My Huntsman Lives!

So, yes, my huntsman is a bodyguard, but before he was a bodyguard he was a houseboy. Named Nino for now. And here he is with Eva and Arturo Sy on the day my Snow White was born:

The day that Eva Sy gave birth, Nino was cracking ice as she labored, timing the downswing of his pick with her cries. She had insisted on delivering the child at the Alabang house rather than the hospital, and because Arturo Sy could deny his wife nothing--including mountains of fake snow in the gardens at Christmas, cheese imported from France, and a whole room given over to her hobby of stitching fine linens with golden thread--he had eventually agreed with an “Okay, okay,” and a flick of his wrist.

Eva wanted only her mother, who was visiting from Sweden, and the local midwife--toothless, barefoot, and with strings of fat nara wood beads encircling her neck--to attend to her. In the beginning, Eva thought she would go mad with the constant clack-clack-clacking of the beads; but as an hour grew to eight, then, twelve, then sixteen, the sound brought comfort, as did the midwife’s hands as she moved round and round the bed, smoothing Eva’s sheets, massaging her lower back as she lay on her side, wiping her brow.

Nino once heard a maid--a girl of just sixteen--give birth in one of the rooms behind the cocina. She had made the sounds of someone working to climb a mountain or to outrun a man bent on murder. But the noises from Eva Sy were like the screams of the aswang that can be heard in the fields at midnight, screams of pure terror that tore though the house like a terrible wind. The worst of these was followed by a silence and then frantic shouts to fetch Dr. Lim from the other side of the subdivision.

Eva was dead before he arrived.

Just wanted to prove to myself that I really was working on it. Now it's after midnight, and really I must go because I have to wake up early to get Risa and Vida ready (this entails wigs and make-up; I don't mess around) for their Halloween preschool parade which ends at a senior citizens' home. There they will sing a slew of Halloweeny songs. They are not particularly uplifting songs, but I seem to be the only one concerned about that. I mean, what do you think of this (the children have been directed, mind you, to look very sad throughout this little number):

Oh once I had a pumpkin,
a pumpkin, a pumpkin,
Oh once I had a pumpkin
without any face.
With no eyes and no nose,
and no mouth and no smile,
Oh once I had a pumpkin
with no face at all.

Methinks this is no way to spread cheer...