Free Ghosts of Infinity: and Nine More Stories of the Supernatural by Lara Saguisag, April Yap

slender tree-trunks. She stood staring at the tiny lights so uncertainly that she couldn’t have realized that she had placed her hand under her friend’s elbow, the way she used to with him. And a sadness overcame his desperation, because he missed her, and her anecdotes, and her laughter, and all her little qualities, but he could not approach her because the little lights followed him wherever he went and he didn’t know yet how to defeat them.
    A slight wind sent a rustling above him. He glanced up but the light from the lobby was too faint to make the treetops visible. As he stared at Sarah he had the feeling that the fireflies had done him some good, but he couldn’t quite figure out what. They had been both a curse and a blessing, he thought, so he thanked them, and cursed them back.
    His cousin made up some excuse to get Sarah to go back with her inside, thinking perhaps that he might have gone in to use the washroom. When the two women re-entered the lobby, Dennis took the opportunity and stole away into the darkness, taking the fireflies with him.

The Man Who Came Home
     
    Robert JA Basilio Jr.
     
    W HEN D ANTE REACHED for the remote control by the table on his left, quickly, casually, naturally, with almost no effort at all, just as any man watching a boring game of tennis on cable would, he felt a gust of cold wind blast through the wide-open living room window. It got so cold that he, who had been waiting for his wife to arrive for the past half hour, had felt it in his bones and began to shiver.
    In fact, for no reason at all, he experienced a cold chill creep up his back when he saw the thin blue curtains sway vigorously in the wind. He felt that there was something mysterious about that wind, coming in like that on a hot night like this one, catching him by surprise. Since he liked to believe that he was a logical man, he quickly dismissed the thought, although he could not ignore the chill he felt when the wind rushed in. Perhaps, he said to himself, the wind could have meant something; a sign perhaps, or an omen. Because he was averse to entertaining such ridiculous notions, especially one about the weather having a significance in his life or about the chill down his spine, he put the thought aside. Instead, he tried to think of what Jimmy told him on the way up. Jimmy was the guard on nightshift who stayed at the reception area of their modest residential tenement. He told him that he was the first one on the seventh floor to come up that night.
    “Mrs. Santa Ana still out, huh?” the guard asked with a smile, as he scribbled an entry in his logbook. “Well, that makes you the first one on your floor to arrive.”
    Dante nodded and said that the reason he came home early was that he was the only one who didn’t care about his job as much as the others would. But this wasn’t entirely true. He cared about his job too and that being a bank manager already gave him a full plate at dinner, what with small- and medium-scale enterprises in his area sprouting like mushrooms after a rainstorm and each of them asking for loans and letters of credit.
    Dante told Jimmy that he was already out of the corporate game, the rat race, the desire for promotion and recognition, but he wasn’t sure if the guard understood what he was talking about. He only stayed long enough just to put a word in edgewise about his wife catching the last full show at the mall with her officemates. He just didn’t want Jimmy to get any bright ideas, especially since Dante knew that Mrs. Victoria, who lived two doors down to their left, was having an affair with one of her husband’s subordinates. Or at least, that was according to Leah, his wife, who said that she got it from one of the Victorias’ maids whom she once met at the hall and who was later fired.
    Thankfully, Jimmy didn’t bother to ask him what movie it was they say because it was a cheap bold flick starring Richard Gomez, Pops Fernandez, and Joyce Jimenez. Dante