The Woman Who Was a Dog

---

or: Why I Love Taxicab Theology

There’s this thing that happens when you get into a taxi—some kind of atmospheric pressure change, a shift in the fabric of reality—where suddenly you’re not just a passenger, you’re a priest in a confessional booth on wheels.¹

I don’t know what it is about me. Maybe I have one of those faces that says “you can tell me weird shit and I won’t judge,” which, fair, because I won’t. Or maybe it’s that I actually listen when drivers talk, which apparently counts as a radical act of human connection. Whatever it is, taxi drivers tell me things. Confess things. Share things that probably should stay buried but instead spill out somewhere between point A and my neighborhood.

This particular afternoon, I’m doing my usual logistical dance—explaining which village, which barangay, because apparently we named everything after the same five saints and now nobody knows where the fuck anything is.² I always give drivers the option to decline if it’s too far, because I’m not a monster, and also our security guards can indeed be assholes sometimes.

Halfway there, he asks for the exact name. I tell him. He goes, “Oh, thank God.” And here’s where my antenna goes up, because “thank God” in that tone of voice means there’s a story.

“Why?” I ask, because of course I ask. “What’s wrong?”

So he tells me.

There’s this other village. Same barangay, same general area, probably a few kilometers away. I’ve never been there—well, except I have seen it on the news because one of the residents got assassinated by a sniper in his own front yard,³ which is its own flavor of surrealism we’re not getting into right now.

This village—middle-class, private security, the whole performance of safety that we buy into because what else are you going to do, not have a guardhouse?—this is where our driver dropped off a passenger one night.

Just a regular fare. House to house. Done it a thousand times.

Driving back out, trying to find his way through the streets (because GPS is a liar and these subdivisions are designed by people who hate taxi drivers), he sees a woman on the other side of the road. She’s waving at him. Calling out. Needs a taxi.

He’s driving past her, so he does a U-turn to get to her side of the street.

Standard taxi choreography: see passenger, calculate, turn, collect.

He gets there.

The woman is gone.

What he sees instead: a white dog.

Just. A white dog.

Where a woman had been standing. Waving. Calling out to him.

And that’s it. That’s the whole story.

The driver tells me he’s never going back to that village. Ever. If a passenger asks to go there, he’ll decline. If someone needs a pickup, sorry, not available. That place is now on his permanent geographic blacklist, right next to wherever it is people keep vomiting in the backseat.

Here’s the thing—and I mean the thing—there’s no resolution here. No moral. No “and then I learned that the supernatural teaches us about ourselves” bullshit.⁴

It’s just: a driver, a woman, a dog. Maybe.

A shape-shifting dog. Maybe.

Or a tired driver who saw something weird in the shadows and his brain, that beautiful pattern-recognition machine that kept our ancestors from being eaten by tigers, went “ASWANG” and created a narrative to match the fear.

Or maybe it was exactly what he said it was.

I don’t know. He doesn’t know. The white dog, if it was a dog, if it was ever a woman, presumably knows but isn’t telling.

This is what I love about taxicab theology. These little moments of the inexplicable delivered matter-of-factly, sandwiched between complaints about traffic schemes and observations about rising gas prices.⁵

No dramatic music. No special effects. Just: “Yeah, so I saw a woman turn into a dog, anyway, you want me to take the expressway or just suffer through the main road?”

The universe operates on multiple frequencies simultaneously, and sometimes, in the back of a taxi that smells faintly of sampaguita air freshener and existential dread, you get to hear one of the weird ones.

What do you do with a story like that?

You can’t fact-check it. You can’t investigate. There’s no follow-up article titled “Local Woman Actually Dog, Film at 11.” You can’t even really ask questions without sounding like you’re doubting him, and I wasn’t going to be that passenger, the one who turns a man’s genuine fear into a cross-examination.

So I did what you do: I said “Hala! Mao ba,” which is Filipino for “I acknowledge the weight of what you just told me and also I have no idea what to do with this information.”

He nodded. We drove in comfortable silence. The kind of silence that happens when you’ve both acknowledged that reality has more floors than we usually visit.

I think about that driver sometimes. Wonder if he’s told other passengers. Wonder if that white dog is still there, waiting for someone else to U-turn. Wonder if the woman (if she was a woman) (if she was ever human) needed a ride somewhere specific, somewhere our geometry doesn’t reach.

Wonder if this is just one of thousands of small, weird moments happening every single night—tiny tears in the fabric where something else shows through, and we just… drive past it. Note it. Add it to our collection of things that don’t make sense but happened anyway.

The Philippines is full of these stories. Aunties who saw dwarves. Titos who heard voices. Security guards who refuse to patrol certain areas after midnight.⁶ White ladies on dark roads. Black ladies everywhere else. Mangkukulam who can kill you from three provinces away if you piss them off.

We live in a haunted geography, but we still need to get home.

So we get in taxis. We tell our stories. We leave offerings of “Manong, dito lang sa tabi” and exact change. We acknowledge that the world is stranger than our organizational systems can contain, and then we go about our lives anyway because the alternative is staying home forever, and rent doesn’t pay itself.

The driver dropped me off. I paid. I said thank you. I got out of the car. I did not turn into a dog.

But somewhere in this country, in a village I’ve never visited and now probably never will, there might be a white dog who used to be a woman. Or a woman who’s sometimes a dog. Or a dog who learned to wave like a woman because traffic has driven everyone, human and otherwise, slightly insane.

And taxi drivers, those priests of the night shift, those collectors of impossible stories, will keep driving. Will keep seeing things. Will keep telling passengers like me about the time reality glitched and they were there to witness it.

No resolution. No moral. Just the story.

Just the fact that it happened, or didn’t happen, or happened in a way that our language can’t quite capture but our grandmothers would understand immediately.

I love these stories precisely because they don’t resolve. Because they resist explanation. Because they exist in the space between “definitely real” and “definitely not,” which is where most of Filipino life actually happens anyway.

We’re a country of contradictions held together by sarcasm and resourcefulness. Of course our supernatural is also like this—frustratingly ambiguous, casually terrifying, utterly matter-of-fact.

Of course a taxi driver would see a woman turn into a dog and his main concern would be “I’m not going back there” rather than “I need to understand what happened.”

Understanding is overrated. Survival is the point.

So here’s my non-conclusion conclusion: sometimes people tell you things that can’t be verified, can’t be explained, can’t be neatly wrapped up in meaning. And your job—my job, our job as witnesses—is just to hold that. To say “I believe that you experienced this.” To not dismiss it, not explain it away, not turn someone’s genuine weirdness into a teaching moment about brain chemistry or cultural folklore.

Just: okay. That happened to you. Thank you for trusting me with it.

The universe is vast and strange. This country is a specific kind of vast and strange. And sometimes, in the liminal space of a taxi ride, you get a glimpse of just how much we don’t know, delivered in the same tone someone might use to complain about road construction.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

---

P.S. I wonder sometimes if the aswang, assuming it was an aswang, assuming aswang are real (and honestly, who am I to say they’re not), I wonder if they also get tired. If they’re also just trying to get home. If waving down a taxi seemed easier than whatever their usual transportation method is. If the driver doing a U-turn somehow broke the spell, disrupted the illusion, forced reality to reload and glitch out. Or maybe the dog was always a dog and needed a ride for dog reasons and was very disappointed when the taxi drove away.

P.P.S. The fact that I now mentally categorize neighborhoods by “normal middle-class” vs. “assassinated by sniper” vs. “shape-shifting dog sightings” says something about living here, but I’m not sure what.

P.P.P.S. I should probably get a car. But then I’d miss all these stories. And honestly? The stories are worth the occasional driver who doesn’t know where they’re going and refuses to use navigation apps.

Worth it for the theology. The taxicab confessionals. The casual magic.

Worth it for moments like this, where someone tells you something impossible and you get to say: yeah. Okay. I believe you.

Even if I don’t understand.

Especially because I don’t understand.