How My Sister-In-Law Landed A Husband: A True Story (Supposedly)

The old man stepped from the living room and out through the main doors, hefting in the crook of his arm a steel air rifle. Its nose glinted in the Saturday morning sunlight. It was heavy. It was long. It was lovely.

"Alvin," the old man said, and he placed his hand on the left shoulder of a much younger man seated nearby. His touch was light, but the younger man flinched ever so slightly, and could not take his eyes off the rifle.

"Uncle! Good morning!" Alvin responded, but he could not rise from where he was seated on the barrel stool. He worried over the stains his suddenly flowing perspiration would leave on his shirt, and placed both his hands on the stool's matching green-marble table to steady himself.

"How are you this morning?" The old man raised the rifle to his face and checked his aim against a small bush a few meters away. The bush pushed up against the lot's front wall, which divided their privacy from the road outside. He held the weapon ready, cocked and steady.

"F...f...fine," Alvin said. "I'm just waiting for Cathy. We're going out for the day."

"Mmm. Okay."

Neither of them spoke for a while. The old man kept his pose, a granite statue.

"Alvin," the old man said after some minutes, "how long have you been seeing my daughter?"

The young man was startled by the question, and spent some moments in frantic thought. "Umm...more than a year? No, two? Maybe three."

"More than three," the old man declared.

"Really? Oh."

"Yes, really. Shh."

The lower branches of the bush trembled. From a very small hole in the wall behind it, a rat's head peeked out. It inched through the hole slowly until it was fully through, and crouched in a burrow of shallow soil under the low-hanging leaves of the bush.

The rat was a full-grown adult, dark grey shading to black, except for the striated and fleshy pink of its paws, its inner ears, and its tail, which seemed as long as its body. Bits of dead leaves, grass, and unidentifiable detritus from the stinking canals outside stuck to its damp fur. It opened its mouth and chittered, revealing sharp, white teeth.

Then, it flew! Into the air it somersaulted, rustling the bush's leaves. But the first and last flight of its life was short; it landed on its side near the trunk of a small tree, and lay still and limp.

Even from where they were, the two men could see the dark red gash of blood on its temple, just above its left eye.

The old man brought his rifle down.

"When are you marrying my daughter?" he said.

"Next month! Next week!" Alvin squeaked, sounding not unlike a mouse himself. "Tomorrow! Right now! When do you want it?"

"Good, good. Are you hungry? Have you had breakfast?"

"No...I mean...yes...I mean...no, I'm fine. Thank you."

"Okay. I think I'll go have my breakfast. Excuse me."

The old man walked back into the house the way he had come. Alvin fanned himself with his hands. He nearly jumped out of his pants when the morning newspaper flew over the wall and landed beside him with a slap on the pebble-wash floor. He looked down at his shirt, and noted that his perspiration stains looked like the map of the world, but one whose land masses were either melting, or dripping with blood. The air was very still.

The above parody was written with all due respect to Manuel Arguilla's classic Pinoy short story, "How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife". Mr. Arguilla's tale is the kind that I typically hear people comment that "nothing happens in it", but I think it's a study in subtlety, understatement, and how the undercurrents of surface events can be well-presented.

The parody above is supposedly true, but I'm only relying on Alvin's recounting (which grows with each of his retellings) and on Cathy's reliable denials of "It didn't really happen that way. Just a little bit." Cathy doesn't say much else, while Alvin says too much. So the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

I haven't had the courage to ask the old man his side.

Oh yes, "Alvin" and "Cathy" are not their real names. They've been changed to protect the guilty, especially "Alvin". :)