The road to Maramag was hardly a journey; a siesta would be enough to wake up in Davao City. Sir Neil mistook the cogon grass flowers for sugarcane inflorescences, or perhaps it was the other way around. None could say for certain, and the driver was very eager to blur the view just to arrive home before dark.
The van hurtled. The sky loomed as a subdued canvas. All there was to see were fields of white arrows, nocked on arching green bows, ready to pierce the clouds. There were long blades, too, unsheathed from the green beyond the windows beside you.
The ghosts of the burned weeds wisped from the blazing fields. The fires declared that they were no longer welcome. They could swallow you if you entered their war. But the wet roads against hurrying wheels could tell that they were bound to be miserable.
The road’s diversions disappeared in the rain’s mirror. Mist devoured everything. The sky grew paler, and so did the windows. The cinders of the hulls that had been burning were ashen to the cold. The arrows undrew, then bowed in surrender to the storm.
The tempest’s howls continued to trouble everyone, but the hum of the van lulled its unwetted passengers not to worry—to close their eyes until the weaves and stretching weaves of concrete and steel stood in their silent greetings.
And when the street lamps’ familiar orange finally does stain the roads, you could sigh to be home and not remember a brighter orange—perhaps a flame—and refuse to recollect that you were under the same storm with the flowers of the cogon grasses. You are tired and cold from gruelingly sitting through a siesta, but forget that the lives beyond your windows were wet from wading through the storm’s undoing.
James Bryan Galagate Delgado is a fourth-year Medical Biology student at Mapúa Malayan Colleges Mindanao. He is also a fellow of the 2018 ADDU Summer Writers Workshop and the 2025 Davao Writers Workshop.