Three Smiles

Reincarnation Junkie | Chapter 51

The black-dyed wood stood out against the pale inner trunk of the balete tree. Like a palm-sized birthmark stamped across a newborn’s stomach, it shifted and breathed with the irregular swells of the tree, as though heaving a great sigh.

I hadn’t been on the receiving end of the mask all this time, and I was quite uncomfortable with it. It was an incomplete human’s face after all, incomplete due to its lack of flesh.

Sometimes you see a mouth move but it doesn’t feel like the person in front of you is speaking. Or it tells you what a wonderful day it is while it’s raining cats and dogs.

The mouth is the most deceiving part, but it is also the only thing that remains exposed with such a mask. The eyes and nose remain uniquely carved, dyed a soot-like black with no extraneous details to behold. Unlike the void beneath our feet that left only a fearful imagination, it was inscrutable and plain.

But a tree has no mouth, and all that existed beneath the pointed overhanging nose were pale, conjoined roots, fused together into a ribbed wall. On second glance, the dark lines of coalescence unzipped partly like several thick lips splitting vertically, revealing irregular rows of pearly white teeth.

Human teeth? No.

The sort of pointed teeth that a scavenger had.

“Hello,” I called out to the mouths that had stolen my mask. In the narrow hollow, we were practically face to face.

None of the mouths said anything back but instead mouthed back my own greeting after a delay, as though learning the shape of my words.

“Who are you talking to?” Mat asked. I opened my palm to it and gestured for it to step on. Carefully curling my fingers to form a railing, I lifted Mat so that it too could see where my mask had landed.

“This is probably the former resident eh.” Mat concluded after some contemplation. “Your mask must contain a lot of spiritual energy, otherwise they wouldn’t have manifested at all.”

“Spiritual energy…” What was called magic to Mercy was spiritual energy to a tikbalang, or so I assumed. “You don’t mean that someone died here, do you? Someone like you?”

“Not died, per se, but lived here long enough to imprint on the tree itself.” Mat grabbed one of my fingers to take a closer look at the mouths, who smiled a dense and toothy smile that left no hint of gums or tongue. “They could have been a tikbalang, a dwende, a kapre, or something better left unsaid. By the looks of these teeth, it must be the latter.”

Mat tugged on my fingernail and asked me to let it down. Right after it leapt off my palm, Mat gathered as much of the gray-green fabric as it could manage and pulled it to the mask, struggling and straining like an overenthusiastic little mouse.

I pinched the fabric between my fingers and stuffed it in one of the mouths, plucking Mat away with the scruff of its shirt as the mouth happily gobbled up the clothes.

The tree hollow rumbled before the mouth could burp its thanks. The sound of curtains falling descended all around us, bringing an imaginary wind to the sill void. I brought Mat to my chest and let it wrap itself with my hair, tying up a little harness to keep it from getting lost.