Every year, sometime between the first typhoon warning and the mayor’s latest Facebook Live, the city gathers for the Brown Sabbath.

It doesn’t announce itself with trumpets. Just a faint stink in the air, the smell of wet plywood and spoiled rice drifting in from the estero. Then the brown water trickles down the road like incense in reverse, carrying bits of plastic, cigarette butts, and the occasional slipper of a child.

By noon, it’s knee-deep, warm as yesterday’s bathwater, hugging your legs with a persistence only the devout would admire.

We’ve learned the rituals.

Mama lifts the refrigerator upstairs like it’s an altar. The neighbors lift their monobloc chairs to higher ground, a solemn procession past the waiting cockroaches on the wall. Tatay ties his sandals with yarn so they don’t float away during the ceremonial movement.

By three o’clock, the water reaches our door. Brown Sabbath has begun.

Children, shirtless and shrieking, dive in like pilgrims to the holy spring. Adults wade out with walis tingting for paddles. Somewhere, a tricycle is half-submerged, its horn wheezing out a mournful hymn.

PHP 779 billion, they say, was spent on flood control. Not water parks or Olympic-sized puddles. Yet here we are again, baptized waist-deep in free brown water.

The barangay captain arrives in a rented speedboat (like the Pope, if the Pope handed out sardines). He blesses us with three cans and a packet of expired noodles marked NOT FOR SALE. We accept them with solemn “amens,” because free food is free food, consecrated or not.

In the evening, the mayor preaches on Facebook Live. “Kapit lang, mga kababayan. We are monitoring the situation.”

We eat corned beef cold from the rusted can, balanced on the broken door upon the flood. Our ark, our altar. The water laps at the furniture like a patient choir. Mosquitoes buzz in high harmony. And above it all, the moon shines on our small, sinking town.

We laugh because laughter floats best. But it sinks too, once the water lingers. Jokes wrinkle like our skin left too long soaked in the flood. Each year the ritual repeats, and each year it becomes harder to pretend this is just another storm.

This is no act of God. This is theft with paperwork, sin dressed in barongs, corruption baptized in ribbon cuttings. They call it resilience, like virtue measured in how long you can stand in waist-deep water without cursing. 

The relief packs, the speeches, and the photo-ops are not blessings. They are offerings meant to hush us, incense to mask the stench of contracts never built. Sardines for silence. Noodles for obedience. 

Enough of these rituals. Tear the veil. Demand the scripture of receipts, the gospel of blueprints, the commandments signed in ink that led us to drown. Demand them until the thieves cannot swallow a meal without choking on our voices. 

Do not call this survival holy. Call it what it is.

A crime. 

And the next procession must not be of children raised above brown water, because if we remain silent, if we treat every flood as another Brown Sabbath, then we are no victims of the water. We are worshippers at the pulpit of our own drowning.