She flips through the pages again. "I know what you mean..." she starts, and then stops. A waiter pops up at her side, and asks her if she needs anything.

"Go away," she says. Then she turns to me again. "It's just that... there's always a 'what happens next.' I mean, we're supposed to be chronicling lives here, right?" she says, tapping the printout. "Or a life, anyway. So where do you stop? She might stay with her boyfriend Lucas, she might go off with Makie, she might end up with neither of them, she might get hit by a speeding taxi on her way to the bank. Where does it stop?"

"You're saying that the choice of a cut-off point is always arbitrary anyway, so it's okay to just end it wherever?"

"No... that's not exactly what I'm saying. I end a story when I feel I'm finished with it."

"So you're finished with this one."

"Well, I don't know. It's just that it's due tomorrow."

She calls the waiter back. "Well, I gotta go. I'll just pay for our overpriced sludge, and then I'll go home and see if I can't do something more with this," she says, holding up her manuscript.

"It's a good story," I say, as she hands the waiter some money.

"A good four-fifths of a story, maybe," she says, as she stands up. "I wonder if Dr. Dalusong will like it."

"I'm sure he will," I say, in an unsure tone of voice. "Anyway, I like it."

"Thanks. See ya," she slings her backpack over her shoulder, and strides out of the café. I watch her through the glass facade as she climbs into her VW beetle, starts the car, and drives away.

I sit there for a while, looking at the photograph on the wall beside me. It's a nice summery beachscape - white sand, buko trees and all - but I start to think that maybe it's too dark, that it gives you a sense of something evil about to happen, as if the shadow of a giant hand had been cast across that shore. But maybe that was the point. Presumably, the photographer knew what he was doing, with his varied filters and his knowledge of the developing process.

I take Raya's discarded receipt and look at it for a while, as if the numbers scrawled on its grid might yield a formula, or an explanation. Then I fold it in half, lengthwise. I open it again, and then I take the two upper corners and fold them towards each other so that they meet and form a peak. And as I continue to fold and shape it, I think about stories, and flight, and the more difficult magic of second chances.

--END--

Luis has been with UP Quill since the beginning, but he only made himself useful when he became the Pub. Comm. head in 1996. He has won two Philippine Graphic awards and two Palanca awards for his fiction.