“You’re not a real mother,” I replied. She ran to the corner to pick up a broom and held it up by the bottom of the wooden handle wrapped in red plastic, near the sweeping bristles made of thousands of yellow reeds. I walked toward her, and she raised the handle to threaten me, as my focus turned to the innocent household item that had been the tool of my pain over many years. She’d never beaten me in daylight before, and seeing that instrument, associating it with Nanay Coro’s tireless efforts to keep her home clean, I forgot my fear.

“Your grandmother didn’t hit you enough!” she shouted. “That’s why you turned out so ungrateful.”

“I have nothing to be grateful for,” I replied, and watched my fingers splay to grab the handle, felt the alienness of plastic as my palm wrapped around it. We struggled for a few seconds, but Mama’s widened, fearful eyes invigorated me, and I finally wrested the broom from her hand. I raised that broom high like a trophy and smiled when my mother flinched. I wanted to hit her, so I could prove myself the terrible son she failed to raise, but the last person I wanted to resemble was my mother. I threw the broom aside and ignored Mama’s sobs as I walked back to my room.

My bags were ready when Nanay Coro arrived to pick me up the next day. I told her the news, that Mama had allowed me to continue school in Talacsan for good. My mother wasn’t there to speak for herself; she had left to gamble the previous afternoon.

—

In Talacsan, I woke to the echo of roosters in my dreams and the brightening dots of sky through the gauze of our mosquito net and the thatch roof that covered us. Those maya birds had once again poked holes in that roof, but village men would no longer cover them with new thatch, because we were about to move to another house my grandparents had built, a dizzying two-story concrete-and-marble edifice that announced their success.

As I turned my body to get up, I was surprised to find my brown brother, who slept on his side as he faced me, mouth open, no longer the toddler in my memory but a five-year-old boy. The two of us rarely saw each other since he got sent to live with Nanay Coro. A clutch of scabs littered the side of his face, no doubt from scratching after insect bites. He revolted me, how dark and unkempt he looked, the child I would have been had I come out of the womb like everyone expected, a dark boy like my father.

“Pangit,” I said when he opened his eyes. Ugly.