PERISH MANICURES; LONG LIVE LIGHTER NAILS!
By: Iris P. Concepcion
A Mongoloid-looking man who serves the best cinnamon-almond baked pastry is slumped on his cushioned bed with  monochromatic kitty pictures, looking at his half-consumed intravenous medicine, a dextrose.
He is sick at this time of the day, the 364,111,111 full lunar moon, as he barely hides behind the mast of a grey sky.
His daughter, a china doll, is playing wood blocks nearby, counting the numbers one to ten.  She forms house designs in triangular and oval forms.  She does not know how to use the hula hoop, preferring to circle it in motioned calisthenics using her luminiscent hands.
She has rejected my polite offering of sports education: she could use it around her waist in a mock belly dancing that could then be circled around her neck, knees and forefinger in Olympian Science. She grabs her green, pureed vegetable, contained in her milk bottle and pours it down her tiny throat.
We look at each other as her father is watching us when her mother appears from of the house's doors.
She hovers on her brood, her own mother (the perennial grandmother sitting not on a wicker chair but a dwarfian stool) miraculously farts every 10 minutes on the dot, bewailing the  routinary bathing schedule in the house. Her language is incomprehensible; she has probably left her false teeth somewhere, tucked inside a coffee mug with warm water, overnight.  She is the last person who could use the resident bathroom in this house, constructed with towering showers and large toilet seats.  It is a wonderment how her tiny tush can fit in the bowl to catch her bodily dump, a receptacle that could swallow her whole anatomy.
The grandmother's child, the wife and mother in this story, suddenly barfs as she falls down on her knees.  A liquid and white stream of mouth extracts goes straight to a pail, hastily placed there by his ill husband as a saving gesture.
The mother's own sister, a stout woman with a huge ribbon clamping his butt-long hair, looks at her without puzzlement while ironing the neatly embroidered babay clothes.  Animatedly, the barfer barfs like an anorexoic woman recycling her ingested food.
I am a stranger to this house with its wails of barfs and farts, its ozonizer gadget that allegedly catches bacteria and germs, its handwashing liquid soaps placed in a kitchen sink that one could mistake for a pharmaceutical store, its frail and thin women with olive eyes walking in silent steps even in moments of precipitation.
"You wet here,: says the almond chef who is not feeling well at this time of the day.
I am marooned in his house as a meeting place to attend a conference of bible scholars with their spiritual passage exchanges and verse marathons.
I am riding with his brood, in their D-MAX pick-up car with tools and screwdrivers securely hidden in a built-in toolbox en route to the God questing herd.
He has meant the word "wait" of course, but his enunciation has lost its sing-song lilt in the middle of his stuttering English, having been born a pure Chinese-Thai.
"What time are we leaving?" I ask him as I squat on the floor without chairs, surveying the washing machine, cabinets and overflowing pillows that do not look compressed even when arranged in a small room.
The sick man looks at his oversized wrist watch with rotating knobs that resembles a compass. He diverts his eyes to a curious looking weighing scale that iimmediately converts kilos into pounds in digital form.
"We leave at three p.m.," he replies in his Bruce Lee mouth repartee.  It barely opens as his dextrose is still dripping his invitro healing medicine that seems to throttle his palm.  It is kept busy by his mobile phone tinkering, calling up people, coherent in Thai vocabulary, negotiating to alleviate his sickness in exchange for acclamation.
I nod my head in abeyance.  I have no other option except to play with his kid drinking pureed vegetables and eating thumb-like bananas while waiting for the car to take us to heavenly eternity.
Grandmother at this point, is looking at his ailing son in pious deliberation.  Her farting exrecise performed but never ceasingly.  She asks for water, a polite halting breaker to her bottomed sound system.
A newcomer to the scene, a robust man with the deepest dimples hallowed in both his cheeks gives her water.  He is a friend to one of the olive-eyed hou8se women.  He sits on the floor like myself as he readily fires off his barage of questions.  He is a genuine querist, a glib talker with a gift of gab.
He parades his capability potentials when I ask him, curiously, what his occupation is.  Without any hesitation, wiping in a cultured manner a snot on his nose with afacial tissue, he speaks of his numerous credentials: lawyer, teacher, engineer, architect, electrician, plumber with a minor mechanical work capacity.
"You do not happen to be an astronaut?," I ask him in a deadpan manner.
"Ahh, no, I haven't been to the moon," laughing loudly as he files his riposte.  He continues: " Have you already taken your lunch?" while folding his denim jeans on the hem, his curly hair sitting like firebrands on the loose as he bows down to perform his styling chore.
"Yes, I already took my lunch.  Pig's blood with its innards.  I likewise had pork rind, a pig skin deep fried in oil.  And chocolate bread," I spew off my replication as I eye his yellowish noodles with chili and ginger that he takes with him in a frightening feign of a tummy break when he appears on the scene.
 The barfing woman, his kid and the sick man eat in unison in a circle formation on the floor, their abundant house appliances and gadgets almost filling the roof seams looking for the basic dwelling amenities like knives and teaspoons.
The other women, frail and tiptoeing on their dainty feet, prepare for the biblical trip, securing their backpacks painted with funny cartoon caricatures.  They take turns inn using the bathroom for their preparatory baths.
The kid and myself continue with our number revelry using the wood blocks.  I notice that the tot has created an uneven building.  He counts until eleven and repeats my intonation of the numerics in American twang.  She laughs and shows her milk bottle with pureed vegetables as she fumbles with a cabinet with only one leg, still standing.
I sudenly experience a thirst and requests for a glass of water from the bedimpled newcomer, taking a cue from his cordiality and generosity accorded to the grandmother.  He does not own the house but he acts like the perfect and most amiable host.
He takes his steps downstairs, getting water from a dispenser with pebbles and observing the grimace on my face, he explains it as possessing with medical healing powers.
I sip the quenching offer, thinking of the nursery books donated downstairs, the 29" flat T.V. set, the mini library with ape drawings, a funeral booklet for the dead grandfather whose grin is plastered on the booklet cover, the office for water filtration at the hallway and the refrigerator filled with various fruits.
As we all find a place to nomadic acting in this dwelling with complete but curious amenities, the almond sick man suddenly removes his dextrose, weighs himself on the weighing scale, imitates Popeyes's buceps of body building pose and exclaims with a Jack Nicholson's snickering mouth, to the chagrin of the other members of the house:
"I am well!!"
As he feels himself dandy and healthy, I relish at my own trick in that short span of time, teaching his kid the words "asleep" and "awake" with bodily movements fit for toys.
The hefty woman offers me a peared apple as we all prepare to leave at 3:00 p.m. in search of Heaven's Entrance, with screwdrivers and ax on hand and a kid who dutifully watches the ani,ated cartoon series Doremon.
All set, we leave at 6:00 p.m. instead, circling the markets bursting to the rafters with fruits, meats and vegetables.
This is not Milwaukee: Welcome to modern Shanghai that has traded Mao tse Tung with Jesus Christ as their own personal savior.
I do not even know their names.  Names are akin to incapacitated accident victims in this place, in this dwelling, in this street, in this road block.
"THERE ARE NO FOWLS ON THE STAIRS;
THERE IS NO PULTRY HERE."
-----Mother D-----