Sydney Kurleto

Sydney Kurleto woke up in sunshine so bright she would have to squint thrice as hard as usual. She picked up her small bag and prepared to leave without even combing her hair. The Beem stopped her on her way out and asked her if she left the cabbage peelings on the table. Sydney said she didn�t know, and anyway KC was there. KC was always there�

I can remember only a few times when KC wasn�t there. In fact, there was only one ocassion that I do remember of KC�s not being there. It was one day when she was five, and her mother took her to see the dolphins, and I and my brother Jimm Danglo came looking for her, and KC wasn�t there.

�Have you been looking for me?� KC asked immediately after they got home. It was, however, seventeen years later, and KC was a young woman of class, wealth, beauty, and distinction.

My brother Jimm Danglo was quick to respond, made so perhaps by KC�s immense influence on the modest earners�but I stopped him. The last thing I wanted KC to see was someone belonging to my immediate family giving her a direct answer not half a second after the question mark departed from her lips.

It was, in fact, seven and a half seconds after she asked her question that it came to me that perhaps it was Sydney all along, and not KC�and definitely not Ms. Hoiyez�who knew the answer.

In any case I excused myself and my brother Jimm Danglo, and we retreated to the waiting area�an eight square meter room at the back of the receptionist�s desk, occupied by a round fake rabbit fur couch and a low coffee table.

As soon as settling in one of the tall chairs�in fact it was the only one tall chair, and it belonged to the female receptionist herself�Jimm Danglo took out a half-empty pack of Pall Malls from the breast pocket of his shirt. He offered me a stick, then remembered that I had quit smoking even before he was born and that he was at least fifty years older than me.

Frustrated, he cursed me and my line for up to the thirtieth generation and said I had never for once accepted anything he was practically shoving to my direction. �Not even KC,� he said.

It was in time for Ms. Hoiyez to come back from the ladies�s room. She was a twenty-year-old woman who had graduated from **** without missing a single day in class. She also happened to be my signficant other (although no one but me, and I guess Sydney Kurleto, knew of it).

She asked, although I know she knew the answer even before she did, �So, KC?�

My brother Jimm Danglo shook his head. There was a time, he said with regret, when he would have shaken his head for a completely different reason.

I stared into Ms. Hoiyez�s deep-set, light-dark brown eyes with pity and remorse. I tried to get up from my chair.

�Well then?� said the guard.

�Well,� I replied.

� Jay Santos 2004.