Next time you visit Lee Plaza, listen up.
The voice—husky, biting cold-- balances the fever of Dumaguete’s eternal summer. Then your colleagues, for all they care, starts the laugh till your stomach hurts. And the voice: it reminds you of honeymoon in a B-movie--the wife, with much restraint, tempts the husband in his early stage of undress.
Meanwhile, the brownout early at night leaves you nothing but tell stories (ghost stories or otherwise). As if the guard-on-graveyard-shift’s stories about this house doesn’t give you enough goose bumps.
The power failure the whole night sent everyone, that includes me, early to bed.
It’s 2AM here. I wake up to the sound of a fruit falling and with my bedroom door open, the lighted hallway. To the right side of my bed, lying comfortably with my handyphone, is a flashlight--bought at Lee Plaza yesterday for the 4-day camping trip. But I had to use it.
Now, the bedroom voice on a department store’s PA system and power failure, there has to be a connection somewhere. “What’s the point?” in the most pathetic manner, a panelist of a writer’s workshop would ask. Yes. Yes. To steer my thoughts away from the images of the Emily Rose dorm room episode, in the small hours.
Sunrise comes in three hours yet. And the tick of the clock is giving me enough goose bumps. I am wide awake.
