Alex Maskara
Thoughts, Stories, Imagination of Filipino American Alex Maskara
Welcome
~
At 63 and newly retired, Rafael often reminded himself that aging came with expectations—physical decline, grief, spiritual testing, and the aching solitude of being the last to stand. But yesterday, he found himself spiraling again. His brother-in-law had sent a text—frantic, sharp: the hospice had called. His sister was not doing well.
Of course, Rafael knew this was inevitable. His sister was terminal. There would be episodes like this. But panic still surged through his chest. He had told his brother-in-law before: thank you for taking care of her, but I must be careful. Rafael had survived a mild stroke and now took great care to avoid stress that could spike his blood pressure. Yet here it was again. The call. The panic. The helplessness. He reached for the anti-anxiety medication his doctor had prescribed, feeling ashamed that even now, with the outcome as clear as daylight, he still struggled to relax through these moments.
Rafael reflected on the story of King David—not in triumph, but in sorrow. David, harried and worn, once fled from his own son, Absalom, who had turned against him and sought to seize his throne. David’s pain wasn't rooted in mortality but in the heartbreak of betrayal, of family undone. A daughter violated. A son was murdered. Another son exiled. And then, rebellion. And yet, David still called on God, still meditated, and—eventually—slept.
David wasn’t spared the cruelty of family dysfunction, nor was he promised peace despite his righteousness. And neither was Rafael. His sister was dying. His oldest brother had already passed weeks earlier. The losses were piling up like stones on his back.
He thought about the ones who had walked closely with God. Moses never saw the Promised Land. David’s legacy was splintered. Peter was crucified upside down. Paul, beheaded. And here Rafael sat, worried about a quiet, invisible ending.
The spiritual life, he realized, is not a promise of comfort in the physical world. Jesus himself once said, Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s. The physical world matters, but it is not the endpoint. Not the true measure.
Still, Rafael admitted, some days he found himself chasing formulas: Do good, and life will be good to you. But that’s not how it works. That’s not how it has ever worked. His good deeds—decades of supporting families in the Philippines, funding their futures, providing homes, shelter, guidance—had returned to him not with care, but often with silence, even indifference.
He no longer expected gratitude. He was learning to stop expecting anything at all.
There was a bitter clarity in this realization: no matter how much he had given—money, time, housing, even inheritance—none of it guaranteed love, comfort, or companionship in his old age. That belief, he told himself, was as outdated and foolish as his youthful bad habits.
To move forward, Rafael had to release those old expectations. He could not depend on others for happiness. He had to prepare for a future where he walked alone—but not without God.
For nearly a decade, Rafael’s life had been gripped by worry—first when his sister slipped into ketoacidosis in 2015, then again when cancer struck years later. Each new crisis interrupted his life, his rest, his plans. And then came his brother’s request for dialysis support—a permanent reminder that time was running out for all of them. Rafael’s recurring fear was: What happens to them if something happens to me?
But the answers were beginning to unfold. His brother was gone. His sister was in hospice, breathing shallowly. The pattern was painfully familiar—just like when his mother suffered terribly, her screams echoing in Rafael’s mind until he prayed for mercy and an end for her. He had seen her go. Then his father. Then his oldest brother. And now—his sister.
And always, he was the one who remained.
He had done it all before. Financial support, caregiving, moral guidance. He never complained—at least not out loud. He simply carried the weight. Even now, he refrained from traveling, skipping vacations, because of the emotional anchor of being needed.
Now, perhaps, came the final release.
Maybe this was his sister’s final gift to him: freedom.
But it hurt. More than anything, Rafael grieved the deeper truth—that even in his pain, there was no one in his family he could call upon for comfort. All his sacrifices seemed forgotten. If help ever came, it was always from him, never to him. Maybe they believed they owed him nothing. Maybe they thought of him not as a brother, but as a duty-bearer—an endless source.
So be it.
The Lord, he thought, was leasing him a new life—one finally free of obligations. His sister was the last tie. Soon, there would be no more.
He imagined his final days not with family at his side, but walking in solitude with God. That image had comforted him since he was fourteen. That was when he first met Jessie—a quiet figure in his make-believe world, a spiritual companion, not a person but a presence. Even then, Rafael had known: I don’t need the crowd. I only need the Lord Jessie.
Those who once benefitted from his labor and love had disappeared. Some may even wish him ill. Some, he feared, might quietly celebrate his decline, waiting like vultures for scraps of inheritance. But they would find nothing—because Rafael would not be there. Not emotionally. Not spiritually.
He would be walking with the Lord.
In silence. In peace.
God had given him strength and intelligence for a purpose—not to be repaid, but to carry out his part in the continuum of life. For years, Rafael had turned to prayer, journaling from a tiny Gideon Bible in the car before work, now through a laptop and a cloud folder. The medium had changed, but the devotion remained.
Yes, he felt resentment. Yes, he felt alone. But this wasn’t new. Even when the children he helped were young and unable to offer anything back, he had managed. Now, as they matured and couldn’t afford to be with him no matter how hard they tired. They have new families, they have new careers, they want to survive in this modern world depriving them the time and energy to care for a lonely or sick relative, he knew not to expect more.
His siblings were aging too. No one could be depended on. And maybe that was the truth God wanted him to accept: it had always been Rafael and God. No more. No less.
Moses didn’t see the land. David’s family unraveled. Peter and Paul died alone. So why should Rafael expect a warm bed and a circle of loved ones in the end?
No. That was never promised.
What was promised was God.
And Rafael’s strength, his unshakable center, came from that.
He still prayed. He still believed. He still endured. He was not helpless. He was simply returning to where he began—with nothing but faith, solitude, and a pen.
2025-07-01 04:18:28
popong
Ramon Bustamente stood by the wide bay window of his small condominium in Koreatown, Los Angeles, staring absently at the rustling fronds of a worn-out palm tree swaying against the golden smog of a late California afternoon. From this angle, the city always looked like a dream fraying at the edges—too loud, too fast, and far too young for a man like him.
It was Naomi’s story that wouldn’t let go of him. Not the modern one—some Hollywood Naomi with a heartbreak and a bottle of rosé—but the old Naomi, the one from scripture. The widow. The mother who had buried both her sons in foreign soil. She had no pension, no security net, no one left to hold her hand. She went back to Judea, because at least there, there was familiarity. A memory of home.
Ramon wasn’t much different.
There was a time, not long ago, when his sister Marietta and her two husbands—first the brutish one, later the gentler Matt—along with his friend Jim, had formed a makeshift circle of support. A motley crew of urban survivors, bound not by blood but by the gentle glances and silent assurances that aging didn’t have to mean solitude. Ramon, older than all of them by a good decade, often joked he was their spiritual dry run for old age. They would tease him, cook for him, sit on porches and share unimportant stories that felt important in the moment.
But fate, he thought bitterly, always trims the cast.
Marietta was now in hospice, her bright laughter reduced to vague memories and hospital whispers. Matt, whose health had always been shaky, was barely holding on. Jim was still around—but barely more than a ghost of companionship. He was kind, loyal, and perpetually broke, dependent on Ramon for housing, utilities, and the illusion of stability. Ramon knew that if it came down to it, Jim’s heart would be willing—but his hands would be empty.
So now, the path was starting to clear. Like Naomi, Ramon needed to go home.
Back to the Philippines. Back to the tropical rains and cousins who still remembered his voice. It had been thirty-four years. The thought was dizzying—like walking back into a room you left as a young man only to find your own ghost still sitting in the chair. But the logic was sound. Back home, he could live out his years in peace, with faces that looked like his, in a language that didn’t trip on his tongue. He could finally be surrounded by people who might not know all his stories, but at least shared his beginning.
Still, there were logistics.
He couldn’t abandon Jim just like that. Doing so would haunt him for the rest of his life. Jim would need stable housing. And then there were the properties—bits of California he had managed to hold onto, now waiting to be sold, their proceeds earmarked for a modest retreat somewhere near the desert borders: maybe Barstow, maybe Bullhead City. A place close to an airport, so he could come and go. He wasn’t closing the book on America—just dog-earing the page.
But his thoughts kept circling back to his sister Marietta, his only family in California.
He had imagined her final moments. Not in sterile detail, but in light. She would be drifting, perhaps, toward something radiant. A laughing breeze. A house with no corners. Maybe their parents were waiting for her, or their older brother, cracking jokes at heaven’s gate. Ramon tried to picture her not as she was—frail, exhausted, swollen with pain—but as she could now be: dancing, laughing, unburdened.
The grief, he reminded himself, belonged to the living. The dead were free.
And there were still things left to do for the living. Marietta, in her final years, had left him something: a modest IRA account. Her silent gesture. She couldn’t help much while she was alive—not for lack of love, but because life hadn’t given her much to give. Now Ramon would pass it on, quietly and with dignity, to the family she had so longed to support. His prayer was that she would be remembered, not for the years of silence or pain, but for this last, quiet kindness.
Perhaps, he thought, he could use a bit of that to pay off his own medical bills. Nothing outrageous—just $3,700. A strange kind of blessing, really. As though she were helping him, finally, in her own time.
His mind wandered again, not to the estate plans or real estate listings, but to their shared past. Marietta’s life in Los Angeles had not been kind. She arrived like an exotic bird clipped of its wings, her dreams of marriage and work and love smashed against the gritty realities of immigrant life. Skilled in nursing but naïve in love, she had married a man from the low end of humanity’s spectrum—a man who caged her spirit and narrowed her world to four walls and a ball of yarn.
For ten years she crocheted in silence.
It was only after they pushed the man out of her life that she began to heal. Her second love—her rescuer, later her husband—helped her walk again, literally and figuratively. They taught her to drive. She started laughing again. She talked about walking in the park. She even joined a gym.
Then came the sickness.
First the blood sugar spikes. Then the ketoacidosis. Toes were amputated. The cancer came next—silent, then screaming. Ramon remembered it all in excruciating detail. The elastic bandages, the breathless calls, the hospital beds, the silences that said more than any diagnosis ever could. Her voice had once filled their phone conversations with the gossip of siblings and tales of old neighbors. But in those final months, it shrank, like a house closing its windows one by one.
They had both been sick. They both knew it. And still, neither dared to say the worst aloud.
Now, with her journey nearly complete, Ramon stood alone in his apartment, surrounded by the hum of the refrigerator and the faint noise of a car alarm in the distance. He whispered a prayer not for himself, but for her. That she find her way into the light, quickly, painlessly. That she float, finally free.
He thought of her as a pioneer in a strange land, now heading home, like Naomi, like him.
The world would forget them in time. All of them. That was the natural order. But in the time left to him, Ramon Bustamente would make sure her memory lingered—softly, like the smell of cassava cake in a childhood kitchen, or the echo of a hymn sung far away.
2025-06-20 02:11:51
shortstories
Quiet Reckoning
At 63 and newly retired, Rafael often reminded himself that aging came with expectations—physical decline, grief, spiritual testing, and the aching solitude of being the last to stand. But yesterday, he found himself spiraling again. His brother-in-law had sent a text—frantic, sharp: the hospice had called. His sister was not doing well.
Of course, Rafael knew this was inevitable. His sister was terminal. There would be episodes like this. But panic still surged through his chest. He had told his brother-in-law before: thank you for taking care of her, but I must be careful. Rafael had survived a mild stroke and now took great care to avoid stress that could spike his blood pressure. Yet here it was again. The call. The panic. The helplessness. He reached for the anti-anxiety medication his doctor had prescribed, feeling ashamed that even now, with the outcome as clear as daylight, he still struggled to relax through these moments.
Rafael reflected on the story of King David—not in triumph, but in sorrow. David, harried and worn, once fled from his own son, Absalom, who had turned against him and sought to seize his throne. David’s pain wasn't rooted in mortality but in the heartbreak of betrayal, of family undone. A daughter violated. A son was murdered. Another son exiled. And then, rebellion. And yet, David still called on God, still meditated, and—eventually—slept.
David wasn’t spared the cruelty of family dysfunction, nor was he promised peace despite his righteousness. And neither was Rafael. His sister was dying. His oldest brother had already passed weeks earlier. The losses were piling up like stones on his back.
He thought about the ones who had walked closely with God. Moses never saw the Promised Land. David’s legacy was splintered. Peter was crucified upside down. Paul, beheaded. And here Rafael sat, worried about a quiet, invisible ending.
The spiritual life, he realized, is not a promise of comfort in the physical world. Jesus himself once said, Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s. The physical world matters, but it is not the endpoint. Not the true measure.
Still, Rafael admitted, some days he found himself chasing formulas: Do good, and life will be good to you. But that’s not how it works. That’s not how it has ever worked. His good deeds—decades of supporting families in the Philippines, funding their futures, providing homes, shelter, guidance—had returned to him not with care, but often with silence, even indifference.
He no longer expected gratitude. He was learning to stop expecting anything at all.
There was a bitter clarity in this realization: no matter how much he had given—money, time, housing, even inheritance—none of it guaranteed love, comfort, or companionship in his old age. That belief, he told himself, was as outdated and foolish as his youthful bad habits.
To move forward, Rafael had to release those old expectations. He could not depend on others for happiness. He had to prepare for a future where he walked alone—but not without God.
For nearly a decade, Rafael’s life had been gripped by worry—first when his sister slipped into ketoacidosis in 2015, then again when cancer struck years later. Each new crisis interrupted his life, his rest, his plans. And then came his brother’s request for dialysis support—a permanent reminder that time was running out for all of them. Rafael’s recurring fear was: What happens to them if something happens to me?
But the answers were beginning to unfold. His brother was gone. His sister was in hospice, breathing shallowly. The pattern was painfully familiar—just like when his mother suffered terribly, her screams echoing in Rafael’s mind until he prayed for mercy and an end for her. He had seen her go. Then his father. Then his oldest brother. And now—his sister.
And always, he was the one who remained.
He had done it all before. Financial support, caregiving, moral guidance. He never complained—at least not out loud. He simply carried the weight. Even now, he refrained from traveling, skipping vacations, because of the emotional anchor of being needed.
Now, perhaps, came the final release.
Maybe this was his sister’s final gift to him: freedom.
But it hurt. More than anything, Rafael grieved the deeper truth—that even in his pain, there was no one in his family he could call upon for comfort. All his sacrifices seemed forgotten. If help ever came, it was always from him, never to him. Maybe they believed they owed him nothing. Maybe they thought of him not as a brother, but as a duty-bearer—an endless source.
So be it.
The Lord, he thought, was leasing him a new life—one finally free of obligations. His sister was the last tie. Soon, there would be no more.
He imagined his final days not with family at his side, but walking in solitude with God. That image had comforted him since he was fourteen. That was when he first met Jessie—a quiet figure in his make-believe world, a spiritual companion, not a person but a presence. Even then, Rafael had known: I don’t need the crowd. I only need the Lord Jessie.
Those who once benefitted from his labor and love had disappeared. Some may even wish him ill. Some, he feared, might quietly celebrate his decline, waiting like vultures for scraps of inheritance. But they would find nothing—because Rafael would not be there. Not emotionally. Not spiritually.
He would be walking with the Lord.
In silence. In peace.
God had given him strength and intelligence for a purpose—not to be repaid, but to carry out his part in the continuum of life. For years, Rafael had turned to prayer, journaling from a tiny Gideon Bible in the car before work, now through a laptop and a cloud folder. The medium had changed, but the devotion remained.
Yes, he felt resentment. Yes, he felt alone. But this wasn’t new. Even when the children he helped were young and unable to offer anything back, he had managed. Now, as they matured and couldn’t afford to be with him no matter how hard they tired. They have new families, they have new careers, they want to survive in this modern world depriving them the time and energy to care for a lonely or sick relative, he knew not to expect more.
His siblings were aging too. No one could be depended on. And maybe that was the truth God wanted him to accept: it had always been Rafael and God. No more. No less.
Moses didn’t see the land. David’s family unraveled. Peter and Paul died alone. So why should Rafael expect a warm bed and a circle of loved ones in the end?
No. That was never promised.
What was promised was God.
And Rafael’s strength, his unshakable center, came from that.
He still prayed. He still believed. He still endured. He was not helpless. He was simply returning to where he began—with nothing but faith, solitude, and a pen.
2025-07-01 04:18:28
popong
Ramon Bustamante Returns Home
Ramon Bustamente stood by the wide bay window of his small condominium in Koreatown, Los Angeles, staring absently at the rustling fronds of a worn-out palm tree swaying against the golden smog of a late California afternoon. From this angle, the city always looked like a dream fraying at the edges—too loud, too fast, and far too young for a man like him.
It was Naomi’s story that wouldn’t let go of him. Not the modern one—some Hollywood Naomi with a heartbreak and a bottle of rosé—but the old Naomi, the one from scripture. The widow. The mother who had buried both her sons in foreign soil. She had no pension, no security net, no one left to hold her hand. She went back to Judea, because at least there, there was familiarity. A memory of home.
Ramon wasn’t much different.
There was a time, not long ago, when his sister Marietta and her two husbands—first the brutish one, later the gentler Matt—along with his friend Jim, had formed a makeshift circle of support. A motley crew of urban survivors, bound not by blood but by the gentle glances and silent assurances that aging didn’t have to mean solitude. Ramon, older than all of them by a good decade, often joked he was their spiritual dry run for old age. They would tease him, cook for him, sit on porches and share unimportant stories that felt important in the moment.
But fate, he thought bitterly, always trims the cast.
Marietta was now in hospice, her bright laughter reduced to vague memories and hospital whispers. Matt, whose health had always been shaky, was barely holding on. Jim was still around—but barely more than a ghost of companionship. He was kind, loyal, and perpetually broke, dependent on Ramon for housing, utilities, and the illusion of stability. Ramon knew that if it came down to it, Jim’s heart would be willing—but his hands would be empty.
So now, the path was starting to clear. Like Naomi, Ramon needed to go home.
Back to the Philippines. Back to the tropical rains and cousins who still remembered his voice. It had been thirty-four years. The thought was dizzying—like walking back into a room you left as a young man only to find your own ghost still sitting in the chair. But the logic was sound. Back home, he could live out his years in peace, with faces that looked like his, in a language that didn’t trip on his tongue. He could finally be surrounded by people who might not know all his stories, but at least shared his beginning.
Still, there were logistics.
He couldn’t abandon Jim just like that. Doing so would haunt him for the rest of his life. Jim would need stable housing. And then there were the properties—bits of California he had managed to hold onto, now waiting to be sold, their proceeds earmarked for a modest retreat somewhere near the desert borders: maybe Barstow, maybe Bullhead City. A place close to an airport, so he could come and go. He wasn’t closing the book on America—just dog-earing the page.
But his thoughts kept circling back to his sister Marietta, his only family in California.
He had imagined her final moments. Not in sterile detail, but in light. She would be drifting, perhaps, toward something radiant. A laughing breeze. A house with no corners. Maybe their parents were waiting for her, or their older brother, cracking jokes at heaven’s gate. Ramon tried to picture her not as she was—frail, exhausted, swollen with pain—but as she could now be: dancing, laughing, unburdened.
The grief, he reminded himself, belonged to the living. The dead were free.
And there were still things left to do for the living. Marietta, in her final years, had left him something: a modest IRA account. Her silent gesture. She couldn’t help much while she was alive—not for lack of love, but because life hadn’t given her much to give. Now Ramon would pass it on, quietly and with dignity, to the family she had so longed to support. His prayer was that she would be remembered, not for the years of silence or pain, but for this last, quiet kindness.
Perhaps, he thought, he could use a bit of that to pay off his own medical bills. Nothing outrageous—just $3,700. A strange kind of blessing, really. As though she were helping him, finally, in her own time.
His mind wandered again, not to the estate plans or real estate listings, but to their shared past. Marietta’s life in Los Angeles had not been kind. She arrived like an exotic bird clipped of its wings, her dreams of marriage and work and love smashed against the gritty realities of immigrant life. Skilled in nursing but naïve in love, she had married a man from the low end of humanity’s spectrum—a man who caged her spirit and narrowed her world to four walls and a ball of yarn.
For ten years she crocheted in silence.
It was only after they pushed the man out of her life that she began to heal. Her second love—her rescuer, later her husband—helped her walk again, literally and figuratively. They taught her to drive. She started laughing again. She talked about walking in the park. She even joined a gym.
Then came the sickness.
First the blood sugar spikes. Then the ketoacidosis. Toes were amputated. The cancer came next—silent, then screaming. Ramon remembered it all in excruciating detail. The elastic bandages, the breathless calls, the hospital beds, the silences that said more than any diagnosis ever could. Her voice had once filled their phone conversations with the gossip of siblings and tales of old neighbors. But in those final months, it shrank, like a house closing its windows one by one.
They had both been sick. They both knew it. And still, neither dared to say the worst aloud.
Now, with her journey nearly complete, Ramon stood alone in his apartment, surrounded by the hum of the refrigerator and the faint noise of a car alarm in the distance. He whispered a prayer not for himself, but for her. That she find her way into the light, quickly, painlessly. That she float, finally free.
He thought of her as a pioneer in a strange land, now heading home, like Naomi, like him.
The world would forget them in time. All of them. That was the natural order. But in the time left to him, Ramon Bustamente would make sure her memory lingered—softly, like the smell of cassava cake in a childhood kitchen, or the echo of a hymn sung far away.
2025-06-20 02:11:51
shortstories