Fantasy

Alamat ng Huling Diwata

by Elia Navarro

Some families keep land titles. The Navarros keep a diwata — in the last acacia at kilometer eleven, under a bargain written in 1897: the tree stands, the town drinks. Now the notebook has chosen a fifth keeper, a nineteen-year-old with a city scholarship and no patience for inheritance, and the road survey crew has marked the trunk with an X. Elia Navarro retells the old stories from the inside — myth as family paperwork, kept by hand, six generations deep, with the funniest and saddest diwata in Philippine fantasy waiting overhead.