Monstress by Lysley Tenorio Page A

looked up, checking to see that Papa Felix was still in the bathroom, then took it out. A text message read, Buy roses. 6pm. 1525 South Van Ness.
    I left the livers where they were. I took the day’s cash from the ice bucket, stuffed it into a manila envelope. “I’m going to the bank”—my voice shook, I could feel it—“to make the deposit.” We’d found a Filipino bank near Chinatown where no one questioned large deposits of cash. I changed into a clean white shirt and my good corduroy pants, grabbed my backpack and Windbreaker from the closet.
    â€œLook before you leave,” he said. He meant that I should check the hallway, through the peephole, for anything suspicious; anyone, he said, could be undercover hotel security, ready to arrest us for our activities. But I didn’t look, not this time, and I left the room so fast I nearly collided with a maid vacuuming the hall. She was a Filipina, plump-cheeked and short, younger than me. We had seen each other before.
    â€œExcuse me,” she said in English, “sorry,” but I caught her staring at the DO NOT DISTURB sign on our doorknob. It was always there, to keep maids from finding the batches of blood and bags of chicken livers, or barging in on an Extraction. So the room was never cleaned, and though we kept it tidy ourselves, the Filipino housekeeper looked suspicious, as if thinking, Dirty room .
    I said sorry, too, then walked slowly to the exit stairs, ran all the way down.

    â€œD o you know this place, sir?” I showed the taxicab driver the address in the text message. He popped his gum and nodded, and we sped off before I could fasten my seat belt. In minutes I was far away from downtown. For the first time in America, I didn’t know where I was.
    We had arrived in San Francisco three weeks before. We worked seven days a week, up to ten hours each day, making the kind of money we could no longer make back home. Once, life was different: years before, Papa Felix had been one of the Philippines’ top healers. He’d made his reputation by curing Batangas City mayor Agbayani’s gout and action star B. J. San Remo’s diabetes, which led him to becoming a regular Very Special Guest Star on It’s Real!! (Di Ba?) , the paranormal TV variety hour that named the procedure the Holy Blessed Extraction of Negativities. Once a month for several years my grandfather, my father, and I made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from our home in Batangas City to the TV studio in Manila. I would sit in the last row of the live audience and watch Papa Felix in the monitors above, the zoom angles on his hands penetrating the patient’s belly, like a ghost about to possess a body. When blood was shed the audience would gasp; when fleshy Negativities were extracted, they would cheer.
    When I was ten, I snuck backstage to watch the performance. I hid behind the edge of a moveable wall, and as my father chanted Hail Marys into a microphone I saw Papa Felix slip a hand beneath the table and snatch something small and red—a bag of blood the size of a thumb. In an instant the Extraction began, and I felt a hand on the back of my neck. “You don’t belong here,” a stagehand said. He brought me to a white, windowless room, where I waited for what felt like hours, and when my father finally came I told him what I’d seen. He nodded slowly, stared at the ground. “Time to go home” was all he said. Two months later, he died in a jeep wreck, and at the post-funeral potluck I heard Papa Felix tell our guests I was his one comfort, a good, strong boy who would take his father’s place: like a birthmark, the family business was mine forever.
    After some years, Mayor Agbayani’s gout returned, followed by prostate cancer, and B. J. San Remo became a double amputee. The big-shot clients were gone, and our loyal following in nearby shantytowns brought in little money; I remembered long