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rodrigo v. dela pena jr. : “algebra”
Solve for x, the teacher’s tired calligraphy announced on the blackboard.
That day, a freshman had leaped from the top of the Humanities building, fracturing her skull.
It was the year when we were beginning to understand the intricacies of the body—the four-chambered heart, liver that purified the corpuscles of the blood, a skeleton almost comical displayed in the lab.
Someone said the girl died instantly, as though her pulse ceased the moment she hit the ground.
It was a mystery why she jumped, much like the unknown variable in algebra class was a riddle I could not decipher.
I took comfort in the body’s rhythms explained, the frog dissected then preserved in formalin.
But on my half-sheet of pad paper neatly torn cross-wise with surgical precision, the equations never took off in their intended trajectory.
We shuffled along the hallways that dimly echoed with secrets whispered, reluctant of contact, uncertain of the future looming before us.
A white van arrived to stitch together her broken body while our bones itched with desire, our voices quivering in the strange language of mathematics.
We edged into daylight, painfully conscious of gravity, puzzled by integers in their disguises of x and y we will incessantly be solving.
Rodrigo V. Dela Peña Jr. lives in Dumaguete, an idyllic city on the island of Negros, Philippines. His works have been published in the Blue Print Review, Literary Tonic, Gowanus, & Poets' Picturebook.
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{ issue three |
