i always told tall tales growing up. and it never got me into trouble so much as when i told true ones.
my favorites usually involved me and my often rehashed encounters with a very unoriginal black hairy giant smoking a cliched enormous cigar.
and my friends, those very earnest boys, just lapped up my kapre stories like they were the dark virtuoso pieces of the brothers grimm.
annoyed though, but my mother simply brushed off my taradiddling. essential part, perhaps to her thinking, of my growing up.
until one afternoon, i brought home for dinner a fish, a big silvery one, that i claimed simply fell off the sky.
tweaking my ears, my mother demanded that i return the fish she thought i stole from our neighbor fisherfolks.
but i never stole nothing from nobody, i insisted.
this made her livid that she made me kneel on a bed of salt. she threatened to keep me there, even for a day, until i find back my scruples and return the fish to its rightful catcher.
crying now, i told my mother that the fish simply dropped from heaven. this infuriated her more that my usually bated mother was now screaming in my face.
from then on, i realized how dangerous it was to really tell a true story.
before the salt could pickle raw my knees, i relented. i made up this story about how manang alet, a neighbor two houses removed from ours, gave me one of her husband’'s catch as she was really fond of me.
fond? why? my mother asked.
because i resembled her dead son, i told her.
my mama's mien quickly blanched as if the ghost of manang alet’'s son just spooked her.
she helped me get up and scraped out the salt crystals caking in my knees with the hem of her skirt. i still remember until now the pink and white flower prints of her skirt blossoming in my knees.
that evening, we had one of the juiciest fish steaks we ever had. and mama, in her prayer before the meal, thanked copiously the lord for surrounding us with friendly neighbors and enveloping the new me with the mantle of integrity.
on my way to bed, she reminded me to ask the lord for forgiveness for my transgression earlier that day. and when i only nodded, she called me out again, enunciating my full christian name like a curse.
saying my prayers that night, i asked the lord for pardon many many times over for my made up manang alet story.
and all throughout the rest of my evening prayers, i tried, i really tried, to suppress the memory, that magical memory of how earlier that afternoon, this majestic kingfisher bird, indigo crested, straight billed, just lost its grip of its day’'s catch and tossed on my way a silvery reef fish as i made my way home along the coastal road that was never straight and narrow.