By Lily C. Fen

She hadn't meant for it to happen. Not this way.

Elena had tried everything else, at first. She was going to go into photography, had started during her sophomore year in De La Salle University. She'd invested in her first camera then, taking snapshots of Jan's short film for class, "Lola."

She'd dabbled in taking headshots of people, mainly actors, even trying out wedding photography for a time and hating it. Flor—an actress she'd met on the set of "Lola," had had a dreamy beach wedding. But she hated the stress of going all the way to Laiya, Batangas so early in the day, packing up heavy equipment that same evening. She wasn't going to drag herself through all this for the next ten years, no thanks.

Then she discovered yoga. At first, she was just a student.

Then she started taking self-portraits on her tripod, doing headstands, the wheel. An accomplishment, and she looked great. Posted those on Instagram.

Elena discovered Kon Mari, this cool thing she'd read about on the plane while she was flying to Davao for a photo shoot. It was about getting one's life simpler.

When she was back in Manila, she went and raided her closet. Took out the five cameras that had accumulated over time there, all those years that she had gotten weighed down by things. Sold them on sulit.com, and that was it. Only one camera left, and she was quitting photography as a profession. 

Before Jan knew it, Elena was taking up a yoga teacher training course. It was harrowing, especially the hot yoga that had them breathing in 38-degree Celsius weather while managing those power poses. But she had never felt as strong, as light, as slim, as when she came out of the sweaty room every time she had teacher training.

Then it was time to teach her first class.

She hadn't discovered it then, not yet.

It must have been during her third class, when she was leaning over a student. She still had to practise taking note of their names, if she could.  

Iya, that was her name. Iya was having trouble with supta konasana, the Reclined Angle Pose, and she had come up to her. Just when their spirits had taken leave of their bodies and their breaths floated in tiny clouds above each student, as was normal in the Philippines, during sleep and meditation.

Elena hadn't meant to do it. Not really.

It was illegal to drink of someone else's spirit, taboo; no one did such a thing. It's just that Iya's spirit cloud was a pink ball floating above her, and her asana was wrong. She had leaned in to whisper to Iya and correct her student. But before she got the words out and touched Iya's shoulders to open them up more and adjust her palms to keep them open to the skies, she caught a whiff of Iya's rosy spirit. Just there, hovering above her like a scepter, like cotton candy floating in mid-air. It sparkled on occasion, like glitter in a disco.

Elena had breathed Iya's spirit in. A part of her soul, so small an amount that it wouldn't have been missed. And Elena was smitten. She immediately felt Iya's sweat, her vantage point, the feel of the rubber mat beneath Iya's shoulder blades, and above all, an energy surged through her, like an electrical current, and then Elena was at peace. On Cloud Nine, so to speak.

Elena shook her head to shake off the effects of what had just happened. Continued with what she was doing, and as she adjusted Iya's asana and Iya came back into full consciousness, the cloud disappeared back into Iya.

She forgot about it then, took a cold shower after class; it was the last class for the day at Go Yoga.

She didn't have many classes assigned to her yet, being new at the school.

But next week, Viktor had issues with his shoulders during shavasana, and Elena didn't mean to, not really. She was going to lean over to whisper helpful instructions to him, help him rotate his shoulders back to get the most out of shavasana, the dead man's pose.

Viktor's cloud was a blue-gray floating above him as the rest of the class rested, the color of a stormy sea. Lightning surged through his cloud, a strange kind of masculine energy that Elena had never gotten close to before. Perhaps she had seen it in her father once or twice, but he was gone now.

She did it again. Inhaled the scent of him, breathing in some of that blue-gray cloud of Viktor, a part of his soul. She felt the same electricity jolt through her as she leaned over him, her knees nearly collapsing as the man's energy raced through her. And she was transported, for a moment, into his consciousness. First the feel of the rubber mat, the sweat pooling at the base of his back where his cotton T-shirt clung to him in the Manila heat, then the IT thoughts that poured through him, all the stress from working at the bank, the deal they were trying to close. Then it snapped shut as she pulled away. She didn't even lean over to help him with his shoulders, so taken aback was she. She stepped away from him, looking around the room, wondering if anyone had seen what had just happened. Everyone else remained in shavasana, their spirits hovering over them.

She took a deep breath and shuffled back to the front of the room, collecting herself.

What had just happened?

She had just drunk of someone's spirit a second time, and it was like adrenaline-- like catching a wave at La Union when the tide came in. It felt so good that she had to steady herself on the wall behind her. It was lucky no one else in the room could see her. When her hands were steady, she grabbed hold of the two bells and rang them.

Cling. The sound reverberated throughout the room and her entire body. "Time to awaken," she said to the class.

Elena was becoming a seasoned yoga teacher now, at least she felt like it, after teaching ten lessons of Ashtanga. She was soon teaching the working crowd after office hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

She was busy, and wanted, and slowly becoming a yoga teaching success. She still had her regular students. Iya and Viktor were there.

She was leaning over Pilar Pilapil, the wealthy artist who lived on McKinley Road, when it happened again. Pilar had sighed her spirit into the air for a moment, and as Elena bent Pilar further into the stretch, Elena inhaled a part of Pilar's spirit, that one hovering and glittering over her.

Elena hadn't even realised how much spirits glittered when they were out of body, perhaps it happened only in yoga? Was it the sweat, the nature of the short breaths and short pauses, that it wasn't sleep, but meditation? Was she privileged as a yoga teacher to see these glittering clouds? Most of the time, their spirits left Manilenyos in sleep. And in the depths of R.E.M., spirits could walk the vicinity, take on human form, or walk like shadows around the perimeter of their bodies.

She caught a taste of Pilar, and inhaled in her student's afternoon, caught sight of the Pilapil's sprawling lawn, the silverware with which her retinue of uniformed servants served her tea, the lhasa apso barking in the background, begging for attention, the green that stretched on and on in their front yard. It was so large that it looked like a tennis court, or a school lawn. She felt the brush strokes of Pilar's oil painting that day, the bright yellow, the high she was on when she was painting, how comfortable it was to be wealthy in Metro Manila.

Then it was gone, just like that. It was like inhaling a teaspoon of Pilar Pilapil's life. Hers tasted of green, of life, of wealth, of being cared for, and from this moment on, Elena was hooked. It didn't matter if spirit-eating was taboo, and worst of all, illegal and punishable by capital punishment.

She would never get caught. She was a yoga teacher, after all, and she had access to spirits in their miniature meditation form three days a week (sometimes more, when she was subbing for another teacher at Go Yoga).

Iya, Viktor, and Pilar were none the wiser. Students came and went, and more students enrolled. She knew all of them from the taste of their spirits, the snapshots of their lives she saw every time she inhaled them in. Her best opportunity was when the students were in shavasana. It was that one time in class when everyone was tired and in the corpse pose for five minutes, and their spirit clouds rested over their abdomens, as if reluctant to take leave of their bodies.

She drank of Marivic and felt the ecstasy of making love to her boyfriend from Norway, felt that spiritual connection they had had once, when, by accident, their spirits had left their bodies in the act of climax, and their souls had met in mid-air for a moment, before going back to themselves.

She drank of her regulars; she drank from visitors. It was her regulars who began to feel the effects of the soul-drinking Elena did.

One student, Viktor, was so low in spiritual energy that he lost control of the wheel and crashed into a truck while driving on the C5 highway at twilight. Things happened when darkness descended, that time when cats came out to hunt, when human sight wavered despite highway lights.

Then there was Marivic, and the gray in her eyes where there should have been dark brown. And her constant fatigue.

Elena's students were affected, but none of the blame ever came back to her, for sucking teaspoonfuls of soul now and again at yoga class was never enough for people to become suspicious of her. She kept her habit a secret, wondering if other yoga teachers did the same.

It wasn't until she got to teach privately that disaster awaited her.

She was teaching the Walds at the time, a wealthy interracial couple. Diana had been her student for several months, whom she would see once a month, sometimes for a one-on-one class in her apartment in Ortigas, other times with her two kids, Marco and Marga. The kids were a handful, with Marco being 13 and Marga, 11.

But she loved how they were so attuned to their bodies at that age. They had a hard time being still, though, and so she spent most of the time wearing the kids out doing wheels, headstands, and other power poses.

They loved it but giggled often. Sometimes, Diana's wealthy engineering husband, David, would join them. He'd huff and puff, his girth overcoming any of the yoga poses that lithe Diana could do so well. A part of Elena wanted to laugh at that but still she focused on what her clients needed.

She must have been teaching Diana regularly for a year when Diana became pregnant. It would be her first child with David. Diana kept asking Elena to come over, and Elena slowly adjusted the classes to a gentler yoga for Diana's pregnancy.

She never drank of Marco's or Marga's spirits. Was it that they were never still, that their young souls never emerged during shavasana? Had the situation presented itself and the kids concentrated enough to fall into a state of spirit leaving at the end of their private classes, would Elena have drunk of their young spirits?

She had no idea what would happen then and shuddered at the thought. She couldn't risk getting caught like that, not that way, drinking of a child, sucking them dry so young. What if she stunted their growth? What if they grew thin and worn? Wouldn't their mother know it was because of Elena?

Elena shook off her reverie. She regularly stole teaspoonfuls from Diana's spirit. Sometimes, even David's.

But now things had changed. The baby in Diana's belly was three months old, and it had a breath of its own, one that emerged like the light green of Pilar Pilapil's perfect, sprawling garden, one that came out attached to Diana's spirit during shavasana and that mini spirit leaving that so many adults were addicted to.

She never in her wildest nightmares, not even the darkest part of her, thought she would be capable of such a thing. But as Diana's spirit fell on her lips, she felt a taste of the baby's light green spirit, one still unconscious, that had never awoken. It glided into her mouth, and Elena drank it the way plants drink rain after a long drought.

It was the elixir of life itself, one that tasted of nothing and of everything. The taste of the baby's spirit made time stand still. Then she heard the lock turn in the door, it was David, arriving home, and Elena caught herself and stepped away from Diana and the three-month old baby in her belly, and wiped away the taste of fresh spirit in her mouth, as if it were ketchup that had gotten on her lip.

She met with Diana some more, they planned to go as far as Diana's doctor would allow, and it was Elena's first pregnant woman to devote yoga time to as a teacher.

But the taste of Diana's baby spirit had left her smitten, and every week, she drank. Not just of Diana, but of the unborn baby. The young spirit tasted so good that it felt like eternity in a galaxy of stars, or like sinking her toes into the fine, warm sand on Boracay's long White Beach. She would almost forget herself there.

She was drinking of the green spirit during baby's fourth month, when she came to the end of the unborn baby's spirit, and she knew she had done the unimaginable. She let go of Diana then, stepped away, and instead of Diana coming to in a sense of utter peace and calm, she gasped for breath, grabbing at her throat. And just as Elena was standing over her like this, Diana's husband, David, walked in. The one with the gray-green eyes that reminded her of Manila Bay on a windy day.

Elena gasped and took a step back, didn't know what to do. A chair fell over, one that was behind her that she'd rammed into. "I-I don't know what happened. Or what to do."

"Oh my God, what have you done?" he exclaimed. David immediately called for an ambulance. Elena half-squatted and half-perched on the fallen chair.

How could this happen to her? There would be no escaping the scrutiny of a foreigner, not in Manila, despite the city's mysticism when it came to spirit-leaving.

An inquiry was made. The kind that a white man working for a wealthy engineering company could wield. At first, it was on suspicion of negligence as a yoga teacher.

But she knew, having grown up there, what the unspoken rules were about spirit-devouring, that sort of old wives' tale, the kind that children whispered about after their nannies had taught them, the kind that wasn't supposed to happen to anyone, least of all to anyone in such a modern city as Metro Manila. It was supposed to have shed its beliefs about spirit-eating as soon as rice fields gave way to city smog and grimy highways.

Every night, Elena found herself in a dream of a courtroom, living out the nightmare of being tried for spirit-devouring, a crime punishable by death in the Philippines.

It wasn't supposed to happen that way. No one believed in such a thing, only foreigners and children and their nannies.

But slowly, just to be thorough, David's lawyers were sent to Go Yoga to interview each yoga student and instructor and colleague that Elena had ever interacted with. Then the reports came. Of the girl with the big lawn on McKinley Drive who couldn't wake up anymore. And the boy who had driven into a truck on C5 after a series of lessons with Elena.

Then Go Yoga received a telephone call from Norway from a man named Edvard. Said his girlfriend used to go to Go Yoga all the time, that she had started displaying symptoms of falling victim to a spirit-devourer, just as it was described in his Travel Philippine guidebook. His testimony solidified the case against Elena, and after a few harrowing months, she found herself in court, where at least her known victims were.

They hired a mangkukulam, a witch, who was known to deal with things like spirits and devourers. The mangkukulam had something burning in a pot full of ashes, its smoke rising, snaking towards Elena, who had had to take the witness stand.

Elena wriggled in her seat, feeling the hardwood underneath her, feeling as if the entire world were closing in on her, choking her.

She stared at the courtroom. There was Diana, teary-eyed, next to giant David, who had a protective arm over her. His eyes were bloodshot.

Iya sat, unperturbed, on one bench. Pilar and Viktor, her favorites, had to be wheeled in. "Such was the damage done to those whom she drank from," the judge had said. It was the mangkukulam who had requested that they be present for Elena's punishment.

Was there anyway for Marivic or any of the others to get their souls back?

There was no hope for Diana's baby, which she had lost that very night after David had walked in on Elena sucking the last of their unborn baby dry. The rest of the baby had fallen away in clots of blood that left her feeling harried and weak.

That was a year ago, exactly. What a coincidence.

Elena twisted around, jingled her wrists in their handcuffs, as if that were enough to set her free.

She jingled and jangled some more, the tempo becoming panicked and quicker as the witch began to chant and the smoke snaked towards her. Elena's heart began to gallop. "Please. Please, whatever it is, no, no, no," she gasped.

By then, the chant had reached its climax, and the smoke had become several black snakes that wrapped themselves around her, prying her mouth open. A scream escaped her lips, but then it was muffled, just as sharply as it had pierced the courtroom.

Then, slowly, glittering clouds of green, then blue, sputtered out of her. They hovered in the air for a moment, then floated towards their original owners. Bits of cloud flew towards Diana, and the bright green nestled into her, what was left of her baby's spirit. Diana sighed, and tears rolled down her cheeks.

The light blue clouds dissipated into Viktor, a yellow one into Pilar and Iya, and a blue-gray one into Marivic, who had been brought there by her concerned Norwegian boyfriend. And as bits of their lost selves reunited with them, a collective sigh of relief filled the room, and the individuals began to come alive, as if waking from a long sleep.

Afterwards, Elena slumped on the chair. An officer of the court came to examine her. "Pulse is steady. She's still alive," he said. But when he looked closer, her eyes were empty, just as her victims had been.

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