The Red House by Rachel Ramirez

I’m on a wooden bed in a locked room, in a red house, in a gated garrison. Nothing around but endless lines of trees. No one can find me here. No one is looking. A solitary unlit bulb hangs from the cracked ceiling above me. Sometimes, it becomes a snake, hissing at me in a foreign tongue. I can hear my new neighbours—the woman is pleading for her daughter’s end. A loud thump shakes the walls. A door whines open, sighs shut. A girl calls out for her Nanay. Then I hear sobbing and the walls start to heave.

I peel myself off the bed. Piss and blood sticks to me and the mattress. Outside the cracked glass of the window, a soldier is dragging a woman’s body through the dirt, past the sentry in the tower, out the gates. He disappears into the forest. The sun is setting behind the molave trees. The shadows are long. The soldier returns empty-handed a few minutes later. I turn away from the window. The lump of plaster is still beneath the bedframe, beside the three-finger hole. I crawl over. On the other side, a brown-skinned girl, not more than nine years old, is curled on the floor like a pill bug. She is wearing a faded floral dress torn like rags. I watch her, waiting for her sobs to wane.

“Can you hear me?” I ask when she is quiet, wiggling my fingers through the hole.

In the night our prison goes quiet. A bluish moon glows through grey strips of cloud. I rub the lump in the crevice behind my knee. The Commanding Officer gave it to me on my first night many months ago, when I tried to deny him. I kept my legs locked shut, and he hit me hard with a steel rod wrapped in leather, pried me open like a can. He flayed my spirit layer by layer after that. The lump pulses in pain now.

“I am Carina,” I tell her. 

Fingers reach back, cradle mine. 

“I want to go home.” Her words come in shallow breaths.

The night I was taken from my mother, soldiers forced me into an army truck by the Plaza. It bounced along in the dark, along the war-scarred terrain. The engine rattled louder than my cries. Through the flapping tarp I could see glimpses of moonlit trees. The truck drove into the forest, through the gates of the garrison, stopped outside the red house. I was walked through double doors, then up a staircase. The wood moaned beneath my feet. 

The doctor was in the room waiting for me, to inspect my body for diseases. 

“Give comfort to the soldiers,” he said. “Your life will be spared.”

Soldiers still visit me on most days. Some are in such a hurry they keep their uniforms on, rushing out as soon as they finish. It’s the ones who can’t last that fill their time in other ways—bottles, rods, sticks to skewer me like lechon. Before the other girl arrived, the Commanding Officer came to my prison every night. He brought me gifts—a towel, a bar of soap, a pail of water. He watched me wash between my legs. Now, I sit in the dark with my back to the wall. I listen to the water splashing on the other side, to her cat-like whimpering, to the monster’s moans. I weep, silently. I rub the lump behind my knee.

“Never deny him,” I tell her.

A few months after I arrived, I felt searing stabs of pain inside my belly. There was wet between my legs. Blood dripped from my hand when I reached to touch. When the Commanding Officer came into my room that night, I turned away to hide my tears, so he threw me against the wooden bed. I thought my ribs would crack under his heaviness. I thought I would crumble.

I told the doctor about the pain. He gave me more pills for malaria. When I had forty of them hidden in the mattress, I swallowed them all at once. Then I lay back and watched the room lose shape. I thought of my mother. I thought of the pouch she had sewn into her skirt to hide the rings and necklaces my father gave her. 

“They’ll be yours one day,” she had promised me. 

I thought of my puti father, his nose like a vulture’s beak. When I was a girl he would bring me gifts from America—sticks of saltwater taffy, a paper box of crayons, glass marbles in a velvet pouch. He was gone long before the soldiers came, before the snake began to hiss above my bed. I wonder if the girl sees snakes, too. When the doctor brings me more pills, I beg him to save the girl. 

“Let her go,” I say. 

I fall to my knees. I grab hold of his legs. He kicks me away.

In the morning, I hear the doctor screaming for the guards. Outside my window, the girl is running toward the gates. I call out her name, pound on the glass. She turns around. Her skin reminds me of ripened cacao beans. Then there is a boom, a pop of a rifle, and her body is blown into the air. Smoke rises from the sentry’s rifle. Her limp body is dragged out the gates. All day I cry. The walls heave with my sobs. By the time light in my prison fades, my tears have run dry. I hiss at the snake above my bed.

When the Commanding Officer visits me, I am already naked, waiting. He places a half-filled water pail on the floor. I crouch on top of it. I wash, wipe myself dry with a towel. He watches me.

He is wearing his khaki uniform and tall black boots. A sabre hangs from his belt encased in a hard-shell scabbard. Brown and red tassels adorn its hilt. He undresses, then sits on the edge of the bed. The wooden frame groans. I kneel on the floor between his hairless legs. I trace his hardness with my tongue. I look up at his flushed face, as I take him deep inside my mouth. I see beads of sweat above his upper lip, just under his neatly trimmed moustache. His narrow eyes close. His head tilts back—the lump in his thick neck exposed. I hear the familiar moans, wait for them to grow, until his raspy hum becomes a growl. Then I bite down hard, until my teeth touch, as if tearing into taffy. He releases a monstrous roar, pounds my face with his fist. I keep my teeth clenched. I can taste his blood. I fall to the floor, a lump of him still in my mouth.

Soldiers tie my hands behind my back. They pull me from my prison, lead me down the wooden stairs, out the red house doors, and into the sunlight. The Commanding Officer is waiting for me. He is sitting in a chair, in his full uniform, his sabre across his lap. His right hand, bruised at the knuckles, is clenched around its hilt. A soldier thumps the back of my legs with a rifle. I fall to my knees, bite my lip to contain my scream. The Commanding Officer struggles to stand, flinches. He unsheathes his sabre, raises it above my head. In the glinting metal of his sword, the girl is cradled by her mother, sheltered from the sun beneath a canopy of leaves. My eyes water. I hiss.

Rachel Ramirez is a Filipina-American writer and lecturer living in Dublin, Ireland. Rachel has a BA in English from Barnard College, an MSc from Trinity College Dublin, and an MA in Creative Writing from DCU. She is currently working on a novel set in the Philippines during World War II.

29 July 2022