News of the Jonel Nuezca Case Rendered in Stream-of-Consciousness Form
Robin Angelo Yankin
The irreversible happened not too long ago, and there still remained a dull harrowing clamor of immolating fury ricocheting away at the fragile consciousness of the nation at the near-calibrated stillness of Chinese pond lilies; in that mollifying moment of unbroken peace and tranquility, I found myself washing away at the obstreperous filth and grime that had annoyingly accumulated and proliferated all across the sprawling arrays of multicolored lacquer, whitewashed china and tarnished silverware while I stood firm by the double sink like a proud sycamore, simply listening to the hypnotic musings of universal harmony sifting through the air like exquisite French parfum… and that was when the ringing was heard; the excitable sound of clanging viscera bled into my distressed eardrums ever so profusely; it was that night when I heard the hateful crackle of gunfire, the inevitable course of the bronze alloy bullet’s riveting reverberations rendered in striking high-definition audio, with RGB-LED television displays capturing the entire course of the chilling incident in discomfiting graphic detail – another atrocious act of blinding animosity; What was that? I wondered aloud from the chaotic kitchen… but in response, I was only offered austere silence from the people huddled around watching that mind-numbing idiot box in the living room – and at that, I put the dishes aside as I continued to watch the gripping report in its totality; I saw that there were four people involved in that gruesome affair of incalculable repercussions; first, there was an off-duty fat middle-aged barrel-chested policeman dressed in muted darkness – he was wielding a weapon of sheer terror and firepower, a dangerous tool that looked to be a standard issue Glock pistol – and his eyes grew steelier by the moment, his animalistic reptilian tendencies wrapped up in an indelible blood-fueled sultry rage, one that he could no longer control as a brief mortal and as a peacekeeper of sound reason and judgement; second, there was a thinly built scraggly man adorned with an old loose shirt dangling from the end of his penciled neck like a restless hangman’s noose awaiting another swift trial in the grim gallows – he who fell down the mossy concrete in just a few seconds flat, with a few blunt precision hits to the rims and edges of his brittle skull and corporeal torso – and he could no longer be in the position to utter any more vile harangues at the man with the smoking firearm because his bleeding empty cranial cavity was due past the point of insurmountable recovery, because his garbled soul was headed down the winding road to the bardo or to limbo or to burning perdition; third, there was an old gray woman with short and straight gray hair – she who suffered the consequences of obstructing exacted justice in a similar fashion as the one who did before her – and she merely held fast onto the other unliving as she herself slowly progressed into the equally bleak realm of purgatory during the entire sanguine sequence of events; lastly, there was the little girl clad in white with that piercing gaze, that transfixed thousand-yard stare – a frozen spectator of the open stands who was rightfully unable to react to the brutal carnage that came to pass – and after seeing what she’d seen unfold and collapse right before her very eyes, she finally awoke from the naiveties and immaturities of her many-faceted rose-tinted world, exposed to the new unfiltered meaning of her lost innocence, felt what it finally felt like to witness true violence firsthand, realized what it finally meant to tearfully shed those warm and hopeful memories of her early childhood days and of her so-called ‘personal hero’; four ignoble unfortunates they were – forecast by the spindly hands of the treacherous Graeae as the lowly actors in that dastardly play, bound by impenetrable vices that are the unfathomable laws of the cosmos – and at that point of no return, two of them perceived, by the fiery pits of Tartarus, that their public verisimilitude would eek out and dissipate into the inevitable void of nothingness, and the other two knew, by some ominous semblance of thought, that their untimely demise was fast approaching; What was that? I asked them again, and I finally heard a peep from one of the boarders in the apartment: That cop… that dirty pig lurking in the video… that good for nothing swine just shot up an old woman and her son everywhere multiple times… man, it was body shots all over the joint like nobody’s business; I was beyond mortified; W-why? Why did the cop even go out there and do it?; You see, the cop’s neighbor – or the old woman’s son – received a few noise complaints and was also caught using some sort of forbidden homemade firework, so he – the cop – wanted to bring that guy down to the stony lonesome and make a last-minute arrest, but then that cheeky old woman obstructed justice and got in the way so from then on out, it was round after round after round of dirty slurs and cheap street shots all over the place and in the end, he just fucking lost it. That pig – or whatever that thing is – just fucking lost it; Who was that girl? Floating in the background?; She was the cop’s daughter – she’s another form of trouble in the making, I’d say; I had no other words; W–what kind of motive did he have anyway? How is that man capable of such evil?; There was no motive for the crime – as absurd that whole diplomatic fiasco was, there was no ulterior motive behind that senseless act; What was there, then?; There was nothing, he paused, …just the uncanny wiles of the devil in disguise – that cop seemed to be begging for blood… and you know what? He got it – he fucking got it; so, that was it – that was the complete mental picture – and it would be forever burned into my fleeting retinas until the end of the end of time.
Photo credits: Philippine Star (https://media.philstar.com/photos/2020/12/21/h1_2020-12-21_22-44-02.jpg)