Jungle Planet and Other Stories Quotes

“A mix of shyness and arrogance; he has been rejected before. Somehow that cheapens him, his hesitance makes her strong.”
― Lakambini A. Sitoy, Jungle Planet and Other Stories

“Someone else’s laundry is already whipping around in the perennial wind that blows above the city: long white T-shirts dancing in the sun like captive angels. Sam finds a rack that is unoccupied and, with slow and firm movements, squeezes out her washload and hangs it up. she will check on their progress in a couple more hours.

She takes a shower and goes back to bed. The phone is ringing, a fragile hopeful sound. The eighth ring is cut off. Sam allows her mind a few fanciful arabesque before deciding it probably wasn’t anyone she would want to talk to. She thinks with relief of how efficiently she has washed the boy and his treacherous molecules of his perspiration, his scent, his heat, his maleness, our of her clothing, out of the very fibers of her being.

There he goes, hello, good-bye, dissipating in the azure sky, bleached of all meaning by the sun and wind.

I live to do the laundry, she thinks, and smiles; she has not felt this clever in a long time.”
― Lakambini A. Sitoy, Jungle Planet and Other Stories

“No one had asked about his life, the years aboard ship. As a child she had been fascinated by the way he would come home every year smaller, angrier, more leathery, until one day in her teens, he fell into bed and lay there glaring up at her and her mother, unable to rise, enraged, knowing that at the end of this furlough they expected him to pull up his carcass and make his way back to the dungeon of his vessel. Not once did they ask him how he felt. After all he was a man. Men endured.”
― Lakambini A. Sitoy, Jungle Planet and Other Stories

“They were playing. The little girl had started it, the two boys quickly catching on. They would grab hold of one of the vertical poles, swing around in neat 180-degree turns and then barrel over to one end of the moving car. In a field, by the ocean, down a dirt road at dusk, they might have been graceful, like brown butterflies.”
― Lakambini A. Sitoy, Jungle Planet and Other Stories

“Everything, she thought, is in suspended animation; if she moved, dislodged one single pebble, the whole world would come rushing down.

And as she stood there, she saw what the rain and the mountain and the sharply etched morning had conspired to bring her: a bright object, half-buried in the sludge, catching the rays of a sun no one had truly seen for weeks. It was a skull, human.”
― Lakambini A. Sitoy, Jungle Planet and Other Stories