Origin Stories by Frankie Concepcion

Origin Stories | Frankie Concepcion

You imagine it like this:

You and your mother are standing in front of a mirror. You are both looking at your reflection as you brush your still-wet hair and as you push the bristles through your black curls, she counts out loud the number of strokes you have made: “One. Two. Three. All the way through. Four. Again. Again.”

You are wearing matching Tweety Bird nightshirts that both go down to your ankles. Or perhaps you are wearing the pink nightdress with the ruffled edges, and your mother, still dressed from the day, is waiting for you to finish getting ready for bed before she rejoins the rest of the adults downstairs. With each pass, your sleeve brushes against the raw skin of your upper arm, and you wince but do not dare stop. You do not want to anger your mother again. Instead, you splay your elbows wide so only the very tops of your shoulders prickle and burn. 

Steam clouds the top of the mirror. Outside, you know the air is damp with the perspiration of pine and bamboo, and from this balcony at the top of the hill you are able to see the Manila skyline glimmering in the distance. You know that if you just open the window, you will be able to hear the sounds of crickets, frogs, and tuko: the speckled geckos that can often be heard singing their own name in the night.

But the window is closed, and the air conditioner hums loudly. Still, you can hear the voices of your new friends, Megan and Tony, in the other rooms. Earlier that evening, the three of you had made a game of seeing who could roll down a hill fastest: tucking your arms close to your bodies and letting gravity do its work, not knowing that each blade of grass was a sharp edge. When you stood, a thousand invisible cuts made themselves known. Now your skin is still on fire, even after the hot shower your mother said would soothe it.

You picture them, your friends across the hall, laughing with their parents, wrapped in soft, warm towels. You imagine Megan’s mother rubbing lotion on her arms and legs, Tony playing with his Gameboy on the bed while his mother and father chat on the veranda.

“I just want you to learn how to take care of yourself,” your mother says. She is still counting. “Boys like your father can do whatever they want, look however they want. But not us girls. We have to be beautiful, always. Don’t you want to be beautiful?”

“I do,” you say. You will say anything, you think, to be forgiven.

Your parents met Megan and Tony’s parents at the Couples for Christ meetings your parish held every week in the church basement. Megan’s parents each worked at rival banks, while Tony’s parents were thinking of leaving their jobs to migrate to New Zealand in the coming year. Both Megan and Tony were close to your age, which is why today, at your mother’s invitation, they and their parents have all come to celebrate the Holy Week holiday at your father’s mountain estate: a sprawling landscape marked on all sides by a white picket fence, just a few hours drive from your home in Metro Manila. His family called it La Veranda. But you simply called it Antipolo, after the mountain city upon which it was built.

Your mother was always inviting strangers to your family vacations. Two years prior, you and your family had come to Antipolo with a handsome young neighbor and a woman your mother said had once represented the Philippines in the Miss Earth pageant. The year after that, you celebrated with a couple and their two young sons, who had recently moved back to the Philippines after spending a decade in California. Always, within a year, your mother would lose interest in their company, or they would lose interest in your mother— you were never sure which. You taught yourself to enjoy their company while it lasted. You were still a child, but you were already learning not to get too attached to people.

Though it was your father’s house, each time a new person came to visit, your mother would take them on a tour. Yesterday, when you’d arrived with Megan and Tony’s parents, she’d gone through her usual routine: starting with a walk through the vast receiving area with its towering portraits of grandparents and great-grandparents, its walls of books and magazines lauding the business that your great-grandfather had built. She told them about the neighbors: one a former president, the other a businessman whose name could be found plastered all over the country. Finally, in front of your guests, she pointed you toward every picture that held your image. In most of them, you were small enough that you could not yet stand on your own two feet, young enough that you could not even remember where or when they had been taken.

“This is your inheritance,” she’d said. You’d turned to your father to see if this was true, but by then he had disappeared into the kitchen or outside to sun himself in the grass, embarrassed by your mother’s brazen display.

“Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.” Suddenly the bristles catch on a tangle of hair, and the wet handle pulls itself from your hands. With a clatter, it hits the edge of the vanity and tumbles to the wooden floor. But before you can reach for it, you feel your mother’s fingers dig into the flesh just above your elbow and, with her touch, the singing of the invisible cuts on your skin. 

“Pick it up,” she hisses, and though it would be easier to obey her if she let go, you say nothing. With one arm attached to your mother and the other reaching for the floor, you twist your body, catching the brush with your fingertips. Later, you will wonder if she had meant to hurt you on purpose, or if she’d forgotten your skin was still sensitive from that afternoon. After all, her grip is just tight enough to sting but not to leave a permanent mark others might see.

When you sit back down, brush in hand, she begins her counting anew. “Twenty-three. Twenty-four.” You make sure to run the brush all the way from the roots to the damp ends of your hair, which fall down to your waist. You tell yourself that if you do this one thing well, then maybe she will forget you had made a mess of yourself earlier that day, maybe you can erase the image of your tangled hair and grass-stained clothes from her memory. “Twenty-five. Keep going, all the way to a hundred.”

After a few brushes, her fingers eventually relax away from your arm. Now, in the mirror, you watch as she reaches for your face. You brace, but her knuckle only caresses your cheek, pushing a stray curl away from your nose. “You know who was beautiful? Julie Vega,” she says. “She was my cousin, you know.”

When you don’t reply, she leans back in shock. She gasps. “You don’t know Julie Vega? She was a famous actress in the eighties. A superstar. She must have been in dozens of movies and TV shows in her time. You have her nose. And her fair skin.”

As you continue brushing, your mother tells you how, at your age, Julie Vega had captivated the country with her talent. Not only could she act, winning multiple awards for her movie and TV roles at the age of ten but, by the time she was sixteen, she had also released her debut music album and was set to record a second. But Julie Vega, she said, had been a stage name. Born Julie Pearl Apostol Postigo, she had been your mother’s cousin on your grandmother’s side. 

“Is she still an actress?” you ask. “Can I meet her?” You are happy to be compared to someone beautiful, but even happier that your mother seems to have forgotten that she is angry with you. You look in the mirror and try to separate your nose and skin from the rest of your face. As you try to transform your own reflection into that of a stranger, you wonder: who does your mother see? You, or someone else?

“No,” says your mother wistfully.

“Why not?”

“She died,” says your mother.

After your mother finished her tour and the guests had been allowed to settle into their rooms, you all reconvened at the kitchen for lunch, where the parents went over their plans for the weekend. You would all say the rosary every night, starting tonight—Maundy Thursday. Then, on both Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, you would drive into the city for Mass at the local parish church. After that, they had something special planned. There would be an egg hunt, your mother said, and some other games, and of course there would be chocolate.

But Easter Sunday was days away, and for now you three children would have to entertain yourselves. “Why don’t you show Megan and Tony the living room?” your mother had said. “You could put a movie on the big TV. You can turn on the aircon.”

You looked at your father, who had by then rejoined the group. He was sitting at the head of the table, and until then he had been chatting only with the adults, while you sat at the children’s table with your new friends. But when you locked eyes with him then, you knew that he was planning something mischievous.

“Why don’t we go on a tour?” he said.

“I’ve already taken them on a tour,” said your mother.

“I mean a real tour. There’s so much more beyond this house. We could go on a trek. I could show you the lake, the grotto. We could go exploring.”

“I’d like to see the lake,” said Tito Jim, Megan’s father.

“See,” said your father with a grin. “We’ll take the kids and be back by merienda.” 

Led by your father, the pack of you walked away from the main house, off the brick driveway, and into the wilderness beyond. He walked you down to the man-made lake, where years earlier, he’d taught you how to fish for tilapia with rods made of bamboo. He showed you the pink eggs of the snails that clung to the carved rock edges of the lake and then took you all to the small, cave-like structure within which a statue of the Virgin Mary was supposedly nestled into the rock— but inside, when you raised your hands in front of your faces, darkness encased the outlines of your fingers like a glove.

“What was that?” Tito Jim said before the cave exploded with movement. Back out into the light you ran, as the air chittered and flapped around you. Mother Mary, you discovered, had been sharing her grotto with a family of bats.

You had seen most of this already, of course. But with your new friends, and your father as guide, the familiar landscape had taken on a new vibrance. Wherever you walked, there was a story to tell. Whatever you saw, there was a memory beneath, waiting to be unearthed.

After walking through a small vegetable garden and up a grassy, overgrown field, you skirted around the second house on the property, which was primarily used as a storage space, and which your father said was haunted.

“When you leave a house empty for too long,” he said, “things are bound to move in.”

Then you found a path that took you into the trees. From within the patch of pines, he pointed one out to you and said, “Look, there’s the one you planted.”

“I planted that?” You looked up. It seemed impossible that something so large could have been planted in your lifetime.

“Yes, don’t you remember? You and all your cousins planted one each.” But you didn’t remember your cousins, not well. They too had disappeared from your lives at that time, and over the years your relationship to your father’s family would continue to fluctuate, cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents blinking in and out of your sphere.

“Is this really all going to be mine? Like mom says?” you said to your father.

“It’s ours. It belongs to our family,” he replied, and somehow even then you understood that he meant his family— his mother and father, his four siblings, and their children, who were your cousins. You did not yet know what this meant for you, a person who’s only tie to the family he described was standing in front of you. You did not yet have the language to describe what you knew intuitively was missing.

After a short rest in a small nipa hut that was built around an ancient mango tree (“Don’t forget to say tabi-tabi po,” said your father, as you entered one by one), it was almost time for merienda. The tree was at the top of a hill, from which you could see the main house below. Between the nipa hut and the house, the grass sloped at an angle sharp enough that should you walk down, you would have to lock your knees to avoid slipping all the way to the bottom.

“I wonder how fast you could make it down just on momentum,” your father said casually, but you knew him better than the others did. You knew it was a challenge.

By the time your father met you and your friends at the bottom of the hill, all three of you were covered in dirt, your tears carving pale streaks into your dust-brown faces. Searching for your mothers, you, Megan, and Tony flung yourselves into the house, where you found them in the dining room. But while the other mothers instantly began to coo and caress, wiping away their children’s tears with gentle hands, your own mother tugged at your collar, the knots in your hair and when she spoke, she did so through lips pulled thinly over teeth.

“Look at your clothes,” she hissed. “Look at your hair.” The words were for you, but between tears you saw that she was looking at your father. “You should have stayed inside like I told you to. Is this how you’re going to behave all weekend? How am I supposed to trust you? Or would you prefer to spend Easter Sunday in your room?”

But you could not answer her. You could only think of your burning arms, feel only the sting of each movement. It felt as if a colony of hungry ants had grown beneath your skin; when you scratched, they bit down harder.

Hearing your mother’s words, Tito Jim bent down and patted you awkwardly on the head. “It’s just some grass,” he said weakly. He told you not to worry, that it would wash off, that the fire in your skin was temporary. “I used to play in the grass all the time. Nothing some baby powder won’t fix.” But seeing your mother’s expression, he quickly backed away again. You looked around for your father to see if he would come and comfort you, but he was already gone.

Finally, as your mothers herded you into your rooms, your cries echoing off the walls of the house, you wondered if this was the last time you would see your new friends. You had accepted that, as your mother had decreed, you might spend the rest of the day in your room, alone. You only wished you knew why they were deserving of comfort and you were not, if only so you could avoid being punished again.

“This is what you get,” she said, as she walked you up the stairs. “This is what you get for not listening to me.”

You have just passed fifty strokes when your mother takes the brush from your hands. “You’re going too slow,” she says. “Here, let me do it.” With each swift stroke, you can feel her impatience building, the bristles digging harder and harder into your scalp.

“How did Julie Vega die?” you ask her. At this, the brush softens. You lean back and close your eyes. Now the repetitive motion feels almost loving, and you want to enjoy it while it lasts.

“Well,” says your mother, “She was beautiful, you see. And young. She was only sixteen when she died.”

Then your mother tells you about Julie Vega’s final role. For a movie anthology, Julie had been asked to play a possessed child, for a segment that later would be likened to The Exorcist. One day, as the film was wrapping up, Julie collapsed on set and had to be rushed to the hospital. She died days later. After her death, rumors began to spread that the house they’d been filming in had been haunted all along, home to an engkanto: an ancient and powerful forest spirit who could sometimes be seen in wild or abandoned places but primarily lived in a spirit realm, a realm just beyond the senses.

Insulted by the chanting of Latin prayers and the mockery they had made of the spirits, your mother said that the engkanto must have already been angry at the people who had invaded their space. So when they saw Julie —talented, beloved, charismatic Julie— it only made sense that they would want her for themselves. 

“Sure,” she continues, “some people say she died of an auto-immune disease. Some say it was pneumonia. But me? I know the truth. Julie Vega died because she was beautiful. So beautiful that she was whisked away to live in the spirit realm forever.” After Julie’s death, she says, people even began to tell stories of a young, beautiful girl who would appear in the forest near the house, asking for help finding her way home. But as soon as the apparition reached the tree line, she would disappear.

“There,” says your mother, putting the brush down. You are certain she hasn’t reached a hundred strokes but you know better than to point that out. You wait until she places the brush on the vanity and steps away before standing from your chair.

Stepping away from the mirror, you turn to face your mother. “You could be like her, you know,” she says, touching your cheek once more. “You could look just like her, if you just take care of yourself. Will you promise?”

You pause, confused. You know your mother is telling you that Julie’s fate is something you should admire, and yet you don’t want to be like Julie. You don’t want to die, nor do you want to be kidnapped by a strange creature, forced to live in a strange land.

But you do want to please your mother. You want to prove to her that you can be good, good enough to spend the weekend with your new friends. So when she asks again, you look at her and you say, “I promise.”

You lie awake for the rest of the night thinking of Julie Vega and her fate. You think of the grotto, and the family of bats you had disturbed, unaware that they had made the cave their home. You think of the house at the top of the hill, empty and abandoned, except for the spirits that had crept inside. So many invisible dangers, so many rules you could break without even knowing it. You touch your nose, your chin, and when you hear a creaking on the veranda outside, you wait for hours, watching the window, waiting to see if something will try to make its way inside, fear and desire swirling in you until you cannot tell them apart.

Later, you will think of Julie Vega each time your mother pulls you away from the playground to powder your nose, each time she books a hair appointment to iron your curls into submission. On your first visit to the dermatologist, as the doctor brings her hands to your face and your eyes fill with anticipatory tears, you will think of the steady rhythm of your mother’s brush in your hair, the sting of her touch above your elbow. And over a decade later, when your father dies and leaves you unmoored, uncertain of where to call home, you will think once again of your inheritance.

After his death, you will return to this day again and again. But memories, you will soon find, are not pristine recordings of events exactly as they happened. In the coming years, remembering will feel more like playing a game of telephone with a chain of unreliable narrators: each one with their own voice, all of them whispering in each other’s ears. And as these moments are told, forgotten, remembered, and retold again, you will begin to question the truth of these stories you have been telling yourself. 

Eventually, you will recall the story of Julie Vega but not how or when it was told. You will remember the feeling of your mother’s hands in your hair, and then you will wonder if they were her hands at all, or if they were someone else’s and she was simply a figure in the room, a reflection in the mirror. And you will try, over and over, to recall Tito Jim’s exact words, but in the end, you will remember only that he had offered a softer, kinder voice.

Origin Stories by Frankie Concepcion was selected as the winner of the 2024 HoneyBee Prize in Creative Nonfiction by Teri Youmans. Here’s what Ms. Youmans had to say about the piece:

What I loved about “Origin Stories” is that it revolves around a particular experience of childhood, but through that experience the writer effortlessly explores relationships with beauty, with the maternal, with spirits, with fear, with longing and inheritance. I also appreciated the strong sense of physical place in the story, but even more so, the child struggling to understand her place in that world. All of this happens as an unfolding, rather than a forcing.

I felt the invisible cuts on my skin made by the sharp grasses, the grip of the mother’s too firm a hand and the fearful child’s reckoning with the ways beauty can lead to one’s demise. Each reading brought new pleasures.

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