Every night, Dindin circles around Central Bank.

The air is heavy with the smell of tricycle exhaust and the occasional drifting scent of old piss from some corner you pretend not to see.

She’s wearing a faded t-shirt, tight denim shorts, and slippers she bought secondhand at Bankerohan for fifty pesos. Nothing about her stands out, except maybe her face—too thin, too soft, too young-looking for thirty-five.

Sometimes, men like that.

Her body is small. The kind of small that makes some of the clients call her Inday in that sticky, leering way that pretends to be tender. She looks like she’s twenty, though the bones in her back know otherwise.

She waits across the row of Indian mango vendors near Quirino Avenue, close enough for safety, but far enough for men to circle like flies. The freelancers gather there. Some stand alone, some in pairs. None of them talked much until the first pick-up.

Beside her, Teya lights a cigarette. They don’t talk much during nights. You never know who’s listening, who’s watching. And besides, small talk feels foolish when you’re selling your body.

Tonight, the first to approach her is a man in a battered Toyota. Middle-aged, wearing a polo shirt that doesn’t quite hide his belly.

“Pila?” he says through the window.

“Five hundred,” Dindin says.

The man squints at her, assessing. “Naa kay pink card?”

Without a word, Dindin pulls it from her sling bag. A laminated, government-issued card, bright like bubblegum. The man peers at it, checks the date stamped on the lower corner.

“Bag-o pa man diay,” he says, sounding satisfied.

Dindin knows this is what makes him decide. The pink card is proof that she’s clean. That she’s been poked, scraped, and examined, her cervix swabbed every month like clockwork. Pap smear, blood test, urine test. A ritual of humiliation just to keep the customers coming.

The card costs nearly a thousand pesos to renew each month. Money that could’ve bought Gab’s medicines, or paid part of the rent in Buhangin, or replaced the electric fan that’s been sputtering for weeks.

But men don’t fuck you without it.

He unlocks the door, and she slides in.

–

The room smells like disinfectant, failing to cover the sourness of old sweat.

Dindin’s body moves on instinct—hands tracing skin, eyes half-shut, breathing shallow. The man grunts, quick and messy. She keeps her mind somewhere else. She thinks of Gab’s school project. She thinks of tinolang manok. She thinks of Teya standing across the street, waiting for her own car to slow down.

It’s over in fifteen minutes.

After the man leaves, she wipes herself down with tissue she carries in her bag. She counts the bills—four hundred, the man shorted her, but she doesn’t want to risk a fight.

By the time she steps back onto Quirino, it’s close to midnight.

Teya’s still standing under the streetlight, speaking to a man in cargo shorts. She catches Dindin’s eyes briefly—just a flicker—and then returns to negotiating.

They don’t leave together. Never together.

They used to joke about it, wave at each other between clients. But that was before Teya got her tooth knocked out by a man who thought “no” meant “harder.” Before Gab got sick and they had to borrow money from a pimp who now owns more of their time than any clock.

It eats you, doesn’t it? The pretending. The way your body turns into someone else’s house and you’re locked out of it. She says nothing to Teya about this. How do you confess to someone who knows exactly what you mean?

By 2:30 AM, Dindin decides to head home.

Their room sits above a sari-sari store, the stairs creaking beneath her weight. The plywood walls barely hold in the noise of the neighbor’s snoring, the distant roosters that crow too early, the occasional clink of bottles from outside.

Gab is asleep on the foam mattress. His tiny chest rises and falls, warm, safe for now.

Dindin counts the money on the floor, separating the bills: rent, food, pink card renewal, school supplies. The pile is never enough. There’s always something spilling over.

An hour later, Teya arrives.

“Kumusta man?” Dindin asks softly.

“Ka kuha kog tulo kabuok. Pero duha ra bayad ug sakto oy,” Teya mutters, pulling her own stack of bills from her bra. “Ang isa naghilak pa gyud.”

They both fall silent.

Teya leans her head against Dindin’s thin shoulder. The fan rattles again in the corner, working too hard for too little air.

“Lisod ba ani, Din,” Teya whispers. “Naga buhi pa ta og bata. Mag padayon pa ta ani hangtod sa hangtod?”

Dindin looks at Gab. His small mouth opens slightly in sleep, as though tasting a dream.

“Ambot,” she answers. “Wala man ta’y pili.”

And that’s the wound they carry: not just the selling, but the lie that they chose this. No one ever asks who gets to choose when the world’s already decided who you are. Not just poor. Not just woman. Not just queer. But all of it. At once.

She wants to say: We’re already lucky he calls us both Nanay. We’re already lucky we still come home alive. But those don’t sound like victories when you say them out loud.

“Pag-abot sa panahon, biyaan nato ni, ha?” she says.

“Oh,” Dindin answers, voice flat.

But she doesn’t say no. That’s enough, sometimes.

In the cramped room above the sari-sari store, with two women holding each other like they’re trying to sew themselves back together, there is something tender. Something whole. Something like hope.

In the morning, Gab will wake up with a cough, and Teya will walk to the nearest health center and beg for amoxicillin. Dindin will stay and wash the laundry, then cook rice that tastes faintly of cigarette smoke and hope. They will go out again that night, not because they want to, but because hunger doesn’t care who you fuck.

Tomorrow, at nine in the evening, they will return to Central Bank.

And the cars will circle again.

Editor’s Note: This article was first issued in the January to May 2026 Second Semester Newsletter of Atenews.