and we bring him home.”

“This was his home. I paid for it.” I held up the water bill. “Third notice. You took his money every year. Where were you when he was in the hospital, before they sent him home to die?”

“The body is temporary, ma’am. We do not insure the flesh.”

“No. You insured the hole you put it in. How much did he pay you?”

“He purchased the Divine Master Shrine package, ma’am.”

“On my money. While he ate pagpag off the woman next door.”

“And he reached it, ma’am. That is what people remember. Not how a man gets there.”

“The only thing he reached was a coffin. He starved himself for it.”

“It was never about the box, ma’am.” Patient, as if I’d misread a figure. “He chose all of it himself. The casket, the embroidered barong instead of the plain one. But the engraving, that’s what he cared about.”

“The engraving?”

“He was very specific, ma’am.”

“What does it say?”

He looked at me like he’d only just wondered who I was. “If you’re his next of kin, then you know. Tatang lost a boy.” He set the folder down and squared it with both hands. “This is all for his son. The plot, the casket, all of it.”

I picked up the folder.

PHILIPPINE BENEVOLENT MISSIONARIES ASSOCIATION
PREMIUM TIER: DIVINE MASTER MEMORIAL SHRINE
POLICY NO. 6041-DGT            STATUS: PAID IN FULL
TERM: 72 MONTHS             CLOSED:

I read it the way I read any invoice. Down the column. Summing as I went.

Casket…………….. ₱22,000
Barong…………….. ₱9,500
Plot……………….. ₱60,000
Procession band…….. ₱8,000
Marble plaque………. ₱40,500
TOTAL …………….. ₱140,000

The missionary took the barong from his bag and held it out to me, folded in tissue, already made. A slip of paper sat tucked in the fold.

I opened it.

Measurements, in a tailor’s pencil. Chest, thirty-six inches. Shoulder, seventeen inches. I had stood on a stool in Cubao, a man’s tape gathering my dimensions, my father outside with the rent money for the graduation gown. The body I had then.

I folded the slip back into the silk and turned to the last page of the file, in his handwriting, and under it a clean typed copy, so the carver could not get it wrong.

CONRADO SARMIENTO, JR.

MY SON, AS GOD MADE HIM

LOST TO ME IN HIS NINETEENTH YEAR

NOW RESTORED, WHOLE, IN THE LIGHT

“I’m not dead. I’m right here.”

“Ma’am.” He said it the way you settle a child. He had known from the doorway, and he had let me read the engraving myself.

He chose a dead son he could dress in silk and visit on feast days. Over a living daughter.
Seventy-two payments.

Never once late.

I checked the date the policy opened. The third of June, six years ago. The day of my surgery. He had remembered it to the hour.

He was still talking. “Money sent in love, ma’am, for a father to spend how he saw fit. A gift with a string on it was never a gift at all.”

“Then I’ll pay it and go.”

“Four thousand for the clearance. But ma’am, the name. The registry allows a correction. A fee, the Master’s review. It can be done, if the name is not the one you—”

“The name stays.”

He stopped. His shirt had gone dark to the third button, and he turned the ring once around the loose bone of his finger.

“You wish to leave it.”

“I wish to close the balance on the account.” The card was already in my hand, and I laid it on the glass of his terminal. The machine woke, and thought, and chimed, and fed out its slip.

He tore it off and read it, and his mouth moved before the sound did, because the slip printed the name on the card, and the name was not Conrado.

It read COCO SARMIENTO.

“Put him in the silk,” I said. “Bury him. Cut the stone the way he wrote it.” I drew the slip from his fingers. “He paid for a son. Give him his son.”

Outside, the sun stood at the top of the sky, and the tin threw it back white. I walked back up the alley. The woman was still bent over her pot, and I put a thousand pesos in her hand. It was the going rate for a month of my father’s life.

The Grab was waiting at the kerb. The air conditioning came down on my chest where the heat had been.
“To the airport,” I said.

Behind the glass, the city ran bright and loud, already turning into the past, and I opened my banking app and cancelled the standing order, the one that had gone out on the first of every month for the last six years.

In the graveyard on Dinagat Island, my name waited in marble for a tenant, and my father was the one moving in.

Rent paid in full.

 

Ashley Mangtani is a writer whose work explores ecological and social collapse, and the roles people inhabit in moments of crisis. Drawing on an M.Sc. in Environmental Science and a background as a civil servant in digital media policy, his work blends literary realism with slipstream and has appeared or is forthcoming in Litro, Washington Square Review, Boudin, Expat Press, Thieving Magpie, Flash Fiction Online, HAWKEYE, Mobius, Literary Garage, Empyrean Magazine, and others.

Robert Fleming (b. 1963) is a visual poet and digital artist from Lewes, DE. He is an editor at Old Scratch Press, Instant Noodles magazine, and the banner creator for Oddball magazine’s Horrorthon and Christmas wars. His books are White Noir, an Amazon best seller, and Con-Way in 4 in 1, #4. He is an award-winner: 2025 Massachusetts poetry Olympics silver/bronze medals; 2022 San Gabriel Valley California-broadside, 2024/2021 Best of Mad Swirl poetry; Delaware Press: Poetry: 3rd, 2 honorable mentions (HM), graphic design 4 HM, photography 1 HM; nominations: 2025 best of short fiction; 2023 Blood Rag Poet, 2 Pushcart, 2 Best of the Net.