GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2024/25

VALENTINA GINDRI

‘Sound of the Shell’

THE DAY I REALISED UNDERSTANDING GERMAN WAS UNBEARABLE was the same day I threw up sea for the first time. As words unveiled themselves and their aura of mystery vanished, I panicked.

During my second German class at the Goethe Institut São Paulo, nausea settled deep in my stomach.

‘Guten Tag,’ I replied to the teacher, and the malaise languidly spread through my body.

‘Wie geht’s dir?’ Processing those meanings was an attack on any faith that might exist in me. This was a huge problem, as I had been accepted into an architecture PhD program in Munich.

While I walked Lisboa street towards Oscar Freire metro stations, I imagined the sketch I had submitted to TU Munich materialising. The brutalist monolithic forms of my portfolio’s cultural centre, its raw concrete wallsand exposed beams. I felt a twinge in my abdomen as my cement-made reality crushed.

A nanny I had when I was little, Karina, taught me to count and pray in German. I could do the counting: eins, zwei, drei, vier… but I never really learned the Our Father or Hail Mary.

I could see her slowly dripping wet sand over a castle, building towers. Her thick fingers let each drop trickle down her fingertips. Her heavy hand against the sun, and next to hers, my little immaculate hand.

When I got home, the sickness took hold of me as a striding undertow swell that broke upon itself,overflowing, reaching the pharynx. I ran to the bathroom and a gush of thick water filled the toilet. Somewhat cloudy, a slight taste of fish, the strength of salt. 

I couldn’t picture her arrival, I remembered her always being there. Karina was from Agudo, a small German settlers’ rural town in the north of Brazil’s southern state. Her cousin had worked as a cook for my aunt and talked to Karina’s father about my family.

I was three or four at the time and my mother was pregnant with my brother, Davi. Karina’s father was pleased that she would earn a salary; providing her with a home, food, and school materials would have been good enough for him, as he had five other children to look after.

At the age of thirteen, Karina, with green eyes and a strong tanned body, ended up in the tiny bedroom next to the laundry room in our home in Livramento, on the west border and 750 kilometres away from Agudo. Her breasts were just starting to show and she wore thin, small, childish bras that made perfect funny goggles for my dolls.

She was strict about making me shower, sometimes she would drag me by the arm leaving red marks for a few days. She used to choose the exact moment Dragon Ball was on TV to bathe me. I felt she did it on purpose, but it was just the slot she had before my mother arrived home from work. The whole family marvelled at the intricate braids Karina made on my hair and I savoured being praised.

She went to the public school downtown, while my brother Davi and I went to the private school close to the river. Our room had an extra bed between mine and Davi’s, where she slept most nights. When there was a storm, we would change beds, since mine was next to the window, where I was more vulnerable to lightning.

‘God is cleaning up,’ she would say. ‘A good cleaning. Sweeping the dust out of the stars, sponging every corner, scrubbing the clouds with soap and water. The angels are mopping the moon with bleach and tomorrow morning the sky will be neat.’

So I slept peacefully, almost smelling the odour of washing powder and knowing that when I woke up the sky would be showered, dry, and wrapped in a fluffy towel.

The downside of having Karina in the bedroom was that sometimes I was too tired and just wanted to lie down and drift off, but she would make me pray. The transcendental words mixed with the numbness and warmth of falling asleep, in a sense of delirium, one thing cradled the other. Thy Kingdom Come. Thy Womb. Forgive. Erlöse uns von dem Bösen. To rule. To guide. Tägliches Brot. Amen.

Once, Karina accidentally cut me while trimming my nails. I already dreaded having my nails trimmed and tried to conceal them when they got long. When I had to give in to the scissors, I followed the movements ofthe curved blade attentively, petrified, as if seeing precisely could prevent mistakes.

But the blood ran down my thumb before I could do anything, before I even felt the pain: it reached the exact centre of my palm, where it stopped in a condensed drop. Later on, Karina locked herself in the bathroom and didn’t want to leave.

After dwelling with my pride, I went after her. I knocked on the door and said that everything was fine, that I had already forgiven her. But she stayed there until my mum came home from work and talked to her.

When they left, mum said it was ‘girl problems’ and took Karina to buy clothes. I knew damn well it was menstruation, the blood that came out of grown-up women’s vaginas every month. I thought of the Virgin Mary figurine Karina kept by her bedside, and how one of her legs was positioned slightly forward, creating atriangular shape in her robes that divided the upper and lower parts of her body. I imagined that ceramic cloth soaked with the red stain of menstruation. 

She came back from shopping with a beautiful purple dress, which she wore at her fourteenth birthday party. My mum took lots of pictures of Karina in front of the cake and kept telling her to lift her shoulders, to stop hunching over.

‘That winged eyeliner makes her look like a slut,’ I heard my aunt whispering.

*

As a child I had one main playmate, Renata. Besides being in the same class at school, her parents were friends with my parents, so we often met when the adults had their dinner parties and events.

Renata liked to do things as I did. If I picked handball for P.E., she picked it too, if I mentioned assembling the doll’s house was more fun than actually playing with the dolls, she stated this was her favourite part too. If Idraw an astronaut, she’d also want to draw one. If I chose the colour dark purple, she would take fair purple. My drawing ability was the thing she most wished she had.

Me, in turn, the only thing I wanted to do like her — but was unable to — was to be so uninhibited in front of the adults. For her, there seemed to be no boundaries between the social world at school and that of grown-ups; she was extroverted in the same way and spoke with the same ease.

Most of the time, I enjoyed being her inspiration, but there were moments when I almost felt guilty for drawing well, for her desperate attempts to draw like me.

In the summer of 2001, Renata’s parents resolved to divorce, so my mother offered to bring her with us on our summer vacation. ‘They are at each other’s throats filing the papers…’ she said.

When we travelled to the beaches of Santa Catarina, Karina would go back to Agudo to spend time with her family. But with another child to care for, and this child being Renata, my parents decided to bring Karina along as well. It was the first time she saw the sea.

When we arrived at the beach house, an airy space with blue windows and a front porch, Karina caught Renata peeling the paint off the bedroom wall. She scolded her and pulled her away by the wrist.

‘Your maid is so annoying, mine would never talk to me like that,’ Renata said, after escaping from Karina.

My mother had told me never to call Karina a maid. She always called her ‘the girl who works at home’. But I didn’t really understand the difference.

Renata liked to talk about nail polish and bikinis, and to role-play as a ‘style advisor’ from the 5pm show ‘Skinny Fabs’. When I was with her, I would make a mental effort to see myself from the outside. I pictured my body emerging from the water and walking toward the towel on the sand, leaning back on my hands with my elbows straight, long, tanned legs crossed, and my wet hair falling gently over my shoulder.

‘We are mermaids’, she would tell me, and I would exhaustively concentrate on being a mermaid.

A hippie at the beach made us colourful hair wraps one morning. Mine had blue fish-shaped pebbles andRenata’s just yellow beads. She spent the rest of the day staring at my hair and I spent the rest of the day trying to hide the wrap under my curls.

Sometimes Renata would drag me away from the others so that it was just the two of us. She picked on Karina and my brother, rolling her eyes when they talked and suggesting games that involved hiding from them. She dismissed my brother as a brat, too young and too boyish to play with us.

I assumed that was why Karina started asking my mum to go by herself to the ice cream parlour in the evenings, after we kids had all showered and our beach paraphernalia had been cleaned.

Renata would ask me too many questions. Where did my mum buy my flip-flops? Was I with her? Did my mum also get a pair for herself at the same place? Why didn’t she? Why had I chosen yellow? Did my mum often take me shopping with her? Had I ever had sandals with ankle straps like the ones she was wearing? Which ones did I prefer? What colour of flip-flops would I buy when my feet grew? Things I never stopped to think about and couldn’t understand why she wanted to know.

But at night my classmate danced and performed fashion shows, joyful, surprisingly light, and I would return to merely feeling pleased about having her there.

Until the night that didn’t end with music, little secrets and top-model strolls. We were playing on the carpetsurrounded by a tent made of bedsheets, Renata seated cross-legged in front of me. Karina asked us to organise the mess, brush our teeth and get into bed, but we were not obeying her yet. Though we were about todo so, we were enjoying the last minute of games, drunk from the tiredness of a long day under the sun. Then Renata fell.

Her legs and arms jerked from side to side and her mouth foamed. Her eyes rolled back and for a moment only the white sclera could be seen. It looked like her brain had been turned off and a desperate Pikachu struggled inside her body. I screamed and Davi let his Buzz Lightyear toy fall to the floor while she kicked and shook.

After a minute or so, she closed her eyes and opened them slowly. ‘Was I asleep?’ she asked.

I felt the adrenaline of witnessing something visceral.

Karina turned to me: she consulted me, she looked at me as an equal. I noticed that her face was as smooth as a ripe tomato, so plump and fresh that she was perhaps closer to me than to the adults. I held her gaze for a few seconds and then ran to my parents’ room.

I stopped by the door. I could hear my father’s heavy breathing interspersed with snoring. If I went to them, they would solve everything. My mum would talk loudly and do something simple, and before I even finished telling her, she would conclude that everything was fine, as it always was, and that any other hesitation, fear, or perception was absurd.

I knew this time they couldn’t make what had happened become tiny. I anticipated the embarrassment I normally felt whenever I had something important to say and my father was around.

Besides, Karina’s look made me feel my opinion mattered. So I went back to the room and said I wasn’t going to wake mum and dad up, that Renata looked fine now. I gave her chocolate and a glass of water.

Karina got back on her feet. She joined the four of us in a circle, hand in hand, to pray. ‘Unser Vater im Himmel... Do not let us fall into temptation, but deliver us from evil’. Her words loaded with anger and will, more fervent than ever.

After we turned off the lights, I heard Karina moving. She climbed down her bunk bed and came over to my bed.

‘I think we should sleep together tonight,’ she said.

I asked what had happened to Renata, almost wishing Karina would look at me that way again, as if I were to decide. But she whispered:

‘The devil.’

She held my hand with the same shower-dragging strength and left the bedside light on. When she turned to the side, her pyjama blouse became loose in the front and I noticed she had two purple marks on her chest, almostreaching her breasts. The skin had pink dots and violet stains; at some points it was practically black.

I spent the night tossing and turning, with the image of the Powerpuff Girls’ devil in my head along withRenata’s white eyes. My friend’s restlessness and the cartoon devil’s pointed ears and chin, his goatee, and his low seductive voice, mixture of man and woman.

When there was sunlight, rays of normality fell upon the world. The image of the devil dissipated, and although I had been sure something profound had happened, I didn’t exactly believe in invisible forces anymore. I got annoyed with Karina for sneakily making signs of the cross and filling our heads with nonsense of the devil, for leaving room for fear.

But when it got dark, I encountered doubt. My daytime truth seemed full of cracks and the realm of hell, spirits, voices in the silence, and absolute evil — that could harm you suddenly and no matter what — came to life.

I felt relieved that Karina kept coming to sleep with me. I lay as still as possible, focusing on the feeling ofdominance over my own body, as if with enough effort, I could prevent a fit.

I looked at the purple mark on her breast and felt that a delicate object, a crystal ship inside an impossible bottle, had crumbled inside me.

On the morning of our return, I woke up before dawn, and Karina was not in the room. The shutters made a tinkly noise and the window was ajar. I got up and went to the living room.

Quietness and penumbra covered the contours of the holiday house and I seized the details of a decoration I would probably never see again. The bowl with crystal balls, the sailor’s knots framed on the wall, the plastic orange flowers. Karina was not there either. I thought about calling her name, but I couldn’t ruin thatenvironment with sound. Things felt dreamy, so I went back to sleep. For the first time ever, her smell in my blankets made me somewhat unsettled.

When I woke up again, she was hurrying me to go have breakfast. The day before, she had filled two empty pickle jars, one with sand and seaweed and the other with seawater. 

It was an endless journey home, descending the green, exuberant Mata Atlântica hills and following packed roads with aggressive traffic. Then, as the volume of cars thinned out, entering the monotonous, flat landscape of the Pampa, where static fields of pasture stretched as far as the eye could reach, dotted here and there with crops, cows, sheep, and twisted, semi-arid bushes.

In the first kilometres, a lorry in front of us halted abruptly. Dad slammed on the brakes and we lurchedforward with a jolt. The tires screeched against the asphalt followed by the sound of glass breaking. We pulled over, got out and opened the boot: the seawater jar was intact, but the one with sand had shattered.

Mum and dad began picking up the shards and throwing them into a garbage bag, pulling out the luggage, and sweeping away the sand. I wanted to help them, but mum yelled at me.

‘You’re gonna cut yourself, stay back. For God’s sake, the suitcases are filthy!’

I stepped back and watched. Karina was by my side staring perplexed at the boot. When Mum flung a wad of seaweed onto the road, Karina snapped out of her trance, squatted, and picked up the seaweed.

‘No, don’t touch that, it’s disgusting, leave it there!’ Mum exclaimed.

Karina helped clean up, her eyes red and glistening. If I couldn’t mend the broken pickle jar, preserve the things Karina had collected, or stop her from crying and make her happy again, I wasn’t going to try to console her. One step before making a difference — saving someone — lay total lethargy. There was no middle ground, theonly alternative to fixing all that was wrong was to do absolutely nothing. So I stood still and watched the tiny sand grains scatter in the air.

‘Can we stop at the gas station to buy bouncy balls at the vending machine?’ my brother asked from inside the car, where he and Renata had stayed eating snacks.

‘Yeah, we have to fill the tank anyway.’

Back in the car, Karina placed the surviving jar filled with seawater between her legs, a safer spot than the boot. She bent down and took a small shell from her sock. She held it tight in her hands until Livramento.

It was late in the night when we arrived home and the waning moon was a yarn of silver silk. The adults unloaded the car and Renata and I ran to my room to play.

‘Do you have the star-shaped keychain too?’ Renata asked me, taking the trinkets we had bought at the gas station out of her bag.

‘No, I got the rabbit, the fish, and the leaf.’

We sat on my bed and I could smell the blankets. I craved sleeping alone in that familiar scent after such a long time.

‘I’ll give one to my mum, one to my dad and the other one is for me. And you?’ she asked me. 

‘I’ll give the leaf to my mom, the fish to my father, and the rabbit to my friend from tennis class… Or maybe to Karina.’

Renata said that I couldn’t give the rabbit to that girl from tennis, that she was a weirdo, and that I had to tell her that I didn’t want to be her friend anymore, that she wasn’t part of our group. Let alone to Karina.

I said that I also told the girl from tennis my secrets and that she was teaching me how to write since she was one year ahead. Renata snatched the keychains out of my hand.

‘And the rabbit’s eyes match Karina’s, the green…’ I said. I grabbed the keychains back.

She took them from me once more. I got worried that the incident would repeat, that her brain would turn off and her body become possessed, her eyes absent.

But then Renata took the sharp star-shaped keychain and scratched my face with it, drawing it all the way from my eyebrow to my mouth. If I hadn’t closed my eyes in time, the pointy dirty metal could have pierced my eyeballs.

In the mirror above the dresser on the far side, I saw the giant scratch fill with blood. Renata started to weep. My face burned and throbbed. I took in the space around me, and my gaze settled on Karina’s sea jar sitting next to the middle bed, the first thing she had brought up from the car.

Renata kept saying she was sorry and begged me not to tell her mother. I felt compassion for her, she was already tormented by the shaking thing Karina insisted on calling ‘the devil’. The feeling of a fractured world hit me. I felt an air balloon in my stomach, starving for agency.

I took the jar of seawater and threw it onto the floor. The glass broke into a thousand pieces, and the water spread in a languid way, forming a ghostly stain on the wooden planks.

*

From a certain age, happiness started feeling like only the memory of happiness, not the feeling itself.

I gave up going to the PhD in Munich. The unrevealed content that inhabited the cadence of that language needed to be forever contained in Karina’s prayers, murmured at bedtime. Denn dein ist das Reich und die Kraft und die Herrlichkeit in Ewigkeit.

I just didn’t send my documents to the Univerty’s portal, ignored academic registry e-mails and didn’t buy my plane tickets.

I kept vomiting seawater and it imploded my daily routine. I could be at the office, at a meeting, visiting aconstruction site, at lunch or watching a film at home, and I would have to run to the bathroom. First, the rumble in my stomach and the sea-air burps, followed by a steadily advancing nausea until the breaking waves provided some relief. Before the crash of the surf, I’d lose my balance, my body swelled; I longed for firm ground.

There was also the salt issue. My throat and mouth got so dry that they started burning. Cuts from abrasion appeared on my gums. I tried gargling with propolis, hydrogen peroxide, anti-inflammatories, mallow plant, and ginger tea; these sometimes softened the dryness, but my gums still scratched and throbbed.

I felt like a faded version of my real self. There’s something to a chronic condition that makes it excruciating once one doesn’t see a way out. Three months of vomiting felt like a lifetime of sickness.

But the vomiting also came as a chance to leave my boyfriend. I had been teetering on the edge, the idea almost consolidated, but I lacked the courage. The sickness became my scapegoat. I told him the physical toll was too much to maintain a relationship, and I needed some time alone.

My job at the architecture firm reached a lukewarm point. We were a medium-sized office that usuallyapplied for public bids or designed commercial buildings and condo houses. But the company got stuck for months in dull renovations and unremarkable consultancy work. Even though I had few demands, I struggledto keep up. The lines and numbers in Archicad seemed meaningless, and the attention I was able to devote them was limited. I scrolled through my phone, waiting for the instant the ocean inside me would force me to run to the toilet.

Sometimes things appeared in the water: seaweed, tiny blocks of petrified sand, porous pieces. I couldn’t stop thinking how other people had it easy without vomiting sea.

I tried to look Karina up on Facebook, but I didn’t remember her last name.

I called my mother to tell her that my departure in September, which was only three weeks away, was not happening.

‘Do you think you are going to take a thick winter jacket from here or buy one there?’

‘I don’t know. Buy it there, I guess.’

‘You should buy it there. It’s a winter country, they will have more options. Have you started packing yet?’

‘No.’

I summoned the words in my mind but I just couldn’t make them come out. So I let her talk and tell me about minor details of her daily activities, like her Pilates class having been cancelled that day or noting how sweet the mandarins in the garden had turned out that season.

‘You know, out of the blue I was thinking about that nanny I had when I was little,’ I said, just before hanging up.

‘Joana?’

‘No. Karina. What was her last name?’

‘Oh, that one. Yeah, Joana took more care of your brother, you were older when she arrived. Funny you ask me this. I think I saw her in the supermarket the other day.’

‘Karina? I thought she had gone back to her family back then. To her hometown.’

‘Well, no idea. I almost didn’t recognise her, she is much thinner…’

‘What was her last name again? 

‘It was something with “H”, Hocher, Hachmurer. It was weird, difficult to pronounce.’

I googled German surnames starting with HO and found a list at globalsurnames.com.

I tried them out on Facebook: Karina Hoffer, Holler, Hoc. Under ‘Karina Hochmuller’ I got her.

She could be seen crouched next to a row of hydrangeas, smiling. The same hair, the same natural bronze tone of her skin, a striped blouse. Her face was more stern and slightly hollowed in contrast to my memory.

She was tagged in motivational messages by an old lady called Elaine Silva. They were written in kitschy, tacky typography against pictures of sunsets or roses. We had one friend in common, an old school teacher of mine.

Her profile listed a previous work experience of two years in a shoe shop, and years of her current position: housekeeper. It also listed that she was engaged, but it didn’t show to whom. I wondered if she worked for another family with kids. If she braided and showered them, if she made them pray.

After I told my parents I gave up on the master’s degree, I avoided visiting them in Livramento. But a longweekend came and my mother begged me to go. My father was about to have surgery for kidney stones, mybrother would also be there and they had just installed the new pizza stone oven in the garden. And how long had it been since mom last hugged me? So I went.

I sent Karina a friendship request and a text: ‘Hi, how are you doing? Do you remember me?’ I flinched from awkwardness pronouncing those words in my mind.

She answered me a couple of hours later. Of course she remembered me. What an amazing surprise hearing from me. She asked if I happened to be in Livramento on the weekend, and invited me and my mother to her baby shower on Sunday afternoon.

My mother seemed a bit confused, but I was so emphatic I was going no matter what that she said, ‘Yeah, why not?’

‘Do you think it’s her first baby?’, she asked me and went on not waiting for my answer. ‘I bet not. They start early. Well, but she was a solid girl, after all.’

She bought six big packs of diapers from the best brand, Gold Premium Care, to take as a present. The packages boasted the high absorbency, ultra-soft, hypoallergenic materials, and the stretchy side wings that prevented leaks.

The event was a small celebration with iced tea and finger food in the garage of her boyfriend’s familyhome. He was a motorcycle courier and they lived with his parents. My mother and I were seated just the twoof us at a table. At times, other guests peeked over at us, and when someone approached to offer us tea, itwas always in an apologetic tone, as if they needed to redeem themselves for everything being so humble.

After a while, Karina came over. She asked me about life and I told her things that seemed like a list, dates and places, but not my real life. She placed her hand on my shoulder.

‘You know, Marina is gonna have a second name as well.’

Her fingers were thinner but still strong. Her green eyes looked more alert.

‘Oh, really?’ I glanced at the pink paper letters forming Marina on the snacks table.

‘Marina Luísa. Luísa with an ‘S’, like yours.’

In my head, it hadn’t been a lie, but an almost-truth. I had pictured the blood running from my finger and reaching my palm when she trimmed my nails. That scarlet bead dominated my mind when I went downstairs and showed my mum my bleeding face, scratched from eyebrow to mouth, and said Karina’s name.

‘Let’s take a picture together,’ my mum suggested.

Karina led us to the decorated table, with a ‘cake’ of diapers in the centre, surrounded by brigadeiro sweets. We placed ourselves behind the table, our backs touching the arch of pink balloons adorning the backdrop. Shestood in the middle and my mother and I put our arms around her shoulders, smiling.

I remembered her sobbing in our living room, her shoulders shuddering so abruptly they almost touched her ears. She could barely utter her single sentence, ‘Dad, Dad is going to be furious.’ Crying too much to defend herself, Karina packed her things into a big duffel and what didn’t fit into supermarket plastic bags. My father then drove her to the bus terminal.

The camera flashed and I stared at her bulging belly that sheltered Marina Luísa. The house was made of cheap wood and the carless garage was dim. With the needs of a child, Karina would probably never see the sea again, it was too far, too expensive.

Karina took my hand and my mother’s hand and placed them onto her belly. ‘Say cheese,’ Karina’s mother-in-law exclaimed.

She lived in her neighbourhood, in the town that, with little chance of being left behind, grew larger. For her, Livramento was big and Porto Alegre was already an extremely distant point. Everything beyond was ‘outside’, an amorphous mass.

I ran to the toilet to vomit. On my way back, I noticed a slightly open bedroom door. Karina and her boyfriend’s room was tiny and packed. Beauty products, notebooks, pens, and different sorts of objects werekept inside paper boxes. The walls were covered with small stickers and posters of cars and motorcycles. A magnet board showed photos of the couple, the boyfriend always hugging her from behind, resting his arms on her waist.

My eyes quickly scanned the room and rested on the bedside table, where next to a rosary and a nasal spray lay a huge, majestic conch. My parents had brought it from their honeymoon in Cancun. It was covered in brown smoky flecks, with a screw-shaped end. I knew its exact form and pattern; it had always sat in a straw basket by their bathtub, along with bubble bath bottles, creams, and other smaller seashells. I put it to my ear. A deep, primordial, distant sound.

I used to think that those empty shells spent so much time under the sea — like ancient fossils — that they ended up memorising the sound of the ocean. Due to the eternity they endured. Later, when I learned they were part of molluscs’ bodies and, therefore, it didn’t necessarily mean they were extremely old, I adapted my theory to the idea of sea sound waves entering the conch by chance and being stuck there. I was already an adult when my brother told me that what was heard was a simple echo that had nothing to do with the sea.

That theft was maybe Karina’s little revenge. I thought about my friend Renata. As she grew up, she started having more and more epileptic fits; they became strong and uncontrollable, to the point of her even losing theenergy to envy. The last time I saw her, she was apathetic, her stare didn’t scrutinise my clothes, my hair, or myexpression. There was no eagerness to ask me anything or to cling to my words like a starving cub.

‘Those Carbamazepine pills are starting to feel like mere Gummy Bears,’ she said.

I pressed the conch harder to my ear, and that sound blocked all others, it reached deep inside me with its unfixable longing. I hid the conch under my shirt and put it inside my handbag when I got back to our table at the tea party.

That night I vomited so much I thought I was emptying my whole self. I was struck by the thought that I needed to fill that conch with something important and return it to Karina. But I could only think of money.

I stuffed many notes inside it. Two reais, ten reais, a hundred reais, twenty reais, fifty reais. Jaguars, turtles, golden lion tamarins, macaws, fish, fish, and fish. The result was vulgar and I took all the notes out.

I got up at dawn and decided I was going to go to Karina’s house. I would hold her hands tightly and just give her back the conch. The streets were still empty and as I walked the surroundings grew eerie. The mass of electrical wires hanging precariously overhead got thicker, stray dogs appeared rummaging through litter, and the potholed asphalt exhaled a muddy stench. I quickened my pace, regretting not having taken the car; I was not sure how dangerous the neighbourhoods might be.

I felt the conch’s weight in the pocket of my sweater and gently touched its contours. A sudden dizziness clouded my head and I leaned on a Jacarandá. My ears echoed a continuous melancholic tone. The first spurt burst open my mouth like floodgates. Then something hurt my throat, and I feared it was a jellyfish or an urchin. Maybe a crystal splinter.

But when I threw up again, a delicate paper boat gracefully floated out on the water and docked on the pavement. I picked it up: well-assembled, a bit creased and shabby, smeared by translucent goop.

I opened its folds with the certainty that there was something written inside. But the grooved square paper was completely blank. I shook it in the air to dry it and the morning breeze swept it out of my hand, carrying the swinging white figure until it disappeared from my view.