The Winnower

by Jack Wolflink

Hilda, a Filipino writer, battles creative stagnation until she receives a mysterious wooden statue, a bulul, traditionally used to bless crops. Placing it on her desk, her writing thrives, yielding breakthroughs on her novel, Ang Mahihirap. However, strange occurrences unfold—the statue seems to move, and her isolation grows.

Hilda updated Word. Her laptop tried informing her of all the wonderful new features she’d just unveiled—customization! Collaboration! The Cloud! She clicked through, her mouse clacking like a roomful of geckos: taka-taka-taka, until she reached her draft.

The cursor blinked at her from the end of a who... She exhaled through her teeth. Six hours earlier, she’d collapsed into bed, having spent all evening trying to push the cursor forward. She’d written, Pacificador said he was looking for the kid who, and then found nothing else that fit.

Who’d smashed in the window of a police van? That had been too on-the-nose. Who had shoplifted from the Pasay City IKEA? She didn’t know what Beboy would take. (She did know that the hour spent trawling their website for a candidate object had turned up some excellent new shelves.) She wanted something specific to Manila’s urban poor, yet as universal as Valjean’s theft of bread.

Nako, she thought, tearing small bits off the edge of her printed outline. Hilda had thought of so many possibilities, but none of them fit anymore. Like her clothes—too loose at the top, too tight at the waist. Too many differences to cover up with a simple patch and stitch.

Her agent, Tom, was supportive as usual. “Next year, Hil. You’re on track to get Ang Mahihirap in front of some big distributors. The stuff you’ve sent me, by the way, is wonderful. Mind-blowing.”

On track was the problem, she decided. Tracks were precisely the villain in her work, the desire to place the human mind on rails, on schedules, the character of the pursuing Lieutenant Pacificador personifying the ordering fist of the Duterte regime, of all regimes, from those generating the headlines her phone sent her to her historical source material. She intended Ang Mahihirap to be a rallying cry on behalf of human virtue and freedom—was it any wonder that, imprisoned by tracks, its vibrancy had disappeared?

And yet, until last week’s prize announcement, she really had been on track.

Hilda had to put the loss out of her mind. She stretched back, feeling the ligaments in her shoulders pop into place. The laptop screen faded, its light blocked at this angle by her stick-on privacy filter. She felt a long sigh slip between her teeth. More tea. More tea is the key, she thought.

The kettle screeched. She was standing at her stove, an empty mug in her hand. She didn’t remember getting up and putting the water on, though of course, she must have been the one to do it. Exhale. The drawer groaned as she pulled it out. That Rooibos blend she’d gotten from her cousin last Christmas seemed right for the moment. She tried looking for the steep time but couldn’t focus. There was some kind of inhuman screaming going on—oh right, the kettle—and she turned off the burner.

Tea in hand, Hilda approached her wide corkboard plotter. Clusters of photos and scrawled notecards were webbed together with red yarn. A plastic takeout cup held pastel thumbtacks, two of which pinned the cup to the board. Pacificador, she imagined, would unspool thick webs of red yarn in his increasingly unhinged pursuit of Beboy. She’d thought it would be a fun touch to do the same. Now it looked like a scathing editor was suggesting she cut most of her work.

A card bearing “BEBOY,” written in thick block text, sat at the center of the web. Some of the connections she understood. Others she had no idea about. Was Beboy connected to the bakery shop owner because they were fast friends, or because she wanted him to extol the virtues of ensaymada? The owner, also linked to Pacificador and Hilda, had no idea whether she was his informant or his victim. The board was like a map that brought you to the right office tower but didn’t tell you the floor.

She lifted the mug and let its warm steam fog her glasses. The blend smelled like rosewater and dark honey. She sipped, but it was too hot to taste.

It’s just writer’s block, she told herself. The plan is fine. The first section is fine. The intertextuality is great. You were a nominee last time—one of five across the world! And next time, you’ll be the winner. She sucked moist, sweet air in through her nose, then out through her mouth.

She sat back down. There it was again—the blinking cursor, waiting. Pacificador, searching for the man known to everyone but him as Beboy. Hilda, searching for the perfect inciting incident. Beyond the cursor lay empty space, like the one she’d made on her desk last week. Nothing she did could fill it.

***

Hilda found a package on her doorstep the next day. It was a large, heavy box, overstuffed with packing peanuts. Inside was a wooden statue, black, in the shape of a seated man. Its limbs and features were stretched, like a Modigliani sculpture, though a crossed-arm pose kept it compact. Its torso was thin and straight, and its head was oversized and impassive. Statues like it could be found at any Filipino-themed cultural store. Hilda frowned. Who’d send me a bulul?

She crouched down, feeling a pesky crick in her hip pop into place. It sent a rush of satisfaction through her. Her pleasant feeling faded when her fingers slid across the bulul’s smooth, dark wood. Blood, she thought. When the Ifugao people planted each year’s rice crop, they would anoint these statues with pig’s blood to ensure the harvest’s bounty. She’d seen this—as a tourist, of course, since the beliefs had been washed away decades ago by the influx of tractors and radio. Then, she had smiled at the weight of history she felt behind the ritual, despite knowing it was pure performance. Now, for some reason, she couldn’t shake the blood.

Again, she tried to think who could have sent the statue. And why. The box lacked a return address, and she didn’t recognize the toothy logo on its branded packing tape.

But the statue was beautiful. The ruddy afternoon sunlight ran over its curves like the flourish at the end of a car commercial. She almost wanted to give it a massage.

With a grunt, Hilda stood, cradling the bulul in her arms. A packing peanut slid off its lap and drifted back into the box. Most of her living room’s tables and cabinets were already filled with art and tchotchkes. But her eyes fell on the blank spot on the shelf behind her desk. I suppose I’m at the sowing stage of my writing. Perhaps, she thought, the bulul could watch over her crop as it grew. Hilda tottered to the shelf and hoisted it up.

“Aray!” she yelped. The bulul’s thick, heavy base had nipped her middle finger as she set it down. She stuck the fingertip in her mouth, tasting copper. Apparently the corner was sharp enough to nick her. Hilda glared at it.

As the statue settled into place, the shelf creaked beneath it.

***

For the rest of the week, Hilda crushed her writing targets. The bulul felt like a writing partner, looking over her shoulder to keep her focused. She sliced through the plot: Beboy slipped the cops. Pacificador, enraged, attacked the kid’s friends. The novel grew by nearly a hundred pages. When Hilda arrived at the chapters where Beboy throws himself at the mercy of the law, unwilling to let an innocent take the fall for his crimes, she didn’t stop typing until daybreak caught on the bulul’s thin, straight nose.

The morning light was almost a shock, given how little fatigue Hilda felt. It was like she was in college again—staying up all night on the adrenaline from seeing Manny Pacquiao beat the tar out of Gabriel Mira. All those screaming crowds at the Big Dome. Oh, there’s a setting to use, she thought. A few plot threads untangled themselves. She went back to her desk, added another half-dozen pages, and smiled as the new geography restored order to her outline. When Hilda plopped into bed late that afternoon, it was almost a formality. It didn’t feel healthy to stay up two nights in a row—even if the first one never seemed to hit her.

The next day, she picked up her kitchen landline and called Tom. “I’ve really broken through. The words are just flowing through me now! I don’t think I’ll need to make that research trip to Valenzuela.”

Tom laughed. “Really, Hil? No more local color?”

“No, Tom—it’s fine! I have my memory. Better to keep writing and skip the jet lag.”

Tom took a raspy breath. “That’s… actually convenient, in a lot of ways,” he said.

There was a relief in his voice Hilda didn’t like. She could feel her face scrunching in response, as if she’d cracked a rotten egg. Tom, of course, couldn’t tell.

“The merger went through—as you know—and the word down the line is universal storytelling. They feel like their distribution’s too big now. They want things that’ll sell anywhere.” She could almost hear him gesturing.

“Nako, Tom! Don’t buzzword me. Do you have notes? Issues for me?”

A thin creak rang through the house. Walls settling, Hilda told herself.

“…was to stay at, like, medium geographic detail. If you’re skipping that Valenzuela street survey, you’re probably fine.”

“Okaaay,” she said. Tom always led with the smaller ask.

“The title. Ang Mahihirap.” Mispronounced: Ang like the Taiwanese director, hirap like syrup. She’d never drilled it out of him. She’d once considered calling him Tohm, like the Thai soup, but he wouldn’t have noticed.

“What about the title?”

“The good news is they don’t want it gone. Just, like, a subtitle. After the colon.”

Tom was confounding, but Hilda had learned to accept his instincts. He’d grown up in the industry—publisher parents—and had an almost autonomic sense of audience, of trend, the way she knew when to speak Tagalog and when her native Kinaray-a. But Hilda yearned, just once, to jump the track. She felt her hand clench around the phone.

“Tom—you’re great, but you tell them they keep their white hands—”

“Annnnnd,” Tom said, drowning her out. “Annnd, Hil… you go on Oprah.”

Oh.

“Oh.”

Hilda knew that, on the other end of the line, Tom was grinning like the Cheshire Cat. She had to grant him this one. She felt buoyant, like pumice on the tides.

“Gotcha! Hah. You thought bad news, I thought best news! I just sent you the contract. Sleep on it. Talk tomorrow.” The line went silent.

***

When she rounded the corner to check Tom’s email, the bulul face toward the kitchen, not her desk. That’s funny, she thought. I don’t remember ever touching it since I put it there.

She turned the statue back toward her desk. Beneath it, the shelf creaked. She tried not to realize that it was the same sound she’d heard earlier.

***

Tom stood in the driveway of Hil’s Pacifica home, running a finger through his sandy mop of hair. His trips up from L.A. were always disorienting—the sun from his plane window shone just as bright, but the wind was cold and clammy. He’d had to get a light jacket from a store just past the train station, then spent the walk down her street tugging off the various stickers and tags that hung from it.

Usually, he could just take the steps and bang on her sky-blue door until she stopped her last-minute tidying and let him in. But the succulents in her xeriscaped garden had developed shriveled brown spots and dropped their waxy leaves as if emulating an East Coast fall. They must not have been watered in weeks. Her wicker mail basket was overflowing, and the wind had taken the top layer off, scattering it across the eastern half of her porch.

There was a check in there, he knew. Plus a baker’s dozen of letters from him, her publisher, her friends. Tom had received the full manuscript—titled The Wretched Ones: Ang Mahihirap—in a heavy envelope last month. Nobody had heard from Hilda since. No response to his excited voice messages, or emails from Oprah’s booking agent. Nothing from the breathless blurbs he’d solicited from Jonathan Franzen and Jay Caspian Kang—“Hilda Jimenez sets The Wretched Ones in a Manila that could be anywhere”—or from the doubled advance Tom had negotiated.

Tom walked up onto the porch, feeling a chill penetrate his jacket. It must have been caused by stepping out of the sun. He bent over to gather up the mail, carefully negotiating a few envelopes from between the spines of the prickly pear cactus that had caught them. Credit card and PG&E billing statements—maybe Hil had gone to Valenzuela after all? But she’d already sent the manuscript.

He went back and banged on the door. “Hil? Hey, it’s Tom! You home?”

Nothing.

He peered through the windows, rapping periodically on them too. The last thing he wanted was to get taken for a prowler. A dog down the street began to bark. The panes of glass were cold and slightly damp. Hil’s blinds were drawn haphazardly so that, through the slats, he could see lights burning in the kitchen and office. There was a large, dark silhouette in the office, but the figure was as static and lifeless as everything else on Hil’s property.

Years ago, when Tom had taken Hil and her editor out for drinks after signing the contract for her first American publisher, he’d had to drive her home after she’d dropped her keys into a drain. He watched her shuffle around the side of her house, wondering if she was further gone than he thought, until she’d returned with a spare keyring, cackling with triumph. He had to do something, he decided. Something more than checking her mail. What if—he thought with a jolt—she’d had a heart attack?

White gravel crunched beneath Tom’s shoes as he negotiated the edges of the cactus. He kicked over larger rocks until—there it was—he saw the dirty brass key. Another awkward squeeze, and he was sliding it into the lock. Hil’s front door squeaked open.

The chill Pacific wind accompanied Tom into the house. Dust whirled in its wake. There was quite a lot of it. Tom pushed the door closed by its brass handle and found even that had been coated with a thin gray layer. He wiped his hand against his jacket.

“Hil?” he called. No answer.

The kitchen drew him first. That’s where Hil usually was when she was too caught up to realize someone was at the door. Not today, though. There was just a ceramic tea infuser, filled with now-cold water, and an open box of loose-leaf standing next to it. He knew the brand—its scent should have filled the room. But it smelled just as dusty as the hall.

Tom clicked the light off and went to the office. The dark shape was a big, black, wooden statue with a long face and blank expression. It was standing at the desk, where Hil’s chair would be. A similar statue, much smaller, was on a shelf above it. Between the two, he could tell the larger one was female: its elongated shape curving outward at the chest and hip. Hil had shown him statues like this before, he remembered. A kind of ancestor spirit. Maybe this was a prank?

He placed a hand against the smooth, stained wood. “Hil, it’s Tom! You got me, hah! Punked, like you always said! Hil?” His voice echoed in the empty house.

There was another large shape beneath the desk—a tall cardboard box filled with packing peanuts. It was a custom size, clearly fitted to the dimensions of the larger statue. There was an unfamiliar, toothy logo printed on the sides. He tugged the box into the open.

“Huh,” he said. It took him a moment to understand the label. Neither an arrival nor a return—this was a fresh box meant to send the statue to some third party. The sticker label was prepaid and already placed, with a big QR code in the center. It was addressed to an apartment in Long Beach, recipient Tony Salcón. He recognized Tony as a Filipino graphic novelist—just signed with Marvel, if he remembered correctly.

“Super weird, Hil!” he said. But it made a certain kind of sense. Maybe this was a kind of mutually supportive tradition she was starting up. He thought about the statue while wandering the rest of the house—yelling respectfully up the stairs rather than further imposing on Hil’s privacy. Maybe this Tony would have some insight into where she’d gone. He certainly wasn’t part of Hil’s usual circles.

The dying evening light lent the statues a warm, almost threatening glow. Tom couldn’t help but feel like the larger one was angry, specifically at him. “Well, off you go,” he told it, and lowered it into the box. The smaller one sat impassively on its shelf.

Tom pushed Hil’s mail basket inside and left the box where UPS could see it. As he closed her door, he heard a long, loud creak. It wasn’t until his flight back that he realized it hadn’t been the hinges.

---

Jack Wolflink serves as the intern project coordinator for Kinsman Quarterly's Winds of Asia Award. A biracial Filipinx writer, he holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Wilkes University and an M.A. in Environmental Geography from San Francisco State University. Jack's short stories have been featured in Suspect Journal and the Lighthouse Community Anthology, with his work set to appear in Kinsman Quarterly's upcoming speculative anthology, "Iridescence."