Prologue
It was already afternoon.
Dust swam in the thin light that slipped through the blinds of the small-town morgue, settling on steel tables and silence. The operator, sixty-five, hair white as candle wax, moved slowly about his day. He should’ve retired years ago, but who would take his place? His children had finished college. The pay didn’t matter anymore. It was the waiting that kept him.
So he waited — for the dead, for the next name, for something to do.
He had torn off a big November sheet from an old calendar, the kind the funeral service handed out every year. There was one extra, so he took it. On it he wrote two-digit numbers — the last digits drawn each day in the PCSO lotto. Guess them right and you win.
Illegal, yes, but even the police joined sometimes. Imagine: ten pesos turning into seven hundred. What’s ten pesos to lose?
He tried once, but lost. Tried again, won. Then lost again. Then it became a habit. The feeling was good — the feeling, not the money. The thrill covered the loss; the amount never did.
Now he was watching the lotto draw again. He had gambled twenty pesos.
The calendar lay on the table beside him, each date filled with numbers. His friends had taught him a trick: look for a pattern — vertical, horizontal, diagonal.
There had to be a pattern.
Some hidden order that made the world less random.
And yes, he saw one. Even if there wasn’t any real connection, he convinced himself there was.
Patterns.
Whatever it was, he believed he had figured it out today.
The paper waited on the table while he watched the results, anxious. It was of no use now. He leaned back, scratching the edge of the table with his thumbnail.
That’s life. You look back — at your choices, your luck, the people around you, maybe even Providence. You try to see a pattern, hoping it all makes sense. You think you’ve figured life out, so you look forward.
But then—
Shk! Shkkt! Shkkt.
Life stabs you — quiet, quick, when you’re not looking, when you least expect it.
What a twist.
He lost twenty pesos. But it was just twenty — what’s wrong with that? He moved on.
The dead body lying nearby had also been stabbed. Three times.
Just like that piece of paper, someone — or something — had decided this boy was of no use alive.
Or maybe being alive had already become a liability.
A police sergeant and a barangay kagawad entered. The operator turned off the TV.
“Sir, Kagawad. Good afternoon po!” he muttered. There is always a po, even to the young. The police were as old as his son, and the kagawad around his fifties, yet rank and salary decided who was who.
He guided them to the dead on the steel table. No one had claimed the boy. No media yet; no one had given a tip. Their days just went by — none of their concern.
After pulling back the sheet, the kagawad made the sign of the cross.
“Still young,” he murmured. “Doesn’t even look like trouble.”
The operator pointed out the abrasions on the knees and hands — signs he’d been running and stumbled before the stabbing. He showed the belongings: a shirt, pants, handkerchief, a few bills, and a bracelet.
The bracelet was plain — brown and black threads woven together, the colors fading into each other like dusk and smoke. In the middle hung a wooden cross, small and imperfect, shaped by a patient hand that never aimed for perfection.
Among the bills was a receipt from a donut shop and a dried sampaguita. The boy probably slipped them into his pocket with his change and forgot.
The young sergeant studied them. The devil is in the details. He needed a clue, and there hadn’t been any at the scene.
Forensics here was still old-school — magnifying glass and faith. This was a barrio, where some crimes were blamed on aswang, and some sicknesses on duendes you’d accidentally peed on.
They were just an hour from the city — universities, malls, businesses — yet here, people still clung to old beliefs even when proof said otherwise. People were too stubborn to change their ways.
He examined the receipt. The date was last Sunday. The timestamp read 11 p.m. A light bulb flickered in his mind. The donut shop — the one they stopped at for merienda when in the city. He remembered the children selling sampaguita outside.
Right — the boy was there Sunday night.
Relief washed over the three of them. The body might soon have a name. The police called the station to coordinate with the city police.
When they left, the morgue fell quiet again. The operator looked at the body one last time before drawing the cloth back over it. Then his eyes returned to the calendar on his table — the squares filled with numbers, all his guesses about luck and life.
Patterns, he thought. We spend our days tracing them — in winning numbers, in faces, in the reasons people live or die.
But fate always skips a line.
It comes from the blank spaces — the ones you never see coming.
