Ang Listahan sa Paminggalan

On the first night of every full moon, the house went to the moon, and the family had learned to plan around it, the way other families plan around the tide.

It was not discussed outside the family, in the way that money and certain cousins are not discussed. If a visitor happened to stay late on a crossing night, Lola Remedios would simply serve the good biscuits and remark that the guest looked tired, and the guest, understanding nothing but feeling everything, would go home.

Lola Remedios kept a list taped inside the pantry: water the orchids twice, cover the mirrors, leave a window open for the house to breathe on the way up. Nobody remembered who wrote the list. The handwriting changed when no one was looking.

Preparation took most of the afternoon. The jars were turned label-inward, because the house was vain about how it looked from outside. The rice was moved to the low shelf, since gravity, Lola said, was a habit more than a law, and habits loosen when you travel.

Tonio, who was eleven that year and therefore responsible for the questions no one else would ask, wanted to know why the house went at all. His mother said houses need to get away like anyone. His father said it was the land that left, technically. Lola Remedios said some houses are homesick for places they have never been, and hers happened to be one of them.

The crossing itself was gentle. There was a feeling like the moment a jeepney stops being pushed and starts being driven, a soft gathering under the floorboards, and then the sound of the street — dogs, videoke, the barangay announcements — thinned out like a radio being carried into another room.

From the moon, Manila was a spill of lamplight on a dark table, and their street was the smallest coin in it. Tonio liked to sit on the roof during the crossing and name the things that could not be named from the ground.

Supper on the moon tasted the same, except the sinigang stayed hot longer, which Lola attributed to the absence of gossip, heat having fewer places to escape to.

The neighbors never mentioned the absences. A house has its errands, Aling Corazon said, sweeping her steps, and everyone found this reasonable. In a country of typhoons and miracles, a traveling house was well within the ordinary shape of things.

What worried the family was never the leaving. It was that one morning, unpacking sunlight in the kitchen, they might find the house had grown fond of the quiet up there — and had begun, in small ways, to pack.

That morning was still far away, that first full moon of the year. But Tonio, on the roof with the whole bright world below him, had already noticed what the grown-ups had not: the house no longer waited for the moon to be entirely full before it started, quietly, to lean.