กระดานสายล้น

Nika Lomibao

You answered a note taped to a post in July. Room for rent, ok lang kahit sino, must be ok with night shift. ₱4,500, split down the middle, paid on the 5th. You had never met her.

Now you know the sound of her key at ten past seven in the morning, and she knows to leave the kettle full. She works a US healthcare queue at the site up in John Hay, ten at night to seven, and sleeps while you're out being awake in the daylight. What's left is forty minutes of breakfast where she's too tired to lie well, and two hours in the evening while she finds her lanyard.

She gets that out before she's even put the kettle down. Then, if you ask her back: two hours pa lang akong tulog. Then she's gone down the stairs and the room is yours until morning.

Blue and white Ilocano stripe, thumb-sized burn hole near the bottom corner from a candle. It's hers. It's the only one.

It has been shared twice. September 30, when the wind took the awning off the store next door and the power stayed out six hours. October 26, when the roof leaked onto your cot and it was still wet at two in the morning. Neither morning did either of you say anything about it, and it is now the middle of November.

The jalousie over the road has three cracked blades and a gap between the second and third that used to whistle all night. In late October it stopped. She'd folded a sheet of paper into a strip and jammed it in there.

You worked it loose one afternoon while she slept, and you read it.

Printed three weeks ago by her team lead. Never answered. The December roster posts on the 25th. She has not mentioned it once, and she has no idea you've seen it — so every reason she ever gives you, you'll be hearing against a page you can already recite.

Today is Friday, November 14. Eleven days.