01: Ang Dilaw na Bestida (The Yellow Dress)
pilot chapter of my novella Sobra-Sobra (Too Much)
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction.
While the events, places, historical contexts, and cultural references depicted here are anchored in real histories, they have been fictitiously reimagined for the purposes of storytelling. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental or used solely as a point of artistic inspiration.
Some characters, scenes, and moments may evoke figures, icons, or historical events rooted in truth. However, the author intends these not as factual retellings, but as poetic representations, symbolic renderings shaped by imagination, personal narrative, and literary exploration. This is not a documentary account. This is a story.
Where history ends, fiction begins.
✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧ Introductory Guide (Table of Contents, Blurb, and Characters) ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧
→ Next Chapter: [02: Anak ng Parlor (Daughter of Parlor)]
1970s, Marina
INT. BEDROOM – GLITTERY NIGHT
GIRLLLLL—
The world is burning, everything is trashed, and the television flickers a chromatic hue across a pair of small hands. The bungalow snores. It watches a small boy slither underneath his bed. A small boy-body becoming a changeling as he clasps something soft, lace-textured, and frilled with ribbons. When he gasps again for the light, the bed creaks in warning.
The shadows sing. The moon watches quietly. And there, in the flamboyant fingers of the tiny boy, is a faded dress yellowed at the seams. The embroidered sunflowers glow golden. Its threadbare fabric turning magical against the chiaroscuro of dark. This dress once belonged to her cousin who died of dengue. The grown-ups, always fond of hoarding and collecting sentiments, didn’t bury the clothes—only the body.
When he sits on the 1banig, he lays the dress flat to his chest, and underneath his ribcage, a loud thrum recognizes the shift of his bones. The skin stretches like his Mama’s, shedding away the thick scales of his Papa’s militant leather. The dress listens to him as he twirls in the mirror. The reflection winks back a girl. And silence.
Except the radio downstairs is telling of another apocalypse. 2Tina Revilla hosting 3Eat Bulaga’s early sketchy segments. The snore of his father crawling like an animal through the slats of their wooden house. The begging prayers of his mother in the next room. The rosary singing miracles in her hand, coiled like rope. The statue of the Virgin, her hands poised in eternal prayer, seeing him become her. And the boy, kneeling on the banig—maybe eight, maybe nine, but still a kid—asks God to make him a daughter.
And the world tilts. She names herself Marina. She disrespects the name her Mama had given him. She tosses it onto the floor as she pictures herself no longer in this bungalow. The stage bows to her. She swallows it at the 4Little Miss Philippines pageant, in front of 5Tito, Vic, and Joey. The floors are sticky, but in her mini heels, she glides. She twirls. The beads of the gown scratch her armpits. The neckline is too tight.
In the mirror, she clicks open the tube of lipstick she stole from her Mama’s drawer during Sunday Mass. She smears it on her wide, chapped lips. Her mother’s color. God winces at the bad drag. This is her. The house doesn’t agree.
When the snores stop, the bam! bam! bam! of her father’s boots follow. She scrambles. She wipes the lipstick with the back of her hand. She hides the dress under the bed. She bleeds while doing all this. The bed creaks under her weight, heavy as a secret. Her father never comes in, but she’s always prepared—like the military boy he expects.
EXT. ELEMENTARY SCHOOL – DAY
The 6banyan tree caresses the children playing 7luksong baka. Marina watches them with pretend adulthood. She wants to grow up suddenly and tower over the childishness she knows herself to be now. The mossy rock she’s sitting on laughs at her faux maturity. She munches the 8sampalok with her sweet teeth.
Miss Cristina—always in a beehive hairdo, ruffled blouse, eyes full of worry and clouds of concern—sits across from Marina’s mother in the guidance counselor’s office. She says, “[dead name] seems to have his head in the clouds. Always fogged. Always drawing on his notebooks.”
Marina’s mother raises her brow and retorts, “That’s a problem because?” The question is seasoned with sass.
“He’s in his own world.”
Marina’s mother shakes her head again and purses her lips dramatically. She waves the concern away and dismisses it: “Of course, he’s a kid.”
And yes, truly, factually, everything is correct. The girl is in her world. She’s spinning in a dress on her own axis. The universe in her head braids her hair. In that world, 9Chona Cruz from 10Lovingly Yours, Helen is her spiritual mother. In that world, the boys love her. She’s being serenaded by 11Rico J. Puno with The Way We Were.
The pages of her notebook are tunnels of sketches: dresses, ribbons. Glitter, girls. Gowns with butterfly sleeves. There, she writes inscriptions of prophecies. She will be a girl.
INT. KITCHEN – NIGHT
Her mother doesn’t know this, but Marina can always hear her through the thin plywood walls of their bungalow. When she gets home from school, she presses her ear to the coarse skin of the plywood and wounds herself with pain when she hears her mom whispering to saints, “I hope I am a good mother.”
In her mother’s hand is a baby photo of Marina—a girl assigned male at the genesis. When she was chucked out into the world, she cried so hard that her mother asked the nurse for a blanket. The nurse handed her a pink one. That should have been a sign.
She held Marina in her arms, gulping the scent of life, the beginning of decay, the thrum of revolution. And she whispered to her, “You will be a star, 12anak.”
INT. MILITARY CAMP – DAY
One night, Marina wore the yellow dress. She had learned at school that bravery takes action, that cowardice is messaged through silence. Her teacher gawked at the class after rendering that wisdom to them. Marina squirmed in her seat as she drank the words, the same way her Papa pickled his throat with alcohol until he was drunk enough to scream dangerous expletives at Mama. 13Puta. 14Tangina mong babae. 15Palamon. 16Malas.
When she arrived home, she listened again to Mama’s songbird cries in the other room. Her litanies were about a miserable marriage, the barbed-wire pain in her chest for giving up her life, and the wrong choice she had made committing to Papa. Marina snuck the yellow dress from the closet, unzipped it from behind, removed her boy-uniform, and slid the dress over her body. It fit snugly—a second skin handed by God.
Is this the daughter Papa would love? she asks. The silence flitters.
When she is twirling under her own mirrorball, it fractures into a million tinkling shards as her Papa stands at the door with an angry face and a rabid belt in his hand. The slap comes like a whip on Jesus’ back. A holy sacrifice.
A week later, her father pulls her ear to the military camp. He called it conversion therapy. A way to pulverize the gay, to drown the gay, to bury the gay, to unleash the gay.
To be free of sin is to be straightened. Ruler? she asks. She is met with the buckle of a belt again.
The boys there, damaged Kens with ferocious brutes, marched under the sun. It blistered Marina’s skin like she was being scaled. Papa smirked at Marina when he saw the fear on her face. He commanded the boys, and they saluted him. They shouted their real voices with extra thorn. They shouted slogans about saving the nation from communists and degenerates.
When he introduced Marina to his friends, they barked. She could only hear dogs.
"This your son? Why so soft? Homosexuals like him should be bleached in the river." Laughter. Canine-guffaws. Dogs. Dogs. Rabies.
Marina tried to stand like the other boys. Squared shoulders. She push-upped, but her body failed her. Her arms trembled like banana leaves in a typhoon. They sang defeat. When she couldn’t hold it in, the grown dogs laughed.
When Papa couldn’t take it anymore—the sissiness, the weakness, all the flamboyancy of Marina—it came to a moment of hell.
"BE A MAN!" he screamed in her face. Unhinged jaw, teeth serrated with the breath of gin and bile.
The spit landed on her face like pain splatters.
The shorts she wore sagged on her bony hips. There was fear in her chest.
Her father screamed again behind her. His face taut like a dog’s mewl. His knuckles punched her shoulders a little too hard, like familiar beatings underground.
“BE A MAN!” he recites like a lashing. Her skin stings, her heart cries, and the sun dims. When Marina doesn’t move, he grabs her by the neck and pushes her to the ground, shoving her into the face of the earth with his boots. “Crawl! Swim into the mud. Sin into the dirt.”
Marina crawls. She imagines the dirt as glitter. It glistens gold, not dirt. Her knees scrape against the stones. The blood drinks the murk, and her tears become thread.
“FASTER!”
The whistle blows. The boys around her grow sharp-boned, more aggressive, rabid with desire to hurt. She understands then that her Papa is a dog like them. Clawing at the ground, desperate for approval. Ready to bark, ready to bite without heart.
Someone throws a stone near her. She knows this dance already. She has listened to her Papa’s stories about torture, activists, and communists when he drank with his kumpadres.
Another stone. Another hits her elbow. Another punctures her arm. Another grazes her cheek. Her body hurts less compared to the glitch between her legs. She winces. They laugh.
The soldiers jeer from the sidelines.
17“Pageant nalang, hija!”
“Faggot!”
Those comments shame her father.
Marina thinks against the afternoon sun that she’s a 18bangus frolicking in the terrestrial land of wolves, dogs, and flea-ridden predators. He bows and presses his lips to her ear and seethes. He verdicts, “You fucking worthless son.”
He grabs her by the collar, lifts her like a ragdoll. “Stop the drama. Stop being a sissy.”
And then, a punch in the stomach.
Marina thinks of the prisoners abducted. The many breasts he coddled, violatingly. The men he has put bullets in. The drunken stories of punching activists until they were left with no breath of hope, just the whimpers of their motherland.
Marina folds. She gasps. No air. Just sound. A husk.
And she remembers her throat. The wetness of her voice. The power of her chords. So she gulps all the air, expands her chest, and lets out a shrill, animal scream.
The kind of noise that permits her to be a glitch in a world of uniforms, guns, and men.
The noise that breaks glasses. The noise that blots out karaoke machines.
Everything stops.
A bird somewhere on an electric line sings.
Her father is red with humiliation. He backhands her. Twice.
The second slap is penitence. It throws her to the ground. Her temple hits the cement.
The world rings.
Static. TV. Eat Bulaga. Chants. Bullets. And screams of the beaten behind the camp walls. “Fix your body!” / “I don’t want a gay son!” / “I should’ve just killed you when you were born if you were gonna turn out this way.”
And then, the trademarked violence. He pulls a belt from his waist. Military-issue nylon, steel buckle. She doesn’t crawl away. She sits up and looks him in the eye. For a second, something flickers beneath his eyes—fatherhood. He whips her.
The soldiers laugh again, but it’s shaky this time as Marina takes all the pain without a wince.
No one stops it. She thinks she’s Jesus as the belt lashes across her back. The shirt tears, the skin breaks open, and glitter gushes out. Maybe.
She screams silently. Her eyes stare into the mud. The glistening reflection of her learns that in a world like this, she will lose, but at least, she could use her tears for worthwhile things. Crying is bleeding.
Her father walks away, panting, drunk, victorious. She lifts her head and stares at the soldiers. One by one. She plants in their empty hearts a seed of doubt in their macho.
Lip bleeding, skin torn, eye swelling, she proclaims, “This is me. You will never change that.”
INT. BUNGALOW – NIGHT
Her mother is praying again in the kitchen. When they arrive, she howls into the night. Her chin is tipped up, aching for any balm to her pain. When she sees Marina folded in her wounds, her broken bones, her ripped flesh, she crumbles into the failure of her maternal savior. She cooks her sopas and spoons the milky liquid into her daughter’s lips. She traces the wounds with swabs of cotton, Betadine, and tears. She tells her that she kept her dress for her. It’s still under your bed, she assures.
Her Kuya Hector bleeds, but never shows it. He cradles the women in the family under the fluorescent lights and never speaks a word. His silence is love.
Later that evening, in the shoebox bedroom, Marina listens to her brother’s anger, the way his chest rasps in pain as he studies her swollen body, stung by the violence of their father. And under the glittery stars, he knows what to do. Hector sets up their little fantasy game. He knots their 19kumots into the windowsills, shaping them into stage curtains. He slides out a cardboard under the banig and tells her it’s a shield. It’s silver. He is the knight, always. And tonight again, he tells her she is the princess. A paper crown is placed on her head. It’s made from a 20Ginebra San Miguel calendar. The curvaceous body still shows through the origami.
“I’ll protect you, 21bunso,” he says.
She believes it. She twirls weakly. He fights imaginary 22aswangs.
In that world, in that shoebox room, the shadows glow like 23malignos. The cracked wall is a castle. She is beautiful. Safe. Free.
EXT. SCHOOL GROUND – MORNING
A herald of boys, trying hard to be the soldiers they see roaming around town, shove her. They call her 24bakla, 25binabae, 26sayaw queen. They chant.
They all look like her father. Everywhere, she sees her father. His face. His belt. His military uniform. They chant, and all she can hear is her papa’s voice: “BE A MAN!”
One throws her notebook into the canal. She picks it up, wipes off the grime, and hugs it to her chest. She walks home with mud on her legs.
Her mother hugs her. Her father looks through her like she’s an apparition, and says, “That’s what you get when you choose to be a faggot.”
The silence betrays her in the bathroom. In the bedroom, the yellow dress lulls her into a world of her own. She hums 27Bituing Walang Ningning to herself.
The night wants to claim her because she’s a star. She hasn’t been given to the sky yet, but she will shine one day. The world will understand, someday. She’s always been that girl.
The world will catch up.
But the world today will try to kill her.
Get rid of her body mercilessly.
Tonight, though, the mosquitoes watch her. They taste her blood against the stillness of curfew hours. She whispers her name.
Marina. Marina. Marina.
It lingers on her like perfume.
“Someday, they will all see me.”
Banig – Traditional Filipino handwoven sleeping mat.
Tina Revilla – 1970s–80s Filipino TV host.
Eat Bulaga – Long-running Filipino noontime variety show.
Little Miss Philippines – A child beauty pageant segment in Eat Bulaga.
Tito, Vic, and Joey – Comedic hosts of Eat Bulaga.
Banyan – A type of tropical fig tree, often associated with old Filipino schoolyards.
Luksong Baka – Filipino children’s jumping game.
Sampalok – Tamarind, often eaten sour as a snack.
Chona Cruz – Fictionalized or real pop culture figure from Lovingly Yours, Helen.
Lovingly Yours, Helen – A famous Philippine drama anthology.
Rico J. Puno – Iconic Filipino singer known for ballads and novelty songs.
Anak – Filipino for "child." Often used affectionately by parents.
Puta – Profane Filipino slur meaning "whore."
Tangina mong babae – Vulgar insult: "F*ck you, woman."
Palamon – Derogatory term implying someone lives off others (parasite).
Malas – Filipino for "bad luck."
Pageant nalang, hija – "Just join pageants, dear/daughter." Patronizing mockery.
Bangus – Milkfish, the Philippine national fish.
Kumot – Blanket.
Ginebra San Miguel – Popular Filipino gin brand, known for its iconic calendars.
Bunso – Youngest sibling, a term of affection.
Aswangs – Filipino folkloric monsters, often shapeshifters or flesh-eating ghouls.
Malignos – Supernatural creatures or spirits in Philippine folklore; often malevolent.
Bakla – Filipino slur for effeminate men or gay men, sometimes reclaimed.
Binabae – Literally "like a woman," a derogatory term for effeminate men.
Sayaw Queen – "Dancing Queen," used mockingly here.
Bituing Walang Ningning – "Star Without Sparkle," an iconic Filipino ballad and soap opera about fame, longing, and dreams.
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thank you for your words <3
Such a rich chapter! Raw and violent but with such depth and beauty in Marina’s story, her resistance and truth. How her mother saved the yellow dress for her. Looking forward to reading more!