Avril Shakira Villar is a writer from the Philippines. She is the author of I Live Because I Almost Died and an alumna of WriteGirl LA. She won the “One Room One Hour” essay competition by Jack Wieland, was the First Place winner in the English category of the 7th Heritage Youth Writing Contest, and was one of the finalists in the English Poetry category of the 2025 Maningning Miclat Art Foundation competition.
The Diminishing Bureau of Engineer Pacita Faustino
by Avril Shakira Villar
Engineer Pacita Faustino set out to make her commute less, which is a different and reasonable ambition, the kind of ambition that does not get you committed or written about in the newspapers, the kind that simply gets you up at four in the morning to sit in a garage that smelled of 3-in-1 oil and her late father’s cigarettes, soldering smaller and smaller things in the hope that the smaller things would somehow make the two hours on EDSA shorter.
It did not occur to her, not at first, that she had confused two different kinds of less. The traffic did not care how small her capacitors were. But the machine she built—a boxy thing with a lens the size of a saucer and a dial calibrated in percentages, 100% down to 1%—did something else entirely. She pointed it, by accident, at the stack of unpaid electric bills on her table, meaning only to move them out of the lens’s heat while she adjusted a wire, and when she looked again the stack was the size of a matchbook, every overdue notice intact and legible if you held it close enough to your eye, the total amount owed unchanged but suddenly, undeniably, easier to put in your pocket.
She did not tell anyone for six days. This is a very Filipino interval—six days is long enough to be sure of something and short enough that you have not yet had to explain why you waited.
On the seventh day her Tita Bel came over to borrow rice and saw the matchbook-sized bills on the table and asked, in the tone of someone who has decided not to be alarmed until given further information, kamusta ang current mo, anak, is your electric bill smaller now, and Pacita said yes, in fact, watch, and pointed the machine at Tita Bel’s purse, which contained, among other things, a list—handwritten, in the looping hand of a woman raised on Catholic school penmanship drills—of every favor she felt she owed her four sisters, a list that had been growing for nineteen years and had recently required a second sheet of paper stapled to the first.
The list shrank to the size of a fingernail. Tita Bel held it up to the kitchen light, read it without her glasses for the first time since 2009, and began to cry, from the specific relief of holding a debt in your hand and finding it does not, after all, weigh anything.
Word travels in Pacita’s barangay the way water finds the lowest point, which is to say immediately and without anyone admitting to having started it. By the second week there was a line outside the garage that the kapitan eventually had to direct with an orange traffic cone borrowed from the basketball court. People did not ask Pacita to shrink themselves—she would not have done it, and most of them did not yet think to ask—but they asked her to shrink the things they were carrying. A widower brought the grief he had been hauling for four years, the daily burden of it, the part that made it hard to get out of bed, and Pacita pointed the lens at the air around him for eleven seconds and he stood up straighter, the way a man does when a sack of rice is taken off his shoulders even though the rice itself still exists somewhere, has not vanished, has simply stopped being his to carry every hour of every day.
A nurse brought the number of patients she had lost that year, which she had been keeping, unasked, and Pacita found she could shrink the number’s burden but not its count—fourteen remained fourteen, but fourteen became a number a person could hold without buckling, the way a small stone in a pocket is different from the same stone tied around the neck.
The dial went all the way to 1%, and Pacita, being an engineer and therefore constitutionally suspicious of any system that worked too well, began to wonder what the lens did to things it was not asked to touch.
She noticed, on the ninth week, that her own voice had quieted, as though some committee inside her had reviewed her need to speak and approved a twenty percent reduction with no further explanation given. She noticed her appetite had filed a similar request and that she had, without deciding to, started saying yes to smaller portions of everything: smaller plans, smaller hopes, a smaller version of the man she had once thought she might marry, reduced now to a smaller ache that fit conveniently behind her sternum and bothered no one.
She understood, then, that the machine had been running on her the entire time. She had built a device to make burdens lighter and it had decided, on its own diminishing logic, that the easiest burden to lighten was the woman holding the lens.
She turned the dial backward, past 1%, into territory she had never calibrated and had assumed, with the confidence of someone who designed the dial herself, did not exist. The needle did not resist. There was more room going the other way than she had built for, an entire country past zero where the machine, when reversed, did not enlarge things back to their original size but produced something stranger—a more, an excess, a return with interest, as though the months of diminishment had been collecting somewhere and were now owed back to her all at once.
Her voice came back first, then too much of it, loud enough that Tita Bel, two houses down, came to ask if everything was all right. Pacita said it was, in a voice that filled the garage and the yard and the cone-marked line outside it, and for one full minute, before she found the dial’s true zero—the setting she had never thought to mark, the one that simply left a thing as it was—every uncollected debt in the barangay’s collective memory hung in the air at its actual, original, ungenerous size, and everyone standing in line felt, all at once, the specific vertigo of seeing exactly how much they had been carrying, with nothing yet subtracted, before Pacita’s hand found the right groove and the world settled back into the size a person can survive looking at directly.
She kept the machine after that, but she relabeled the dial. Where it had read 100% down to 1%, she wrote, in marker that has since faded to the color of weak tea, a single new instruction at the only setting she still trusted: enough. She did not sell the machine, did not patent it, did not let the line outside the garage grow back. She used it, when asked, on bills and grudges and the specific tiredness of widowers, dialed always to that one mark, enough, and she let her own voice stay at whatever size it had been before she ever thought to measure it, which she found, turning it over those nights in the garage that still smelled of 3-in-1 oil and a dead man’s cigarettes, had never actually needed shrinking in the first place—only the traffic had, and the traffic, ganoon talaga, was the one thing the lens could never touch.
Copyright 2026 by Avril Shakira Villar