They Know The End

Mary Trish Commendador

2:24 pm

Death-Cast did not call Mary Trish because she wasn't dying today, but they called her late son, Kurt, five years ago and it still killed her every single day. It was as if a piece of shrapnel entered her body and was only getting ever closer to her heart.

She remember the day he died in full detail.

It was a Saturday and for the first time in a long time, he had no work to do. She pestered him with chores, before he went out to hang out with his friends. There was no moment of goodbye, because back then, they knew that they would see each other again.

"Don't be late, ha!" she half-joked. "Ig ka-alas onse sa gabii lock-an tika!" At eleven o' clock in the evening, I will lock you out of the house!

"Dili ra lagi ko mag-late," he returned, with a few laughs.

"I love you."

"I love you too!" And just like that, he was already biking to his friend's house.

The entire day passed by quickly, as she was quite confident that he wouls return late at night.

But it was already 11 pm, and he hadn't returned home yet. She left the door open and as every minute ticked by, she began to become pissed. She sent him a furious message, knowin that he would see it when he was already at home.

She didn't lock the door, as planned. She stayed until midnight.

She called his friend's mom to ask if he was there. But then, she replied that he left four hours ago. This was the only time him being early backfired on him.

That night the police received two phone calls, both reporting the same missing persons case.

She was a wreck the next few weeks. She forced her husband to return home. They both relapsed into their drinking tendencies. They both got in a lot of fights. They divorced after he suggested she go to prison. And they both broke down together and apart.

It didn't take long for the police to find the Kurt's body, battered and unrecognizable in the middle of the sea. He had four stab wounds on the chest, one on the heart, and one that split his skull in two. Nature had eaten away as it had been thrown in a river and drifted to the sea.

Until now, she was trying to get over it. She tried to find who killed him and why they would do such a thing. The police dismissed it as a "hit-and-run murder", but she wasn't having any of it.

And, as they say, you find what you need in the place you least expect it.

Because on one bus ride to the north, she overheard two boys talking about the murder of her son. A gan ambushed him and used him as material for a gang member's initiation--one of the boys talking. But he didn't kill him and instead tried to kill the leader, Iori.

It didn't take long for her to complete the story. After that, they disposed of his body.

She held back her tears and tried not to sob. Not long after the departure, she called the bus driver to stop the bus. She got off and returned to the bus station, looking for a bus going back the way she came.

She was going to visit his grave again.

She felt the shrapnel getting ever-so-closer to her beating heart. It felt like a chasm opened beneath her and dropped her to the abyss. But she found solace on the fact that she finally knew what happened to him. She could finally breathe a little easier, without much burden in every breath.

On that day, she promised that she would make no one else suffer the same fate as he did.