by Erica Dionora
The aloe vera plants have been watching
droplets of rain race down the
windowpane, sticking tongues out towards
the glass
silently begging for a sip.
The old woman paces the wooden
floorboards of her eldest daughter’s
apartment,
a crumpled sepia-stained photograph of a
woman— year 1953—alongside a hawk-eyed
carpenter, with calloused palms and two-toned
skin,
clutched in a trembling hand
spotted and curled inwards,
like a dried leaf, lying on a sidewalk
shivering at the lightest sigh of the wind,
threatening to crumble at any moment.
“Oh Dear,” she croaks, pacing,
steps now shortened, hips creaking, knees
cracking louder than the floorboards
“How will you get home in this rain?”
Her small voice is ash dry
words worn with worry from years of waiting.
Her face is filled with streamlines of grievances
and submerged truths from her youth,
waiting for a hawk-eyed man, with calloused palms and
two-toned skin, to come home still, 55 years later.
Even after the tiny wooden homes
jutting from the streets of Sampaloc City
have fallen like decaying teeth,
even after the floods of monsoon season
have bathed the bones of her ancestors,
even after her children’s children
have scattered the sky like dandelion seeds
in an unending quest to find a land that
does not hide them from their roots or consider
them a blemish—the old woman waits, still.
In the static of the rain,
the aloe vera are shivering, green but greying. The
drooping stalks ache at the weight of their own leaves,
contemplating why one must endure feeling
in the process of withering away.
Erica Dionora is a Filipino writer, editor, and artist who was born in Saipan and is based in Ontario, Canada. She has a background in publishing and creative writing, with a focus on poetry.