Happy Easter! You can find the prompt and the answer to it at the bottom of the post.
Since the Holy Week is the usual time for church camps here in the Philippines, I thought I’d share this funny anecdote. It was a lifetime ago when I took on camp coordinating and facilitating tasks, so I’m pretty nostalgic about this story (previously published on Medium).
It Never Pays to Impersonate a Demon
A real manananggal wouldn’t have flattened that tent.
Image created using Canva
I went from group to group, family to family like the social butterfly I wasn’t. It was one of those years I was tasked to be program coordinator of the summer church camp. That time, we held it at a seaside property in one of the most popular beach towns in the south.
Sleeping arrangements were pretty loose. Campers could stay in rooms with their families or pitch their own tents on the back lawn. That evening, post-dinner activities were quite random as well. They could do anything within reason as long as they didn’t venture off the camp grounds.
The majority of the teens sang to somebody’s guitar-playing. The children played some version of tag. Many just formed chatty little cliques and welcomed anybody who wanted to join the conversation.
As one of the camp organizers. I dutifully flitted around, ensuring that people were having a good time and that camp rules weren’t being broken.
That’s when I noticed them, these two adolescent boys. The two friends sat facing each other inside their tent. They had a battery-operated lamp, snacks, and their sleeping bags. The mesh skylight and mesh door allowed the breeze through, cooling the inside. It was a pretty cozy setup.
I should have just smiled in appreciation of this peaceful little picture and moved on, but I had a moment of mad musing. This was many moons ago. I was still single and childless, so I had the energy to nitpick and sweat the small stuff.
My own personal problem with the situation was that each boy was playing a handheld video game. It was technically allowed that evening, but the anti-social quality of it all triggered me. Frankly, I shouldn’t be one to find fault in escaping the crowd to quietly do their own thing since I’m the worst kind of introvert, but I was wearing my camp official hat that night.
The two boys looked so content and contained in their video game-engrossed little world that I just felt compelled to, well, pester them.
My eyes homing on the mesh skylight, I was struck with stupid inspiration.
In Philippine folklore, there is the manananggal, a female demon whose body splits in half. She leaves the lower half standing on the ground while she takes off with her torso, her bat-like wings lifting her and allowing her to fly over houses. She lands on a roof and elongates her tongue through a crack, latching onto someone inside the house to sip his or her blood, exsanguinating the victim in the process.
I strode to the boys’ tent with the insane purpose of pretending to be a manananggal. I meant to flap my arms above their skylight, screeching, “Ditch those gadgets and join the living!” It was going to be so funny and, more importantly, effective. They would be startled, and then, their video-game-playing momentum sabotaged, they would exit their tent to laughingly tell the others about crazy Sis. Ivy’s dumb manananggal prank.
That was the plan. Excitement pumped through my veins as I neared the tent.
I noticed the tent being taller up close than it seemed from afar, but no matter. That didn’t deter me. I had an agenda, and I wasn’t going to deviate from it. I tiptoed and stretched my body, leaning forward to hover my head and flap my arms above the skylight. I began shrieking like a banshee. “Ditch those — Aaaaaah!”
My spiel was cut short by my own scream of alarm as physics went against me. Instead of hovering about the skylight like the manananggal of lore, I came crashing down, pinning one wall of the tent, some crunchy snacks, and some portion of a poor, unsuspecting boy under me.
“What happened?” The campers first cried in confusion. As they took stock of my predicament, some tittering escaped. It wasn’t long before the entire place was howling with laughter.
I picked myself off the tent, which, thankfully, was resilient, as was my victim inside it. The only damage was on the chips, which were crushed into tiny fragments, and on my dignity, which I left absolutely shattered on the ground, a sad casualty to my poorly thought-out joke.
The boy’s dad came rushing toward us, asking us if we were okay, and inspecting his tent for damages. He had spent a good portion of the afternoon setting it up.
Facing me, he demanded, “What were you thinking?”
“Does it look like I was thinking?” I shot back.
He started to laugh, so I did, too. “I was being a manananggal,” I explained.
“A manananggal,” he muttered in disbelief before walking off, shaking his head.
The two boys slowly crawled out of the tent.
“Are you going to attack?” One of them warily asked, pretending fear.
“Harhar!” I sourly replied. “Both of you okay?”
“Physically, yes. Psychologically, we’re scarred. It’s not every day the roof caves in and the walls come crashing down around us.”
“Stop being so dramatic!” I protested before walking away to continue my forced social-butterflying.
As expected, the boys milked the experience big time. They were the heroes in this tale of disaster and had the campers rolling in laughter over it for a long time. I tried to comfort myself that, faceplant aside, my prank was still a success. The boys did ditch their gadgets and leave their tent to socialize after all.
I would only take on a full-time unpaid job if I were filthy rich, meaning my multiple trust funds would cover my family’s needs and some. Naturally, I’d be doing something I enjoy that I think would also benefit those in need, such as:
animal rescue and shelter worker
barrio librarian
barrio teacher
treeplanter
national park ranger
cold case sleuth
These are the ones I could come up with off the top of my head. 🙂
This Small Life 