The following are taken from Missing Pulse:

Welcome to Missing Pulse: the Electronic Journal of Great Reads. This site is still under construction, but we are inviting you to submit your stories with us. Please read the submission guidelines below.

Submission Guidelines:

1. Missing Pulse accepts submissions in all genres, but strictly in English only. Of course, the definition of "English" must be taken here at its most pliable.

- Short stories, Long stories, Flash fiction, Essays and anything that resembles prose must be submitted anyway you like as long as it's in .doc form, and has no virus. The author's personal writing font of choice will be noted.

- Poetry. Give me poetry. Even bad ones. There will be a special section called "What Was I Writing" where exceptionally bad poetry will be showcased. Deliberately bad poetry are also welcome, but they must be exceptionally bad, or else, wouldn't that be the saddest thing in the world? To fail even in writing bad poetry?

- Digital Stories: A digital story is a narrative that factors in the medium as an integral part. This includes videos, images, and hypertextual works of fiction. Video submissions must be hosted in youtube.com or other video hosting websites that allow embedding. Image Submissions include (a) scans of graphic novels or stories, (b) photographic manipulations, ala post-secret, but less emo. I'm not into emo, and no one should be; (c) a cycle or a suite of digital images accompanied by text; (d) well, it's up to you really, I mean, c'mon, just tell me what you want to do with it, and what's the story, morning glory, and let me worry about presenting it. Hypertextual Fiction Submissions must be discussed thoroughly with the editors at misterman@missingpulse.com.

- Recipes, Death Threats, Obituaries, and other forms of writing which you deem necessary a venue for your story. The only limit to the form you can take is your imagination.

2. All submissions must be original, and unpublished anywhere else.

3. All submissions must be accompanied by a biographical sketch of the author, including contact information (address, telephone number, e-mail address). You don't want us making one up for you. Authors published will be included in the database, and in the mailing list for events, and opportunities concerned with the field of writing and of reading.

4. Submissions should be e-mailed to isubmit@missingpulse.com. Submissions will be accepted all year round.

5. All rights remain with the author, so don't screw me over.

Please direct any and all inquiries to the editors at misterman@missingpulse.com.

So again: it's isubmit@missingpulse.com for submissions, and misterman@missingpulse.com for inquiries and proposals.

After an ear infection that sidelined with me at home, I'm back in the lounge that is my new workplace. I call it that, a lounge. So relaxing. My corner inside its inner room is stuffed with a large box filled with my stuff, one so big I have to sort them out tomorrow. Because I'm a sloth and disorganized, the lounge people did me and themselves a favor: they bundled and shoved together all of my stuff. I think I'm going to write each of them a Friendster testimonial, by way of thank you. I'm still working for my alma mater's PR arm, though I've been relocated, because I am Godforsaken anti-social, and my boss knows writing can be mood-driven, to a quieter place. It was not that silent this afternoon though, when college students excitedly argued their project proposals to my boss, who held the power to veto cash grants to students' artistic endeavors, for which they wanted university funding. I felt relieved to listen to their emotional gestures and spontaneous laughs. I'm not that old, but being around people who are, can make you. So I have to thank my boss for understanding the quirk of a man I am, and for exiling me here, in the lounge, as opposed to the other, tunnel-like office, where I had probably aged 10 years. Feels good to be back. No, this can't possibly be exile. 

Category: Sudden Fiction in English

"No, Marcus and I are not an item, we just hang out!" I yell to the FX-load of people: the driver, the two passengers seated up front, the four in the midsection, and three with me in the back. Only Judith beside me is the intended audience. But this is how you avoid admitting everything during the cramped ride back home. You keep your voice down until your best friend infuriates you with her prying and you cry out in denial.

"Louder. I don't think the MMDA lady outside heard you," says Judith. I can feel glances, hear random bits of murmurs inside the FX. I am the one nearest the door. Is this bitch daring me?

I pull the doorhandle before any of three passengers near me can protest. The morning rush of sirens and engine roars and bus horns blast inside the FX.

"Manang! Yoohoo! Yes, you! Marcus and I are not a couple!--"

"Puta, Ellie--" Judith interrupts, but I can scream louder.

"--we are just going out! Nothing wrong there, di ba!?"  

The FX brakes to a sudden stop. I let Judith reach the door handle across me and pull the door shut. She glares at me.

I glare back: "Happy now?"

"Miss," says the driver,"could you two just text each other about your lovelife instead?" His rearview mirror frames for me his exasperated eyes. He clearly doesn't need this so early in the morning. The FX is still not moving.

"Oo nga, keep your personal lives to your--"

"Opo, Lola,--" Judith fires me that look: let's-just-get-this-over-with, --"my friend and I are sorry."

"We'll be quiet the rest of the way. So sorry po," I add.

The other passengers sigh and resume their bored looks. The driver guns the engine back to life. There's a knock on the driver's window. He rolls it down. It's the MMDA lady. Via the rearview mirror, the driver shoots me that look: nuissance. I shoot him my indignant counter-look: live with it.

"What did I do?" the driver asks the blue-uniformed manang, who tells him to shut his engines off. He does. She glares at him and walks to the back of the FX while waving for other vehicles to pass us by.  

"Lagot ka, Ellie," Judith whispers.

"Puta ka," I say under my breath.

The door swings open. The manang to whom I hollered my exasperation a while ago is eyeing each of us in the back. Her eyes settle on me.

"Were you the one who yelled at me?"

I blink. No one says a word. The manang’s eyes roll up and she sighs.

"Just make sure," she begins. I can feel it: everyone in the FX is just as attentive as I am. "Just make sure that Marcus isn't seeing anyone else. Mahirap umasa."

I am stunned. Judith is giggling. The manang looks dead serious. I can hear mumbles of sus maryoseps behind me.

"Partner!" another blue-uniform yells from across the street. "What's going on?"

The manang turns to her and yells back, "It's ok." Then, in her normal voice says, "just a potential accident." She smiles that knowing smile and slowly closes the door. The driver scratches his head. The engines coughs to life and we slide away from the manang and speed up on the road ahead.

Judith is suddenly too busy thumbing on her cellphone to even look at me. Her grin tells me she is already texting the world of what I had just denied, of what had just transpired.

She presses send. I know so, even without looking closely. We have the same cellphone model.

“Good thing you don’t have Marcus’ number,” I mumble, the streets a blur as I look out the window.

“I do now.” At that I scramble to open my bag, but I already know it’s not there.

“Puta ka, Judith!”

There comes a time when the forces of Peer Pressure must reaffirm.

As I yawned and stretched on my chair, my photocopy of Annie Dillard's essays falls from my lap. God. It's 3:30? Already? The scene from the window beside me says it's still 8:30 in the morning. Or at least it still looks the way it did this morning, when my feet were propped up, and I was reading, trying to wake up to the scent of my first cup of coffee. The sun was on sabbatical; the giant tree from afar being ripped by moderate winds of its dying leaves. The threat of morning rain, come to think of it, is a stasis: it is no different from a grey afternoon slumber. Still, it smells of rain and I love it. I look around and see signs of the morning that has come to pass. I pause and hmmm and remember the details: the dishes on the sink, the now sleeping cats, my wife tucked in bed and cocooned in her favorite blanket (she works nightshifts), and mug drained of coffee on my desk. A good essay and cold weather, they tuck time away and surprise you. I can feel another yawn coming.

I am missing, no matter how deep into my ruble of papers I search, a sachet of coffee. I've tilted my desk and it's not among the items that fell over. I've lifted each cat in the bedroom and it's not under them either. Under the bed, the space under cabinets, the nooks where my cats hide my stuff they steal when I'm looking elsewhere. Not there.

Maybe I had consumed it and hadn't noticed. I look in the trash bin. Nothing Maybe I disposed of the wrapper elsewhere. Maybe I never bought that sachet in the first place.

I retrace my steps, rewind the morning as it unfolded. I kicked the blanket down and crawl out of bed. I heard the PC humming to life after I switched it on. My neighbor was playing "Staying Alive," which I could hear when I fixed my first cup of coffee in the kitchen. Got a little irked when I saw the newspaper in disarray; the cats must have been looking for the classified ads. Maybe they want to move out. Then I went back upstairs to write. And then now. No remembrance of where I put that other sachet.

There is a paraphrase of Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation is usually the best one. My cats stole that sachet of coffee. They have stolen and hidden stuff before. They could do it again. Fine, they did it. Or I consumed it without remembering where I disposed of the wrapper. My memory's playback is suspect. Or I must have never bought a sachet in the first place. All of these are plausible. No real evidence for any single one of these hypotheses. So much for science.

A leap of faith, maybe. That might help. Which hypothesis feels most intuitively true? The cat theory. Yeah, that one. Why? If I have to explain that intuition, it's because my cats are cute and they steal stuff from my desk. Paperclips, post-its, receipts. No point in this. I couldn't find any stolen stuff where my cats usually hide them. And no point in defending an intuition. An intuition does not need any defense.

Either way I want my second fix of caffeine.

This a time when neither science nor faith helps you arrive at a decision. My investigation can drag on and on and still I would not find contentment. I just have to make that decision myself, regardless of scientific or religious truth.

I'm going out to buy some coffee. Regardless.

"That moment, that meeting between you and the person you will spend your life with, is the most cherished moment of our lives," said a priestly voice behind a church wall. I walked past it, never looking inside. The solitary walks I take in my city shoves me into eavesdropping moments. Like this one. I walk past and glimpse bits of people's lives, uninvited, and walk away free to take any piece and twist it anyway I please. Like this one. Most cherished moment. That romantic meeting between two persons destined to be a couple. Right out of a B movie. Cherished moment. Hmmm. Right.

How about those moments playing dodge ball with your grade school friends, before puberty came along and complicated girl-boy relationships? How about back in kindergarten, when you could knock on anyone of your classmates' houses and be fed? How about back in college, when your hangover woke up and realized he and you shared a brain, and the same headache, with neither of you remembering how you got home?

Cherished moment. No one is against the couple version of cherished moments, but someone has to tell that priest that you can't authoritatively suggest (and therefore impose) that the relationship agenda is all there is to life. There's volunteer teaching to kindergarten students, gobbling up all the strawberries in you Ice Monster bowl before they get cold, downloading music via Limewire, envying David Blaine for the kick he gets from his magic, getting that absurd impulse to go to Baguio now and giving in to it, climbing up a mountain on a Friday after work with practically no provisions, grabbing your cats by the loose skin on their napes and deciding which is cuter, and sipping so much Slurpee that you get brainfreeze and yet you still manage to sing the chorus of "Rainbow Connection" with feeling.

Cherished moments. Moments. Plural. Consumers have choices. At least, they should. Someone should email that priest some consumer feedback.

Come to think of it, that priest talked about couplehood with loving care, with silk in his voice, as though savoring the moment. Could he still be enjoying it? Hmmm. His congregation's problem. Not mine. Theirs lives. Not mine. You tell him. I won't. I'm just passing through.

I'm just a walker in the city.

When you silently curse your neighbors for the noise they make, normal innocent racket like screaming at a four year old for merely existing, or the full-blast noontime shows they watch, you wonder what you did right when tranquil mornings arrive. Like this one. I wave the bed covers aside and notice tranquility: beams of sunlight light the wooden floor with stripes, filtered by Venetian blinds. Not a child is screaming. Not a single radio in earshot. No television sets are blaring. What could I have done to deserve a moment like this one. I jump out of bed and switch on my PC. Whatever comes to mind, write whatever comes to mind. Lifelike and at the quick.

I am leaning on the ledge of my open window, on the second floor of this suddenly quiet apartment, seeing a portion of a neighbor's rooftop across me that's brown and grey with rust and age and neglect. One part is collecting water, the upturned sheet of galvanized iron and its through is a water pocket, a puddle of rainwater on the roof. I stick my head out further and look for tomcats prowling. I see one. Coming over here. Too far out to be in range of a pellet gun, even if I had one.

These tomcats are as big as my neighbor's little dachshund and they dent roofs when they land on them and they pull down my laundry and scare my domesticated cats into hiding in the closet. But it's too early in the morning to hate them, and I put away the thought of buying a long-ranged pellet gun with which to hurt those four-legged freeloaders. Delayed gratification.

I'm going to add new parts to my memoir, the one due in class in two or three weeks. I am thankful for mornings like this. The quiet ties together memories and thoughts and such, and make my writing easier.

Look, it's taking shape nicely:

"When Mother and I pushed the boxes deeper into the back of the truck, a neighbor asked if we were leaving that apartment, the one that looked down on the road, with its second floor roof as pointed and quiet and still as that of a church's. Mother said yes as I carried more boxes piled on the sidewalk into the lipat-bahay truck. Neighborly small talk was rare for us, and Mother wiped her hands on her shapeless flowery duster's sides and chatted, with a wrinkled old man with sideburns; a break from moving the contents of our lives into yet another anonymous vehicle. We were used to this. All this moving from home to home. Though none of them felt like home. But this house, I never wanted to leave this house, this two-floored oddly-placed dwelling on the elbow of nowhere."

I'm going downstairs to fix me some coffee, and then I'm going to continue writing, while the quiet lasts.

I am holding in my hand my Form 5, a document in my University that doubles as my class schedule list and as a formal receipt of tuition fee payment. This is the shortest time I have spent enrolling in several semesters. Maybe because I did it at the earliest time possible, given how much of sloth I can be when school is just about to burst open. I tried to get myself enrolled on every morning I woke up with my mind feeling a surge of purpose. Hey when the surge is gone, it's gone. Might as well.

Morning one: got my Registration Materials and went to the English Department, to get my dossier for my faculty adviser to check; got my adviser's nod--I can take a master's level fiction workshop and a PhD level nonfiction workshop; got enlisted, and cleared of lost /unreturned books at the library, had my forms assessed at the Graduate Studies Office. (Oh gee, look at the time, it's an hour before noon.) Went home. What you can do today, you can do better tomorrow, when you're in the mood.

Morning two: breakfast tastes a little odd when you are high on cough and cold medicine; coffee, thank heavens, is still coffee, and served to balance what could have been a badly begun morning; had my boss sign my study privilege form (my office is paying for my tuition); went to HR, where, amazingly, everyone I needed to sign my form was actually there; went back to the English Department to return my dossier, where a lecture was waiting for me: "You're not supposed to take this home," said a stern woman behind a desk, while tapping my dossier. "Oh," I said. "Won't happen again." Went home. "Procrastination is the thief of time," said one cliché. I say, "Mug me, baby. I'm rich."

Morning three: such a lazy morning; went to this warehouse that calls itself the Office of the University Registrar; really, it's a warehouse, smells like one, too; got my forms assessed, afterward, I walked to Palma Hall, where I paid a dizzying amount of money for my tuition: P66.00, for six units. Wait, that's not for tuition; says on the receipt it's for student funds. But then I'm a student. I'm funding myself? Why am I required to pay, then? (What? It's only 8:40 in the morning?)

Wow. It's over. Just like that. Usually I'm harrassed just by thinking of what I have to do just to get enrolled. But now it's really over.

I have to print out this entry. So I can remember, when I read this at the beginning of the next semester, how, in three successive mornings, the universe conspired to go easy on me.