The story takes place in Davao City, on the island of Mindanao, Philippines, during the years when Rodrigo Duterte was the city’s mayor and summary executions of people suspected of being common criminals or drug dealers were commonplace.
His parents couldn’t believe what they’d heard. Their son’s name had been read on TV. He had a week to change his ways, the mayor had said. Or else.
Or else what. His mother was shaking. Or else what?
His father was the first to say something. It must be a mistake, he said to her. Alex was only a boy. He couldn’t be that person they’d named. They both had dropped what they were doing—him polishing a pair of brown leather shoes, her writing a list of neighbors who had given donations for the wake at the next door—when they heard the man on the television. Alex would keep hearing about these details every time he overheard his parents recall the moment to their close friends.
Alex had been out for more than an hour and it was almost time for lunch. He’d told his mother that he’d be playing basketball with friends. They could send him away to Manila with his aunts, his mother would tell him later. He could continue school and go to college there. The best universities were in Manila, and one of his aunts had promised before to support him.
Soon, Alex walked into the house, a lean figure brimming with youth, his face already healing from an inflammation he’d developed in the summer, his hair seeming to catch fire in the light pouring through the door.
Alex noticed the odd way they were both quietly seated, then he slipped into his room, rolling his basketball under the bed. He strolled back into the living room, wiping his face and neck and arms with a bath towel.
“Sit down,” his father said.
The first thing that came to him was the trigonometry exam he’d flunked the month before. Had the school already mailed his grades?
“What is it?” Alex asked them, unconsciously smoothing the linen covers of the couch, where he sat whenever he wanted to hog the TV.
“Do you use?” Mr. Abelar asked.
“Use?” This wasn’t about school. Alex waited for his father to speak again, but those words seemed to have tired him.
“Shabu!” said Mrs. Abelar. “Shabu, drugs. Do you use drugs?”
What came to his mind was if he knew someone at school, anyone, who had used shabu before.
“What?” He wasn’t sure if he’d heard what his mother had said. What?
“Don’t lie,” said Mr. Abelar calmly. “We are trying to help you.”
He shook his head. “I don’t do that. I . . . I don’t even know what shabu looks like.”
He’d meant to say that he hadn’t actually seen the stuff before. Of course he knew the white bits packed in tiny plastic bags. They’d been showing it on the news every day for as long as he could remember.
“The mayor read your name on TV,” said Mr. Abelar.
The room was tilting—the view of his parents watching him, listening to each word—turning askew from where he was sitting. How come the mayor himself knew his name, the mayor who sounded like he wanted to eat his enemies’ flesh when he talked about them on TV? Hadn’t they made a mistake? Was it really his name? He placed his hand on his forehead. He closed his eyes.
“I smoke cigarettes at school,” Alex said. “With my friends. That’s it.”
He never caused trouble. Not anymore, at least. The most he’d done was spray paint his initials on the wall of a newly constructed shopping mall, an attempt to beat a classmate who had drawn the anarchy sign on one of the pillars of an overpass.
“You are not lying to us?” Mrs. Abelar said.
“You believe him more than me?” Alex said.
“We are going to find a way,” said Mrs. Abelar. “Your father and I know people.”
“Do you sell drugs?” asked Mr. Abelar.
“Pa!” Alex said.
“The names on TV,” Mrs. Abelar said. “The mayor said they sold drugs, and he wants them out of the city.”
He wanted to take his shirt off; the fabric stuck uncomfortably on his damp skin.
“Tomorrow,” said Mr. Abelar, “you come with me tomorrow.”
“Where? I have class.”
“You come with me tomorrow!” Mr. Abelar said.
The high after the game was fading. Alex wished he hadn’t come home. He didn’t quite understand what was happening, but he knew he was in a mess that he didn’t bring on himself.
Alex was relieved when they didn’t see the mayor the following day. He and his father took a jeep to a cafeteria beside the public park. At a table in the back, a man whom Alex had never met before was waiting for them. “He’s my fraternity brother,” Mr. Abelar told Alex. “He’s going to help us.” Alex hadn’t known that his father had a fraternity. The man, Alex learned, was one of the mayor’s close aides. The mayor had been in power for as long as Alex could remember, although he hadn’t paid much attention to him.
The man asked Mr. Abelar what he knew. Immediately, Mr. Abelar said, “My son doesn’t use drugs.” Where could a high-school student find the nerve to sell drugs? He was only in high school, high school, Mr. Abelar was saying, and now Alex’s name had been read from a list of shabu dealers. Surely they were not wealthy, but they provided for him, gave him enough so he wouldn’t be embarrassed.
“It doesn’t matter,” the man said. “He’s been listed. Those lists are the real thing.”
The man told Alex and his father that they had to make an appointment with the mayor. Alex should ask for forgiveness and promise that he would go to rehab.
“I’ll let you know when,” said the man.
“How long do we have to wait?” asked Mr. Abelar.
“A week maybe. Right now, he’s out of town.”
“We’re talking about my son’s life.”
“I’ll let you know.”
After the warning, Alex thought, the killings followed. The hit men drove motorcycles, often in daylight. The going price, some of his friends in their neighborhood had said, was about five to six thousand a hit. Leave the city or suffer the consequence. The man on the television sounded both like God and a madman. His teachers in elementary school invoked the mayor’s name when telling off students who had fake tattoos or wore bracelets made from skewered coins. He’d make you eat that, they’d say. Soon there were stories about hit men, shootings out on the streets. But many of his friends, including his own relatives, didn’t seem to mind that, rumor had it, the mayor was behind the killings.
“People are used to it,” Alex had heard his father say before to a relative who had stopped by on the way to another town. “But the city is better now that criminals are afraid.” His uncles and aunts had told him how dangerous the city was when they themselves were younger. Fighting between the military and communists, they said, had reached town. One granduncle took part in a militia whose members, several of whom were civilians, carried guns and machetes. His father took pride in this bit of the story. Alex’s granduncle was a local hero, Mr. Abelar would say, a brave man who fought the enemies of the city.
His parents decided that Alex shouldn’t go to school until he and his father had seen the mayor. For a couple of days, Alex didn’t go out of the house, until restlessness kicked in and he snuck out to play basketball with his friends. He received an earful from his mother when he got back home.
Alex and his father arrived shortly after the doors of city hall opened. A security guard with a thick neck and grimacing at the entrance asked Mr. Abelar where they were going. Employees and visitors pacing in and out of rooms filled the lobby. After Mr. Abelar told the guard, they were asked to sign in a logbook, and then they proceeded to a line that stretched to the back of the building. Only the mayor’s word, his father told Alex, could ensure his safety.
The receiving room was freezing. Inside, the employees who were not sequestered in cubicles glanced at them briefly before going back to what they’d been doing. At last Alex and his father were called.
The man oddly looked plain in a striped shirt and jeans, like he wasn’t actually the mayor but a repairman summoned to fix the air-conditioning. He had a coarse and dour face, belly spilling out of his belt. Mr. Abelar shook the man’s hand with excessive deference that embarrassed Alex. In so many words, Mr. Abelar told the mayor, whose surly expression hardly shifted, that Alex was a good son, he wasn’t involved in anything illegal. In fact he played sports, and he was damn good at it. The mayor nodded. Alex stared at the floor.
“You came here to tell me how well you raised your son?” the mayor said.
“Mayor, what I’m saying is,” Mr. Abelar’s voice was breaking, “my son is not a pusher. I’m giving you my word. He’s not a drug pusher.”
“See what your father is going through?” The mayor turned to Alex. “See how your father is suffering?”
Loops of ice formed on Alex’s back. He knew the mayor prided himself on his plainness, on being like one of the regular folks. Seeing him up close, Alex found the man’s ordinariness somewhat sinister, a pretense that allowed him to behave hideously in spite of his position. Mr. Abelar bowed his head, and for a second, Alex thought he was going down on his knees.
“I had the list checked,” said the mayor. “Your son is not in it.”
Mr. Abelar profusely thanked the mayor. He was only messing around, the mayor told them. After all they came all the way. A little suspense wouldn’t hurt. Might as well make it worth their while. Alex almost sobbed.
“It’s a shabu runner from the squatters’ area,” said the mayor. “What do you know? The little ape and your son almost have the same name.”
Mr. Abelar turned to Alex, eyes laughing. “There’s the son of a bitch! There you go.”
“You were scared, weren’t you?” The mayor laughed. “But you know, your son might actually do it. He has plenty of time.”
“I won’t,” said Alex, his mouth dry as paper. The room was too small. He might not be able to breathe, he thought irrationally.
“Put the fear in your heart, no, dong?” The mayor grinned at him. “Young man, you have nothing to fear because you’re not doing anything wrong. It’s those animals who should be afraid. You have to take the fear to them. Smoke them out of their hole.”
Later at home, while his father was preparing dinner, his mother talking to someone on the phone—“Yes, everything was set right, the mayor himself said so”—Alex thought about how things could have ended if they hadn’t come forward.
“Let this be a lesson, son,” his father said on the table at dinner. “Either you ruin—”
“I didn’t do anything,” Alex said.
“What I’m saying—”
“There’s no lesson.” Alex pushed his plate. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Watch your mouth,” said his mother.
“Of course, son,” his father said. “You didn’t do anything. Of course. Nobody said you did something. Really anything.”
He wanted to say something, but the look in his father’s eyes stopped him. He stared at his wrist on the edge of the table. After they’d left city hall, Alex felt for a moment that a load had been taken off his shoulders, but on the way home, he couldn’t stop thinking about what could have happened.
When Alex finally showed up at school after his name was cleared, some of his classmates made light of the situation. As far as they were concerned, it was unthinkable for Alex to be dealing drugs, and if he did, he had been hiding it well from them, and now the joke was on him. Many seemed to have seen the announcement on TV, from the first years to the seniors who only now heard of his name.
In the afternoon the school team trained for the interschool league. They played at the outdoor court where they also held the flag ceremony in the morning.
“You got new shoes,” said his classmate Roy when they met in the court. Roy, whose strong knees and quicker movements had often outplayed Alex in basketball games after class, spoke to Alex as though he hadn’t heard anything.
Alex rubbed the tip of one of his sneakers on the back of his leg. His aunt living in the States had sent the shoes, he told Roy. The shoes came in a balikbayan box stuffed with canned food, chocolates, bottles of lotion, detergent, and bath towels. The package arrived while he and his father were out to see the mayor. When they returned from city hall, the gifts from his aunt were a welcome diversion, as if Alex had been rewarded for not being the one who was named.
After doing drills, Alex and Roy both played on the same side, a mix of new and a few former players who were now in college, coming back just to play.
“You’re still here, Abelar?” said one of their opponents. “Coach knows what you’ve been up to?”
Redner dela Rosa was a couple of years older, but Alex had known him since elementary school. Alex pressed closer to Redner, who was slightly shorter but more muscular, but Roy pulled them apart.
Alex’s side led by four points for most of the first quarter, but by the second, the other side surged to a twelve-point lead. The other team held on to their lead until the third quarter, Alex and his team only able to cut down the deficit by seven points. Sometime in the fourth, he found himself trying to squeeze under the rim against two other players when Redner appeared and smacked the ball away, his fingers jabbing Alex’s left eye.
“Stop messing around!” Roy shouted at Redner. Two of their teammates had approached Alex, who was bent over, grabbing half of his face.
Redner shrugged. “I’m not the addict here,” he said, walking away.
The game continued, the players jostled for the ball, Alex watching closely. When Redner got possession and leaped for the basket, Alex clung to him and yanked him down, his face smashing on to Render’s rib, and then they were tackling each other on the pavement, the other players pulling them apart. Alex had a blackened eye, Redner a ruptured lip.
The following week, the coach told Alex to take a “timeout” from the team, even though interschool league was days away. The high school director wanted a word with him at her office.
His parents were asked to come to school and told about Alex’s behavior, how his temper had caused a disturbance. Was there a problem at home that needed sorting out? No, Mr. Abelar told the principal, there was no problem. Mrs. Abelar, who sat next to Alex, agreed. Alex was being teased when he turned violent against another student, the school director continued. She was also aware of stories about Alex being linked to illegal drugs. The school director hoped none of it was true, but if it were, she said to them, she knew people who could help their son. My son is no addict, Mr. Abelar said. He’s not a drug dealer. How could you say such a thing about your own student? What kind of a shit hole school are you running here? Before the principal could assure them that she meant no harm, Alex and his parents were going down the staircase, his father yelling at him to hurry, he was going home with them.
Some nights, before Alex shut his eyes, a hole gnawed through his chest. There were times when he forgot: he would go about the day without feeling a weight bearing down on him, a stillness returning to the world until he was reminded again, his muscles knotting up, his nerves humming with unease. Each time he woke with the knowledge of that list, the more fearful he grew, and sometimes he even believed that what they did at the city hall was for nothing.
On a Friday, the week of third grading exams, Nikka Verano, one of his classmates and Roy’s girlfriend, came up to Alex during lunch. He thought she was going to ask him about some requirement. Instead, Nikka told him that two men had come to their classroom looking for him. “I told them they were in the wrong section,” she said. Alex asked her what time the men came.
“In the morning,” she said. “But they left right away.”
“Did they say who they were?”
She didn’t ask. She thought he knew them.
The thought of these men hounded Alex until the evening. Both his parents were home. At dinner they were talking about something else when they noticed him staring at his plate. What was he trying to pull this time, his father said. His mother asked if he was not feeling well.
“Two men came to see me today,” Alex said.
“What?” Mrs. Abelar said.
“They didn’t find me.”
“What are you talking about?” Mr. Abelar asked.
Alex stared at his father. “What we did was useless, Pa.”
Mrs. Abelar asked Alex what they looked like. Did he get their names? Did he know them from somewhere? Alex told them he didn’t know who they were. He didn’t even see them.
“That’s nonsense,” his father said. “You’re cleared.”
“But if they come back?” Alex said. “And I meet them?”
Mr. Abelar must have heard the tremble in Alex’s voice because, the following day, they went to the police precinct to file an incident. But the police weren’t too keen, especially since Alex didn’t have proof, and nothing really had happened to him. Mr. Abelar tried to explain the list of drug suspects read on TV, but the policemen insisted that there was no case. Not even an incident.
Alex didn’t go to school on Monday the following week. His parents didn’t say anything. The next day, when Alex still didn’t want to go to school and began talking about quitting the rest of the school year, Mr. Abelar told him he would take him to school himself. Alex reasoned that he’d already missed a lot of his classes, he might as well start again, or transfer to another school. What would Alex do for the rest of the year, said Mr. Abelar, sit on his balls until Christmas?
But nobody came to look for Alex when he returned to school. The next day was uneventful, and then the week was over.
He became listless, easily distracted. Back home, the sounds coming from the television unnerved him. He stayed away whenever his mother was watching something. Meanwhile his father hardly spoke to them, except when they had to, like before meals, or when his father was looking for something inside the house. Alex’s parents had a fight after Mrs. Abelar brought up again the idea of sending Alex to Manila to study.
He had clipped another boy in the eye during a basketball game at his elementary school, so his father made Alex spend the summer in Santa Cruz. In the beginning he kept to himself at the house of his aunt who managed the cockpit at the town proper. At least he was allowed to bring his bike. The dirt roads led to what seemed like boundless fields of bananas. Children followed him around because he was the only boy who owned a real mountain bike, which he rode around town in the afternoon. In one of those bike runs, he decided to go up a hill close to the bay.
Alex was surprised to find them, two boys only a few years older than him, sitting there watching the sea. Had he known that he wouldn’t be alone on that spot that afternoon, he would have returned home sooner.
One of the boys, taller, skinnier, maybe the older of the two, was taunting him to let them borrow his bicycle. The other boy had big ears and awkwardly flashed his teeth at Alex, maybe worried that the older boy would try something. Alex became nervous and angry at the same time. These boys were up to no good. The older one was persistent, but Alex dismissed him.
“If you won’t leave your bike now,” said the boy, “I’ll take it soon enough.”
He was huffing when he got back to town. When his bike went missing a few days later, Alex went to the police.
Alex himself described the boys to the policeman who wrote the blotter. At first Alex was hesitant to go to the police after his aunt said they should, but he remembered the way those boys laughed at him as he pedaled away from them. A few days after, they returned to the police station. He found the two boys already there, sitting in a corner next to a desk. He was so surprised to see them that he pointed at the boys right away, as if waving to a couple of friends he hadn’t seen in a while. “That’s them!” he told his aunt.
Days before Alex left Santa Cruz that summer, a neighbor came to his aunt’s house to tell them that Alex’s bicycle had been found, its front tire deflated, the handlebar slightly crooked. They’d found it under a bridge that linked the town to the highway going to the city.
Years later, when he was already in high school, Alex would recall those two boys. His father had met with a military officer friend of his to talk about the strange men who were looking for Alex. Mr. Abelar received the usual advice to be vigilant. Later that day, after his mother told Alex where his father had been, telling him not to worry anymore and to focus on school instead, Alex thought of those boys. He had never bothered to find out till now what happened to those boys after the police had taken them.
When Alex stopped pretending that he was fine, that he had put behind him what happened, things began to feel less of a burden. He managed in this way until the end of the school year. By the time he was a senior and had to prepare for college admissions tests, he was looking forward to life in the university.
One day in April, Alex skipped graduation rehearsals to go to the shopping mall, whether to play arcade games or watch a movie he hadn’t yet decided. Since he’d submitted all school requirements, he was taken by a feeling of newness, nervous and excited at the prospect of starting afresh, at something within his grasp.
The mall wasn’t far from campus, but he hopped on a jeep to get there quicker. The jeep had stopped twice to pick up more passengers before he recognized his mistake; he’d taken the opposite route.
He could get off, but it would already take longer to catch another ride. He figured there was some time, and the jeep needed to go only a couple more blocks. He sat at the center of the vehicle, until a few passengers left and he could move close to the exit. So did two boys, not that much younger than him, both wearing shirts whose sleeves had been cut off. One was skinnier and darker, the other had dry, grayish skin and brown hair. Alex was sitting beside the brown-haired boy, and when he scooted over, both boys followed suit. The boys were loud. They couldn’t stop blabbing about some person who was so dumb the thought of him left them in stitches, even inside a half-empty jeep. For a few seconds, Alex felt that they were talking about him. Ignoring them, he stared at the road.
Alex wasn’t paying attention to the passenger sitting across him near the exit. His mind was elsewhere when it began to happen.
The sound hurt his right ear the most, digging into his head. Alex thought that it was him who’d been shot, and the boy next to him was trying to hold him. He thought it was his blood he could see on his forearms, his uniform, his basketball shoes. He couldn’t hear anything. The jeep, he felt, was rocking. He couldn’t quite steady himself, his legs were so soft.
The other passengers had run away, leaving only Alex and the boy who’d been shot. Alex heard his own voice rising. Calling for some help. The boy’s head was on Alex’s shoulder, so he pushed him and didn’t turn back when the boy fell on the seat. When he jumped out of the vehicle, there were people coming toward him, one of them might be the driver, Alex couldn’t discern, all of them men of a certain age, asking him things. Do you know him? Where do you live? What’s your name young man?
It wasn’t me, Alex was saying, it wasn’t me. The men were asking him about what he saw, but he wasn’t hearing them. Instead he yelled at them, pushing their hands off him, pleading to them that it wasn’t him, it wasn’t him who’d killed the boy.
He wasn’t supposed to be having a vacation alone in the south of Cebu, but his friend from work couldn’t make it at the last minute. An emergency, his friend had explained on the phone.
Alex had already made a reservation months before. The resort probably thought that it was for a couple because they booked them a hut with a matrimonial cot, which included bath towels wound into two swans kissing over the bedcovers. His friend would have found it a hoot. The resort was clean, and big enough not to feel crowded, even when Alex got there during peak season. The lobby had Wi-Fi. He’d learned when he got to the resort that his friend’s younger sibling had not returned home or called for almost a week.
In the afternoon a man came to Alex’s hut, asking him to confirm reservations for the sightseeing tours. The tour guide had thick brown hair, a broad, pockmarked face, and ears that stuck out slightly. When Alex handed back the clipboard where he’d written his name, the guide stared at his feet and then abruptly left.
The next day Alex expected to see the tour guide, but the man wasn’t in his group. They drove for about an hour and a half from Oslob to Badian and visited a waterfall that cascaded down rocks covered in grass and green moss, spraying the branches of a tall bamboo grove. Alex took a few pictures, swam for a minute, and returned to the van before the others could.
As their van drew up in the parking lot of the resort, Alex recognized the rude tour guide sitting on the curb and smoking. The driver joined him as soon as all his passengers, including Alex, had gotten off the van. Alex caught the tour guide staring up at him again as he walked past them toward his rented hut.
A familiar edginess settled upon Alex in the evening. It started at dinner and lingered on as he walked across loose sand to an outdoor bar, where he ordered a bottle of beer. He was leaving the bar when he saw, having drinks at a table not far from the shore, the driver of their van from earlier. He was with a companion—the rude guide.
The driver offered Alex a shot of rum.
“This is Kirk,” the driver introduced the guide. “He’s from Mindanao too.”
Alex introduced himself. He could feel Kirk’s eyes on him as he took the shot. What was with this guy? He thought of thanking them and taking his leave. But he changed his mind and sat next to the driver.
“Why are you alone, sir?” said Kirk mechanically, as if this was the way he opened a conversation with every client.
“Let him be,” the driver said. “Can’t a grown man have a vacation by himself?”
Alex turned to look at Kirk. Their eyes met fleetingly before Kirk wiped his face with his shirt sleeve. The guy was probably tipsy, Alex thought. He quickly looked away when Kirk opened his eyes and caught him staring.
“Can I have some of that?” Alex said to him, eyeing the glass of Sprite. Kirk handed it to him.
“There are many beaches in Mindanao too, no, sir?” the driver said. “But I guess there are no whale sharks over there.”
Alex was only half listening as he, glancing at Kirk, tried to recall where he’d seen someone whose ears jutted out like that. Kirk, after that first awkward question, had fallen silent.
“So, sir,” the driver was saying, “do you think we’ll be better off if your mayor becomes our president?”
He was still not through with this, Alex thought. Earlier that day, after he found out where Alex was from, the driver had perked up. He then said that it was about time somebody outside of the capital took charge.
Alex chose his words cautiously, tossing the question back at the driver. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you think?”
“Hey, dong!” the driver yelled at Kirk. “Talk to your neighbor here!”
“It’s you who live there,” Kirk said to Alex. “You tell us.”
When Alex didn’t answer, the driver took a swig of rum and said to Kirk, “He’s just being modest. We know how proud you people are of your mayor. He’s like a god back there, right?”
Warmth had spread in Alex’s stomach. It had been a while since he’d had rum, or anything as strong. The way the driver was talking about the mayor, how he seemed wooed, persuaded. He didn’t even know the man the way he and his father knew him. What made Alex uncomfortable was that, all this time, he’d felt some affinity. He was ours, and we were his. The years of living there had taught him into working and thinking a certain way. They were beholden to the one in command because it seemed that the only other choice was chaos. For their submission, they’d been rewarded with some order, a little peace.
The driver turned to Alex and continued, “Kirk here won’t vote for him.” He threw a peanut at Kirk. “The mayor killed someone you know, dong?” The driver sneered.
Alex asked, “Are you from Davao?”
Kirk stared at the ground.
“His friend got shot,” said the driver. “He said it was the mayor’s orders.”
“Let’s not talk about this anymore,” Kirk said.
But the driver ignored him. “Now explain this to me,” he was saying. “Sir, explain this to me please. Could every killing be one man’s doing?”
When neither one took the bait, he continued, “Maybe your friend did something. I mean, why would he, why—why would he get shot if he didn’t do something to deserve it? Right, sir?” He gestured to Alex. “That—that’s how it goes back there, right?”
“That’s enough,” Kirk said.
“Where in Davao are you from?” Alex asked Kirk.
Kirk only gazed at him for what felt like several minutes. Alex asked him again where in Davao he was from.
“I’m not really from there,” said Kirk. He’d been living and working in Cebu, he explained, working as an errand boy while his employers sent him to school. He eventually moved down south where he was hired as a tour guide.
“I thought he said—”
“My friend was,” said Kirk. “Well, he lived there for a while. Then he was killed.” He looked away.
Alex paused, fumbling with the urge to probe further. He wanted to reach out from across the table, as if he too had lost someone, something he couldn’t take back.
“It’s terrible,” Alex said. Kirk looked back at him. “What happened to your friend,” said Alex. “Terrible.”
“Yes,” Kirk said. “It was a terrible thing.”
The driver butted in. “That’s why he left. He’d have been shot too if he didn’t.”
The remark caught Alex off guard; he didn’t laugh with the driver. He fidgeted in his seat. Then he got up and said that he was going back to his hut.
He wove around stools and tables, rowdy guests. A live band just began playing reggae. He nearly rammed into a waiter carrying a tray of beer and food. The rum had shot to his head, Alex thought. Finally he crossed a stand of coconut trees and searched for his room among the huts facing the beach. It took him a moment before he remembered that the key to his hut had a number on it.
Alex sat on the large cot inside the hut he’d rented. He was trembling. Or was the floor under his feet rocking? The room, with its mud-tinted walls and dark shutters, was like the belly of some animal that had swallowed him. He looked across the empty room and recognized the strangling terror his parents had felt, and it struck him down like fever. They had thought he was going to be taken away too, like the many others whose loss Alex paid no mind after he’d been spared.
Where do I go from here? We suggest Fernando Gentilini, Diego Marani and Karina Africa Bolasco [italiano/English]