Shrine of Santo Niño de Tacloban

Music used to breathe in this space.  Now the metronome is silent.

The ballroom is a yawning mouth with yellow teeth. The carpet, a red tongue slithering through balustrades, coated with dust, dead songs, and echoes of lovers' feet. Stained glass windows washed immaculate refract yellow light on polished wood, mosaic walls, and ornaments too precious they have been denied the sun.

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 An Arab knife with obsidian blade lay supine beside lacquered porcelain from the Galleons. Oriental cabinets encrusted with mother of pearl reveal a silver crucifix from Rome, the many layered selves of a matrioshka doll, and words entombed in first edition English tomes. King Louis XIV chairs face the grand portrait of an ageless Madonna, cradling the guillotined heads of her cherubim children from an ominous god who adorned her sylphlike feet with lavender heels that crushed serpents.

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There used to be lovers holding hands behind marble statues, breathing each other's sigh. A man's deft hands once romanced Van Cliburn’s piano now moldy and mute. Another held his woman like a glass of wine. Women dressed like flowers danced to a waltz and defrocked to a tango in bedrooms with sepal curtains. The sartorial evidence washed clean the morning after, along with cutlery gone limp and crusty from an evening of exploring mouths. 

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Now shadows bloom on walls, wind scatters dust like ellipses, and rooms named after proud provinces have become cemeteries of decaying memory, occasionally remembered by a staccato of lost feet.

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At the shrine entrance, a century old Niño Jesus beckons. Patina has stained the ivory, lending sanctity to its half-shut eyes. As if inebriated with divine milk. As if burdened with mercy. As if holding out for one more confession from a perfumed penitent before closing its eyes to the rows of empty pews, the opulent ghosts lingering in deserted halls, and the tunnel of light from an open door always out of reach.

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