Orlando Rivera lived his last three days as a corpse.
Thus, when armed bonnet-clad men barged into Orlando’s house on August 13, and shot him three times in the face in front of his wife Regina, they were killing a man whose heart had stopped beating exactly 72 hours ago, when these same men first crossed the rickety bamboo slats that led to the fisherman’s hut, bade the door open not with knuckles but with steel gun butts, and levelled its barrels to the trembling forehead of Orlando. Orlando had awoken from a nightmare only to be confronted by one more ghoulish for being real. These featureless intruders had laughed without mirth, and cocking their guns, whispered in decibels that froze Orlando’s blood: “Tatlong araw ka na lang.”
The watchful moon over Obando, Bulacan blinked.
Since then, he had been unintelligible to everyone, including his wife, who had faithfully been accompanying him to the military camp every morning since Maj. Gen. Jovito Palaparan’s men decided to flush our insurgency in the province and made lists of civilian fates that range from interrogation, to torture, to liquidation. With horror, she watched her husband mutter to himself, in between spasms that shook his body, as if poisoned by indigestible agitation. She saw him eat nothing but fear—for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Orlando’s blood pressure dropped so low that the birds that flew over the hut that he didn’t leave, like a coffin, fell silent. He grew a pallor over his sunburnt face.
Worst of all, he stared at the tangle of his fish nets with an unbelieving sadness, trying to dredge up memories of the rush of blood through his veins when led his fellow fishermen in opposing a nearby dumpsite whose toxins asphyxiate fishes, his incendiary will to organize and teach them about their own livelihood outside of its relations with the weather. But all the sea yielded was the blackest mud. Fish nets never lie, and the military keeps its words of slaughter.
Right before the trigger was pulled, Orlando felt such rage, the final burst of human emotion in a corpse already three days old.
