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Reine

I’ve just reread Reine Melvin’s short story collection, A Normal Life, and was floored all over again. The writing is exquisite, the stories intense: she fillets her characters with a very fine blade. Most of the stories happen in the Philippines in the late 80s, and the revolutions and coups that were occurring at the time are not nearly as emotional as what her fictional people go through.

A Normal Life is now available at the Ateneo Press bookstore and at Loyola Bookshop. Call (02) 441 0854 to order copies. The book will also be available at mall bookstores, but why wait.

(Disclosure: Reine is one of my favorite humans. She’s Filipino-American, born and raised in Manila, and lives in Paris. Her first novel will be published this year.)

Here’s an excerpt.

A Normal Life
by Reine Melvin

When she was nine, and still living in Manila, her parents gave her a pregnant rabbit for her birthday. The servants built a cage high above the ground, with wire screen on the bottom and wooden boards across three sides. This was where the rabbit would have its babies, safe from the chickens, mongrels and geese that wandered the grounds of her home. For weeks, she could hardly fall asleep at night, wanting nothing as badly as the birth of her rabbits.

When they were born, she was disappointed. Furless, pink-fleshed, they looked like skinned rats.

“Patience,” her mother said. “Nothing stays the same.”

Every morning before school, the girl raced down the mahogany staircase to see if white fur had begun to grow and the rabbits been transformed into something she could love. On weekends, she checked the rabbits three or four times a day. One Saturday, as she arrived in front of the cage, she saw a chicken pecking up at the wire screen and bits of flesh and blood in its beak. She did not move. She did not call for help. What she remembered next was her mother shaking her and shouting: “How could you have just stood there and watched them?”

She never played with animals again. They died too easily; she had lost interest. Once in a while, sitting under the mango tree by the banks of the Pasig, she watched chickens scuttling through the bushes. It was their world that interested her now, these creatures that could eat what she wanted to love. At nine, she began to understand that power had life on its side, and nothing was as powerful as the ability to destroy.