Chapter 3
Cine sa Isla, up close, looked less like a cinema and more like a creepy, worn-out place that mothers use to scare their children into going to sleep early or eating their vegetables.
The marquee out front still had plastic letters spelling out a movie title from what must have been four years ago, NOW SHO ING, half the W missing, the rest sun-bleached to the color of old teeth.
The ticket booth window was boarded. Somebody had spray-painted a crude heart on the side wall, which felt, Allan thought, almost too on the nose for what he was about to do with his life.
“Home sweet condemned building,” he said.
“Not condemned,” Robby said, unlocking the side door with a key that clearly took some coaxing. “That’s just what Kapitan says. Structurally, our engineer says it’s fine. It just needs cleaning, fixing, opening back up.”
“You have an engineer for this?”
“The barangay has an engineer for everything,” Robby said. “Part of DRRM. How houses collapse, what can hold, what can’t.” He pushed the door open with his shoulder. “Me, I make the maps and the plan and supply the charm. He makes sure things don’t fall down.”
Inside smelled like dust, mildew, and decades of spilled soda that had become part of the architecture.
Rows of wooden seats sat in crooked lines, half of them collapsed, cobwebs strung between the armrests like tinsel nobody had bothered to take down.
But the screen, patched, yellowed, sagging slightly in one corner, was still there.
And above it, faded almost to nothing, the outline of a mural.
Allan walked toward it slowly, the way you’d walk toward something you weren’t sure was actually still breathing.
It was a mountain. Coconut trees. A sun with too many rays, drawn by someone who clearly loved suns more than accuracy. And in the corner, small enough that you’d miss it if you weren’t looking, a tiny painted rooster, mid-crow.
“Lolo painted that rooster for me,” Allan said, before he could stop himself. “I was seven. I told him I wanted a rooster in the background. He said, ‘why not.’ Months later, there it was.” He laughed, a little wet around the edges. “I thought he’d forgotten.”
Robby didn’t say anything for a second. Then: “He never really forgot anything. Every time there was a new movie, he’d say, ‘look at that rooster, still alive.’”
“You remember that?”
“The whole barangay has memories in this place,” Robby said. “That’s why we want to open it again.”
Allan turned in a slow circle, taking in the whole ruined, beloved shape of it, the screen, the seats, the ghost of a mural that had somehow survived years of neglect and one very committed rooster’s legacy.
“This,” he said finally, “is a lot bigger than the ‘little art’ you mentioned.”
“I said it needed a little art,” Robby said, unbothered. “I never said it would be a little work.”
“You tricked me.”
“I didn’t lie,” Robby said. “I just kept it brief.”
Before Allan could respond, the side door banged open, and a man about their age strolled in carrying a tape measure, a thermos, and the exact energy of someone who considered himself the most important guy in every room he entered.
“Hey! The barangay’s very own Wonder Kid,” the man announced, arms spread. “Still alive? I thought you were rich in Manila by now, that you’d never come back.”
“Jake,” Allan said, and something in his shoulders came down, unexpectedly glad.
Jake had been the kind of kid who knew everyone’s business, told the best campfire stories, and once convinced an entire barangay fiesta committee that a stray cat living behind the chapel was actually a reincarnated engkanto: a rumor that, as far as Allan knew, half the titas still believed.
“Tito Jake now, to the kids,” Jake said, setting his thermos down on a dusty seat like it was a throne.
“I’ve been busy with school building rehabilitation, local tourism with storytelling, about reviving the legacy of Ibalon, about the monsters, about the legends.
And then, I’m the business side of this project too.
” He gestured grandly at the ruined cinema like a real estate agent presenting a penthouse.
“So if there’s funding, I handle it. If there’s a story, I handle that too. Multi-tasking.”
“He means,” Robby translated dryly, “he does the grant paperwork, and he also does the ghost stories.”
“Feels right to combine them, honestly,” Jake said. “Both scare people for a living.”
“I missed you, Jaworski Feliciano the Third,” Allan admitted. “I hate to admit it.”
“Shhhh. Just Jake. Let’s stick to the branding,” Jake said, and for one second, dropped the showman voice completely, just looked at Allan with real, uncomplicated warmth. “Me too. Just a shame it took ten years.”
“Yeah,” Allan said. “A real shame.”
The moment threatened to get sincere, so Jake, with the instincts of a man who’d built an entire personality around deflection, clapped his hands once.
“Okay. Work time. Robby, tell Kapitan we’ll need a permit for the community screening once this place is fixed up.
That’s not a joke, we need proper paperwork.
We can’t just point a projector at the wall. ”
“I know,” Robby said. “I’ve got Kapitan covered.”
“And you,” Jake said, turning the full beam of his attention on Allan, “you’re doing the mural. The new mural. Because this old one’s dead. Look, barely half of it’s even left.”
Allan looked back at the ceiling. At the rooster. At the sun with too many rays.
“I haven’t painted anything in ten years, Jake.”
“You didn’t exactly leave your own barangay behind for ten years either,” Jake said, with the easy brutality of an old friend who had never learned tact and never planned to. “But here you are. So you can do this too.”
Robby, a few feet away, was very deliberately examining a crack in the wall and saying nothing, which Allan understood, with growing, irritated clarity, was its own kind of vote.
“Fine,” Allan said. “I’ll look at it. I’m not promising a mural. I’m promising to look at a wall.”
“That settles it,” Jake said happily, already scribbling something in a battered notebook. “First on the list: ‘Allan, looks at wall.’ Then, ‘Allan, draws.’ Then, ‘Allan, gets famous.’ That’s the whole career path, just like that.”
“Please stop planning my life.”
“I’m used to planning other people’s lives,” Jake said. “It’s my job too, right, Robby?”
“So you say,” Robby said. “I couldn’t stop you if I tried.”
They spent the next hour walking the length of the cinema, Jake narrating a history that was probably sixty percent accurate and forty percent legend he’d clearly embellished for maximum drama: how the projector had briefly caught fire in 1998, how a former mayor had once proposed to his wife in the third row, how the rooster mural had, according to at least one tita, briefly “moved” during a particularly dramatic thunderstorm, which everyone agreed was probably just poor lighting and nobody was willing to fully rule out.
“And here,” Jake said, stopping at a narrow side door half-hidden behind a collapsed curtain rod, “was the most popular spot back then for students. Projection room. Small window, you could watch for free if you were smart about hiding.”
“You used to sneak in here?”
“All the time,” Jake said, entirely unrepentant. “With Robby, sometimes. Before he became Mister Serious Disaster Response Macho Man.”
“I was twelve,” Robby protested, from across the room.
“Twelve, sneaking into a projection booth. Already a delinquent.”
“It was one time,” Robby said. “Then the old caretaker caught us. A whole week, we washed the seats as punishment.”
“That explains the trauma response every time someone mentions cleaning duty,” Allan said.
“Not trauma,” Robby said, with great dignity. “Discipline.”
“Trauma,” Jake and Allan said, at exactly the same time, and Robby threw up his hands, unable to argue against a unanimous verdict.
Allan found himself sketching without quite deciding to, pulling a receipt out of his pocket and a stub of pencil from god knew where, roughing out the shape of a new mural over the old one: the same mountain, the same too-many-rayed sun, but bigger now, more storm in it, more sky.
Robby watched him do it from a few seats away, quiet in a way that felt less like distance and more like he was trying not to interrupt something.
“My question,” Robby said eventually, when Jake had wandered off to argue with the engineer on the phone about ceiling joists, “is why did you stop?”
“Drawing?”
“Yeah.”
Allan shrugged, still sketching, not quite meeting his eyes. “There’s no job listing for ‘town artist’ in Manila. There’s a job for ‘person who’s good with a spreadsheet.’”
“I didn’t ask what the job was,” Robby said. “I asked why you stopped.”
The pencil stilled in Allan’s hand.
He didn’t have a clean answer for that, not one that didn’t involve ten years of trying to be someone easier to explain at reunions, someone with a title instead of a talent that felt too fragile to say out loud.
“I just didn’t want,” he said finally, quieter than he meant to, “everything I worked for to turn out to be for nothing.”
Robby didn’t push. He just nodded once, like he was tucking the answer away someplace safe, and said, “This isn’t for nothing.”
Allan looked up at him, and for a second, one unguarded, dangerous second, the old ache and the new one seemed to be the same shape.
“You’re annoyingly good at this,” Allan said. “The pep talk thing.”
“Comes with the barangay ID, apparently,” Robby said, deadpan, and the moment broke into something easier, something they could both survive.
“Everyone in this barangay has a job that happens to also be emotionally invasive,” Allan said. “Is that in the ordinance somewhere?”
“Maybe,” Robby said. “Ask Kapitan.”
Outside, a rooster crowed, an actual live one this time, off down the street, and Allan laughed before he could stop himself, the sound surprising him with how easy it came.
He looked back down at the sketch in his hand. The mountain. The sun. The storm he hadn’t meant to draw but had drawn anyway.
Ten years, and his hand still remembered exactly how to do this.
He wasn’t sure yet if that was a comfort or a warning.