The rains in Manila did not fall — they collapsed, like a billion buckets overturned by a drunken god. Jeepneys bobbed like bathtub toys, tricycles spun like lost tops, and office workers scurried in their pressed clothes, darting into malls where the air-conditioning roared louder than the storm. From the safety of glass walls and fluorescent light, they watched the world blur into gray water, and then politely forgot it existed.
Far away yet still in the same city, a vagabond sat in a half-drowned basketball court. The court had once hosted sweaty neighborhood games, but now it served as an ark for one man, one dog, and a collapsing kingdom of cardboard boxes. His lips — cracked, swollen, mutinous from too many watermelon seeds — seemed to spell a wordless hymn. He smiled anyway, as though each seed carried the punchline to a cosmic joke only he could hear.
