“Mostly glass. It must be,” said Señora.

Urbing curled her fingers into the grain of the kutsara and scraped more vigorously at the petsay leaves trying to escape the confines of her pot. Damned things just wouldn’t wilt.

“Ridiculous, corazón,” Señor Palad was saying, “I saw old Manoy just last week for tea, and he had to take a rickshaw to get there. A rickshaw! That is not a man who can afford enough glass to build a sunroom.”

She could add more water, but then she’d need to adjust the spices, send the boy out to restock on patis, and fetch the wood to get the stove up to boiling again. No, better to wait for the petsay to darken on its own. One of these days, Urbing thought with the empty rebellion of service workers the world over, she would have them install a proper kaláng luad, none of this foreign, iron nonsense. She was getting sick of standing at the stovetop. Honestly, no one respected their elders anymore. No consideration for her knees. Her spoon tapped out a stick-dance rhythm on the pot’s rim.

“I am telling you what I saw, Waldo,” said Señora Palad, “and I saw them bringing crates down past the harbor to the Felizmeña estate, and every last one of them had ‘Frágil’ stamped on the side. Maybe he has suddenly decided to start a collection of porcelain flamenco dancers, but I am of the opinion that he has at last caved to Gloria’s sensibilities and committed to building a proper space to entertain.”

“I am not convinced,” said Señor. “They could have been Chinese teapots, or durians from Singapore for all we know. Although I suppose you would have noticed the smell.”

Señora’s voice took on a gloating, feverish tone. “Ah, but the crates did not come on a galleon, mi vida. They arrived on a steamer.” 

That drew a sound of phlegmy surprise.

Urbing began dicing sibuyas for garnish. Perhaps if she was more vigorous with her knife work than usual, she could drown out the inanity of her employers’ conversation drifting in through the kitchen curtain. They continued with their gossip, fawning and scoffing over the latest spending splurges of Manila’s elite. She remembered the peacock-pheasants back in Palawan, rattling their feathers and screeching their mating calls at all hours of the night, desperate for attention, desperately on display. There was a very unkind comparison to make there, and her lips twitched as she did so. 

She had almost managed to forget their presence outside her domain when the muffled sound of leather against tile caught her ear. There, at the gap between adobe and abaca, crouched Dido, in his worn-through chinelas. He had one scrawny finger hooked in the fabric, pulling it aside to peek into the breakfast room.

 She kissed her teeth and shook her knife in his direction. “Out of the doorway, boy, you’ve got no time to be slacking, ah.” A sliver of sibuyas flew off the blade and stuck to the wall. She pretended not to notice. “Up! They’re going to want the dining room ready within the hour, mark my words.” 

Urbing thought it was an affront to good sense to have a breakfast room and a dining room, or a dining room at all, but there was no arguing with rich bobos.

“They were talking about hosting a fiesta, Lola,” Dido said as he scrambled over to the silverware drawer with his polishing cloth. “A proper one, I think. With fruit shaped like boats and four-tiered tartas and seven kinds of meat and probably a hundred guests. They said it’ll be the talk of the town, I think. I’m still working on my español. But they definitely said fiesta! I think.”

“Do you,” said Urbing. “Well, no point speculating about tomorrow when we have soup boiling today, Dido. Make sure you get the candlesticks and the mirror this time, ah?” He tripped off down the servant’s passage on his errand. As soon as he was out of sight, she dug a thumb into her temple and tried to breathe slowly.

A fiesta—huwag nawang itulot ng Diyos! Oh, hell. She needed a smoke break.

There was a balete tree behind the compound that the Palads hadn’t gotten around to tearing up quite yet. Roots draped down in curtains from the low, reaching branches. Twenty years ago, Urbing had found the perfect nook to wedge herself in, completely hidden from any of the estate windows. There was a tangle of roots at knee height that she had sat on so often that it now molded itself around her weary hips as she chewed on her unlit pipe.

“They’re going to want the works, I just know it—lahat ng ito. Señora was talking about the Cruz’s and their mashed potato volcano for weeks after that fiesta last rainy season. But the Cruz’s have six people working their kitchen. Palads have to settle for me and the boy. Maybe I can recruit some of the housekeepers to help, but knowing Señora, she’ll have them busy embroidering a thousand napkins with each guest’s name and favorite flower. One for each course.” She pressed her scalp back against the smooth bark and squeezed her eyes shut, lips pursed around the pipe. The balete creaked quietly around her for a moment.

She felt a flare of heat near her face and cracked an eye open. A massive wooden hand, dark and grooved, was offering her a match. She gingerly leaned forward, and started puffing away in earnest. The Kapre pulled the match back up into the branches where he lounged and lit his own cigar. Her tobacco came from one of the Spanish plantations in Cebu, but the spirit of the balete breathed out smoke that smelled like the island itself, like old forests and gentle decay. The two scents mingled strangely in the air. She tried not to sneeze.

After a while, he spoke. “Sounds like business as usual for the paganos, Nene. Why so stressed, ka?” She never saw his lips move around the cigar.

She hummed and tapped her fingers against her knee. A tinikling song, again, fast and cyclical. Du-duh-duh, du-duh-duh, du-duh-duh-du. It had been stuck in her head all month. She’d gone to see her grandnieces perform down in Binondo the last time she’d gotten a day off. They were terrible dancers, seeing as they were six and eight and had all the fine motor control of baby kalabaw, but she’d enjoyed seeing them. And no one had gotten their ankles broken during the show, which was always a pleasant surprise. When she’d told the Palads where she was going, they’d wrinkled their noses and smiled without teeth. They said, Oh, a folk dance. How sweet. Reminds me of the opera we saw last week. You know, at Santa Cecilia? Wonderful, proper Italian performers. Have you been, Tía? Urbing needed to stop telling them things.

“Hard to say,” she told the Kapre. “But I have a feeling that they aren’t going to settle for the usual kare-kare and lumpia for this fiesta of theirs. You know, the other day Señora Dulcina told me the pancit was too salty. Pancit! I never even sprinkle on the toyo before I serve it, they add their own at the table. But toyo’s no good anymore, she wants real granulated salt, so she can fail to put that on her noodles instead.” She exhaled thin clouds of smoke through her nostrils and watched them dissipate up in the leaves.

The branches rustled in a vaguely mocking way and the Kapre blew a veritable bank of loamy gray-green fog in her direction. Sparks flared up from the end of his cigar, dancing and darting through the air until they twisted into fireflies, which buzzed softly past Urbing’s hair to settle in among the roots until nightfall might deign to call them forth. Show off. One of his new creations landed on his knee, glowing in time to a much more sedate beat, and he considered it as he spoke.

“They’ve been going the way of Western nonsense for a while, Nene. City folk, now, as if the islands know what it means to make a city.”

“Didn’t you hear me, aswang? It means cotton, cow meat, salt and pepper,” she said. “Soy is out of style.”

He looked down at her askance.

“Ah, watch yourself. My favorite cousins are soybeans.”

“Hush, po,” she said, turning to her pipe to suppress a laugh. Nearly finished. Damn.

“I’m serious. You don’t tend to see the Kapre of the soy fields, but they’re there. Rusting threshers, spooking horses, tying those silly boot strings together. Great guys. They tend to get a bit more hands-on with their mischief than me.”

“We could use some of your mischief at the estate, I tell you what.” She pulled out a blunted length of bamboo and began scraping out her ash. “I’m too old to be cooking for a fiesta.”

“Kalokohan,” the Kapre said, “you don’t look a day over two hundred.”

Urbing tried to nail him in the forehead with her scraper, and felt something in her back go pop.

“Is here good, Lola?”

“Next to the karne ng baboy, Dido.”

Dido obediently carried the crate of limes toward another corner of the kitchen with a strange, crablike shuffle. Something about the way young boys moved made it seem as if they possessed an extra set of knees.

Urbing leaned heavily against the counter as she watched the boy rearrange Señora’s manifold deliveries for the evening’s event. Two weeks hadn’t been enough to fix her back, but it had been enough for Dulcina Palad to deem her fit for duty. And now she was acting choreographer of the world’s most incompetent scullery-themed samba. Her sternest lip-purse and brow furrow combination didn’t manage to keep the boy from bruising the limes, cracking a bottle of whisky, or spilling carabao milk across the stovetop. Maybe she’d get lucky, and the fire wouldn’t light. Maybe the milk would spoil inside the steel frame, make Señora reschedule the whole damn thing. Unfortunately, it wiped off easy.

Multi-course meals had always been her enemy, but she used to see them as a challenge to her skills as a chef and tyrant-slash-organizer. As the knife in her spine twisted in time with her pestle and kutsara, she felt the upcoming dishes loom like the distant caps of tidal waves. Disorienting, painful, liable to drown her. Hopefully capable of disguising human spit. She considered the meat braising before her. They’d never know.

“Twenty minutes before our guests arrive, Tía. I expect we’ll be in the parlor for another hour before anyone gets peckish. How are things progressing? I hope my vision is taking form.”

For someone so dedicated to propriety, Señora did not put much stock in personal space. Urbing’s hand spasmed, and a drop of brown sauce landed on Señora’s immaculately starched muslin pañuelo, right below her pearled ear.

“Very well, Señora, the first course is almost ready and the solomillo al whisky is braising now.”

Urbing willed her eyes not to stray towards the slowly sinking stain. Maybe Dulcina hadn’t noticed. The lady of the house seemed to take in the kitchen’s stacks of supplies and servants in various degrees of affliction with mystified grace, then inclined her head slowly. Dido tried to disappear behind the torn flour sack he was holding.

“Bueno,” she said as if the word had lost its footing on the way out. “Well, do hurry along. We can’t disappoint the good folk of Manila, now can we?”

Easily. “Of course not, Señora. Would you or Señor care to sample anything before it goes out?”

“Oh no, no, I’m sure that’s not necessary. You know what I expect, and they’re all quite familiar with Spanish fare. It’s the presentation that will set us apart, don’t forget.”

How could she? The housekeepers were frantically embroidering napkins even now. Her guess had been off, it was Hispania’s olive branch and crown, not flowers. Not a sampaguita to be seen. The guests would gasp in delight to find their names elegantly stitched at their place setting, and then send jealous looks at those given seats of honor, whatever that meant. Urbing believed in the straightforward value of food—as fuel, as pleasure, as an opportunity to press her nieces for gossip. There was a difference between honoring your elders and honoring the pesos lining your neighbor’s pocket, and she didn’t enjoy seeing the latter bleed into her kitchen. Forget spitting in it, she should have made this pork into dinuguan. The broth alone might have killed them.

Urbing laboriously ordered Dido around the bubbling pots from her ratan stool, where she dissected a bushel of apples and rolled their paper-thin innards into perfect rosettes. She held one to the waning light streaming in from the courtyard window. It almost looked like a jasmine blossom, pale and fragrant. She placed it with the others among their bed of raw petsay leaves she’d cut to look like rose leaves. What a stupid way to eat an apple. She chewed on some peels as Dido ferried the tray of fruit to the breakfast room, which was serving as the staging area for the fiesta.

As she prepared the oil for frying the sweet pepper bush—Dulcina was mad, Diyos ko, a whole bush? With the fruit still attached?—her attention drifted to the brilliant orange stripes of dusk she could see through the window. Against the growing darkness, small points of light began blinking in slow, swirling patterns. The Kapre was smoking without her, the bastard.

A scream—like a sengis getting its tail stepped on.

Dido had gotten overeager about the peppers and sat curled on the floor, clutching his arm where hot oil had sloughed across it. The skin from his elbow down was red and beginning to bubble, and his fingers spasmed erratically. Urbing cursed.

“Up, boy, up! Don’t just sit there, get that in the sink.”

He hiccupped little sobs as he dunked his arm into the basin they’d used for rinsing vegetables. Urbing hobbled over to the ice chest—strictly for the Palad’s imported perishables—and chipped off some ice to soothe the burn. She grabbed a small china bowl and began pouring the basin’s contents over Dido’s arm in slow, steady movements. Dido blinked away tears.

“Now, that was very foolish. What were you trying to do?” she said.

“Ewan ko, Lola,” he whispered. “Wanted– ow. Wanted to get a head start on the peppers.”

“Well, that much is obvious. Stop wiggling.”

“Sorry.”

“You weren’t this eager about the pastillas.”

“We’ve done pastillas before, po.”

“I’ve done pastillas before. You fetched sugar. We’re going to have to wrap this.”

“Yes, Lola.”

“Answer the question.”

Dido stared morosely as Urbing tucked reddened skin away under strips torn from an old tablecloth. When it seemed like he was intending to ignore her prompt, her fingers darted out and twisted his ear.

“Ow– Lola! I’m already injured!”

“So is everyone in this kitchen. What were you trying to do? Serve them solomillo al Candido?”

“No.” His eyes were caught on the porcelain bowl she’d used to water his wound. “I thought if we got it done early I’d have time to peek and see how the guests react when Esteban and them brought the bush out. It’s gonna be the fanciest thing we’ve ever made.”

“Foolish.”

“Yes, Lola.”

The cook, alone in her mighty fortress. 

Urbing’s shoulder blades ground together as she slogged her way through the pastillas. Dido had been sent marching home, and Señora said every other servant in the compound had work to do. Esteban the butler had offered to ferry items from the kitchen to the breakfast room, but no one could spare the time to assist an old woman at the stovetop. 

She watched milk and sugar melt together with all the viscosity and choler of Mount Mayon. If she concentrated hard enough on the kutsara as it cut through bubbling mush, nothing else could distract her.

The solomillo was burnt. The potatoes were rough cut, not the precise cubes Señora had wanted. The pastillas were going to have chunks of lime zest in them. The peppers weren’t so much fried as they were introduced in passing to the oil’s heat, and a fair few had fallen off the bush. The apples were perhaps the only dish that had turned out right, and even those were turning brown in the air as the party dragged on with empty, flapping mouths.

Mischief. Her mother had taught her better than to ask the spirits for anything.

Stiff fingers wrapped cooling dough in delicate twists of paper. Señora wanted the wrappers to be cut like lace into a hundred distinct, convoluted patterns. Unfortunate. She placed the finished desserts one by one into the glass bowls of an epergne. The dishes caught the light from the sputtering stove, from the candles Dido had forgotten to shine, from the dining room’s distant gas lamps. Shards of it scattered against the kitchen’s rough adobe walls. They looked like fireflies, flickering around each other in a joyous, terrible tinikling performance.

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Gabriella Paz Hoggatt is an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where they work as an Editorial Assistant for Ninth Letter Magazine. This is their first fiction publication. Find them on Instagram at @gabriella.p.h