H. A. Eugene
Maricel looked up one morning to see a cloud of what she assumed were spider cocoons, but were little parachutes, each carrying a soldier the size of a very small army man. They landed on the driveway. Some snagged on trees. Their compatriots cut them down.
She watched as they swarmed her husband Vicente’s car and shimmied up the mosquito netting on the back of the house. It wasn’t clear who they were fighting until she realized they were fighting her. They celebrated when she got up from her chair by the veranda, annoyed by their swarming numbers, and stood up to go inside.
A few days later she discovered that they had established a command base in their living room. They swarmed like ants, their little bivouacs covering a section of the hardwood floor. Little MASH units treated their wounded, occasionally bringing in a beetle or a gecko who got caught in the crossfire. They cheered when news came in from the front that Vicente had moved his car.
Maricel heard one day from uncle Bening that they had set up some sort of industry around the coconut trees near the house, harvesting sap from the trees’ bases, which they’d bled into containers, to be shipped out in endless fleets of little trucks. Their army guarded this factory with checkpoints.
Within days, the area of the living room where the MASH unit was now housed a permanent military base, filled with tiny Jeeps and American flags. By the weekend they had developed an attachment to Auntie Joselito, who caroused with them and sung their favorite karaoke song, which she’d determined to be Lucky Star by Madonna. Tiny boos rang out whenever she tried to sing anything in Tagalog or Bisaya. Meanwhile, they decided they hated Uncle Bening, who walked around the house pointing at his head, as swarms of tiny helicopters attacked his receding hairline. The choppers followed him and didn’t peel away until his Jeepney passed the creek they had dammed up and redirected into some unfinished industrial concern; a project they had begun after quickly losing interest in the coconut trees.
One morning, Maricel awakened to the sound of a tiny brass band and found some sort of presentation at the foot of their bed, complete with a little man giving a speech. It was not immediately apparent what the speech was about, but it was solemn. And it was most certainly directed at her.
A certain solemnity befell her as she walked over to the yard to find their military base being disassembled, and the construction by the creek, abandoned. At the end of the veranda sat a little statue of their soldiers raising an American flag, complete with a little plaque. She took her child’s magnifying glass to it, but still couldn’t make out the words, only that there were many.
She wondered what changed. Had sentiments about the war shifted at home? Solemnity curdled to irritation as she saw that they had built an airport at the edge of their driveway, on which bird-sized jets landed and took off.
She went to the phone to call her neighbor, Juji, to let her know they were preparing to strike their house.
H. A. EUGENE is an O. Henry-nominated writer of strange stories about food, work, and death. His work has appeared in X-R-A-Y Lit, Radon Journal, HAD, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. Witness him talking to himself on Bluesky @autobono.bsky.social and Instagram @h_a_eugene.