The world was a smear of gray concrete and brown filth, and Max was just another stain on its surface. He lay curled in an alcove that reeked of piss and stale cooking oil, the morning sun doing little to warm the gnawing chill in his bones. Manila was already screaming itself awake—the roar of jeepneys, the rattle of a vendor's cart, the chorus of a thousand hurried footsteps on cracked pavement. The sounds used to be a kind of company, but now they were just noise, a constant reminder of the life churning on without him.
He was a ghost in his own city. People looked through him, their eyes skipping over his grimy form as if he were a glitch in their reality. He was below average in every conceivable way: scrawny, with sallow skin stretched tight over a face that had forgotten how to hold any expression but a dull, weary grimace. His existence was a cycle of hunger, discomfort, and the deep, abiding shame of being nothing.
Today, the hunger was a physical pain, a hot coil in his gut. Across the narrow alley, a half-eaten piece of pandesal sat on a ledge, probably left for the rats. It was too far to reach without uncurling his entire body, an act that felt monumental. He stared at it, his saliva glands aching. Come here, he thought, a pathetic, desperate prayer to a god who had clearly blocked his number. Just… roll over here.
He focused on the small, round bread with an intensity born of pure starvation. His head throbbed. He imagined a phantom hand reaching out, nudging it.
The pandesal twitched.
Max blinked. A rat, probably. He squinted, his focus narrowing again, shutting out the city's roar. Move.
The bread wobbled, then slowly, impossibly, it rolled off the ledge and plopped onto the filthy ground a few feet from his face.
His heart hammered against his ribs. It was a trick of the light. A breeze. An earthquake. Anything but what it felt like. He looked at his hands—trembling, dirty, and utterly still. He hadn't moved.
He tried again, staring at a crumpled cigarette butt near his foot. He poured all his will into it, the strange pressure building behind his eyes again. The butt lifted, hovering an inch in the air, spinning lazily. He gasped, and it dropped.
It wasn't a fluke.
A giddy, terrifying energy surged through him, eclipsing the hunger. He sat up, ignoring the stiffness in his back. He looked around the alley, his new kingdom. A plastic bottle. He stared. It shot sideways and clattered against the wall. A loose brick in the crumbling facade. He focused, feeling a strain, a mental grunt. The brick scraped out of its hole and thudded to the ground.
With every successful test, the feeling grew. It was a warmth spreading from his chest outwards, a tingling fire that burned away the years of cold indifference. It was power. His power. The world wasn't just happening to him anymore. He could happen back.
He stumbled out of the alley and into the river of people. For the first time, he wasn't just a piece of driftwood. He was the current. He saw a pompous-looking man in a cheap barong strutting along, phone pressed to his ear. Max glared at his feet. A flicker of thought, a mental push. The man's shoelace, impossibly, snagged on nothing, and he pitched forward, his phone skittering across the pavement with a sickening crack. The man swore, scrambling in confusion. Max felt a laugh bubble up, a rusty, unused sound. He stifled it behind a dirty hand, his eyes shining with pure, malicious glee.
This was better than food. This was divine.
He found a spot on a crowded overpass, a perfect vantage point. He spent the next hour like a vengeful god playing with his ants. He made a woman's umbrella turn inside out on a sunny day. He caused a street vendor's neatly stacked pyramid of oranges to collapse into the gutter. He nudged a fat man's toupee just enough that a gust of wind from a passing bus lifted it from his head and deposited it onto a barbecue grill, where it sizzled with a foul, synthetic smell.
Each gasp of frustration, each cry of confusion from his victims below, was a symphony. They were all so fragile, so bound by the rules of a world that no longer applied to him. He wasn't a stain on the pavement. He was the one who decided where the rain would fall.