≈ 40–50 min read
Introduction
A few years ago, I wrote an article on this site about hybrid, electric, and even autonomous cars as a possible cure for Belo Horizonte’s terrible and ill-mannered drivers.
Then I took it down.
I thought it was shit.
The idea, however, was simple.
If decades of driver education had failed to teach Belo Horizonte drivers advanced concepts such as using a turn signal, yielding the right of way, not blocking intersections, or accepting that occasionally another human being also needs to get somewhere, perhaps technology could solve the problem.
Sensors, cameras, radar, software, driver assistance.
Maybe even self-driving cars.
At some point, I actually came to believe we could build machines intelligent enough to protect us from the drivers themselves.
It was an optimistic hypothesis.
The story below is, among other things, about the day that hypothesis aged badly.
Very badly.
A note to the reader: This is a science-fiction story with acid humor, adult language, and a deliberately imperfect narrator. Sexism, eroticism, profanity, cigarettes, cachaça, weapons, and provocative opinions are part of the characterization; they are not recommendations for conduct. The characters, dialogue, situations, and events are fictional. Any resemblance to real people, companies, institutions, or events is coincidental or results from the use of generic references to reality. This text should not be interpreted as a factual report, accusation, or testimony.
Naturally.
Fuck Your Dreams: The Day BH and the Earth Stood Still
It was May.
The calendar stated that with absolute confidence.
The thermometer did not.
Belo Horizonte was going through one of those heat waves that made it seem as if someone had opened the gates of hell and forgotten to close them. Before eight in the morning it was already over thirty-five degrees Celsius, and the forecast said it would pass forty.
Summer temperatures in the middle of May.
My pickup had no air conditioning.
Never had.
I drove with the windows down, one arm resting on the sill and a cigarette burning between my fingers, democratically sharing the cab with heat, smoke, dust, and noise.
Back then I still lived near Avenida Prudente de Morais.
My plan to abandon Belo Horizonte, move to the mountains, and raise chickens was fairly advanced, but not yet complete.
For the time being, I was still sleeping in the city.
Sleeping is a figure of speech.
I did not need an alarm clock.
Living near a private school provides that service free of charge.
Every day, shortly before seven in the morning, parents who had left home late explained to the rest of the citizenry, through the medium of car horns, that their tardiness constituted a public emergency.
At school pickup time, things reached an almost religious intensity.
A horn was no longer a warning.
It was a legal argument.
A political demonstration.
A request for passage.
A threat.
Therapy.
And for some fathers and mothers, the horn seemed to function as an extension of the penis — biological in some, symbolic in others.
According to my personal statistics, which were entirely innocent of scientific methodology, Belo Horizonte had the worst and rudest drivers in Brazil — and several serious contenders for the world title.
Using a turn signal was weakness.
Letting someone merge, submission.
Leaving space between you and the car ahead, a formal invitation for somebody else to occupy it.
Any fifty-centimeter gap between two vehicles instantly became territory available for annexation.
Late that morning, I was coming back from the pharmacy when I got stuck in traffic on Prudente, inside my old pickup.
Old.
Very old.
Rusty on the outside and immaculate where it actually mattered.
Diesel engine.
Mechanical injection pump.
No smart control unit, no screen the size of a television, no app demanding a password, and above all no server twelve thousand kilometers away deciding whether I was allowed to start the engine or feeding a Chinese database with every place I had ever driven.
The bumpers were steel.
This produced an extraordinary civilizing effect.
Even the bravest owner of a large, expensive vehicle still legally belonging to the bank would look at my rusted bodywork, then at his own showroom paint, and discover — through divine intervention or fear of the insurance deductible — that defensive driving was also an option.
I did not have to demand respect.
Depreciation did it for me.
I had even installed a small, deliberately offensive device in the exhaust, reserved for particularly arrogant drivers who deserved to receive my opinion on sustainability in the form of smoke — a thick black cloud, pedagogically useless but remarkably effective as the automotive equivalent of a raised middle finger.
It was not environmentally defensible.
It was not meant to be.
It was my private response to a generation that bought a two-ton hybrid SUV to save the planet and then drove six hundred meters to the gym.
The pickup was a single cab.
In the passenger seat sat Blackface, my Belgian Malinois.
He occupied enough space to turn any attempt at giving someone a ride into a diplomatic negotiation.
Blackface had no tax ID, bank account, app, password, premium subscription, personalized feed, or need for external validation.
Which meant that, on that particular morning, he was probably the best-prepared mammal on Avenida Prudente de Morais.
I was smoking and sweating when I heard the horn of the SUV stopped to my right.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
I looked.
Chinese.
Brand-new.
Plug-in hybrid.
Huge.
Immaculate.
Painted in one of those hideous 256 shades of concrete that marketing insists on calling colors.
The kind of car that announces prosperity to anyone who does not have access to the owner’s bank statement.
The Chinese had arrived in Brazil first as a novelty.
Then as a threat.
Finally as scenery.
Electric, hybrid, plug-in.
SUVs that looked like other SUVs, covered in screens, cameras, and assistants designed to convince the buyer that he was not merely purchasing an automobile.
He was buying the future. He was building a dream.
Brazilians, always willing to turn a depreciating asset into a public demonstration of financial success, had embraced the idea enthusiastically.
Two hundred thousand reais.
Down payment financed on credit.
Sixty monthly installments.
Maybe seventy-two.
An extraordinary investment that lost value while its owner slept, but parked in an apartment garage looked enough like wealth to irritate the neighbors.
At the wheel was a woman in her twenties.
Blonde.
Long hair, too light to be entirely natural and too well maintained to have survived that morning without professional intervention.
Pretty face.
Fine nose.
Light eyes.
A bust calibrated to the millimeter and the physical confidence of someone who had learned early that when she entered a room, the looks arrived before the introductions.
She wore a pink blouse.
The SUV was still hiding the rest of what I would later find interesting.
Pretty.
Very pretty.
And furious.
She lowered the window.
— Can’t you see people are trying to get through?
I looked ahead.
Dozens of motionless cars.
Then at the mirror.
More motionless cars.
— I can.
— Then move!
— Where?
She pointed ahead as if she had just invented north.
— Forward!
— Excellent plan. You just forgot to clear it with the dozens of cars ahead.
She hit the horn again.
— You’re holding everyone up!
— If I cease to exist, you gain three meters. Then you can find the next person to blame.
— Are you always like this?
— Sometimes I sleep.
She opened her mouth to answer.
The window went up by itself.
Stopped halfway.
Went down.
Went up again.
She hit the control.
Nothing.
Then a male voice began shouting something in Mandarin inside the SUV.
At maximum volume.
She froze.
— WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?
— Mandarin, I think.
— I KNOW IT’S CHINESE!
— Then we’re making progress.
She started stabbing the center screen with her index finger, the universal maintenance technique employed by people who believe electronics can be intimidated.
The system answered in Mandarin.
The mirrors folded in.
Opened again.
The headlights flashed.
The windshield wipers started working under a perfectly dry sky.
The seat moved forward a few centimeters.
She screamed.
For the first time that morning, something had appeared that was more annoying than she was.
It spoke Mandarin and came factory-installed.
— My app won’t connect!
— I can imagine the suffering.
— Do you understand this stuff?
— Enough not to buy a two-ton refrigerator connected to the internet.
— I paid more than two hundred thousand for this car!
— Then I’m sure it knows what it’s doing.
I had seen her before.
I’m bad with names.
Always have been.
But my memory for a pretty face, an impressive bust, and a memorable ass has always entertained eidetic ambitions.
Months earlier, while filling my diesel tank at the gas station on the corner, I had seen her for the first time.
Pink blouse.
Miniskirt.
High heels.
The combination did not seem especially appropriate for refueling a car, but at the time I had not yet learned that practical suitability did not rank highly among her selection criteria.
She was arguing with an attendant because she had tried to bring the fuel nozzle up to the charging port.
The car was a plug-in hybrid.
It had a fuel tank.
It had a charging socket.
It had a manual.
And she had a great ass.
She apparently did not use any of the four in a coordinated fashion.
After the attendant explained that the thing was a charging socket, she looked at him as if that information should have come with a tutorial, an influencer, and a discount code.
Now I was seeing her for the second time.
I still could not tell whether she had repeated the miniskirt and the heels.
The pretty face and the pink blouse — the same one, maybe — were enough.
While she fought with the screen, the car behind her began honking by itself.
Another popped its trunk and refused to close it.
Farther ahead, a vehicle locked its parking brake in the middle of the lane.
Another turned its wheels all the way to the left without moving an inch.
Headlights flashed.
Seats moved forward and back.
Wipers scraped across dry windshields.
In less than a minute, the entire avenue looked like a contemporary-art installation sponsored by an insurance company.
That was when we saw the smoke.
About eight cars ahead, it was coming from beneath an electric car stopped sideways across two lanes.
The driver was already outside, pacing back and forth, unable to decide whether to get farther away or try to save something.
The people around him did what our civilization had spent years training them to do in any emergency.
They took out their phones.
One started filming.
Then another.
A woman stepped back two paces, found a better angle, and raised her phone vertically.
Flames appeared beneath the car.
Small at first.
Then not.
The crowd backed away.
The cameras stayed.
A flame suddenly climbed through the floor.
Dry cracks came from the battery.
The crowd backed away a few more steps.
The cameras stayed.
Blackface went instantly alert.
I threw away the cigarette.
The blonde was no longer arguing with me.
Around us, the malfunctions had stopped being funny too.
One car refused to recognize its own key.
Another had locked the seat belt with the driver still trapped in the seat.
A third accelerated by itself into the car ahead.
Farther on, another electric car stopped sideways in the intersection and began smoking from underneath.
Someone shouted at the driver to get out.
The door would not open.
Then came the fists against the glass.
The smoke thickened.
People started backing away.
Two of them were still filming.
Then came a hard white flash, followed by an explosion that made half the street duck on instinct and the other half run without knowing exactly from what or toward where.
The fire reached the car beside it.
Another battery started cracking.
One horn got stuck in a continuous wail.
Alarms went off one after another. Windows rose and fell by themselves. Doors locked. Lights flashed. Synthetic voices repeated useless instructions while people kicked body panels, dragged children by the arms, and abandoned cars in the middle of the avenue.
It was no longer a traffic jam.
It was panic.
Cars were abandoned sideways across the street like instant scrap while their owners fled on foot, some still clutching their key fobs as if persistence, money, or available credit might persuade the vehicles to work again.
For years they had sold us autonomous cars.
That morning we discovered there was an important difference between autonomy and obedience to a server.
Prudente locked up completely.
Then something happened that was even more predictable than a software failure.
The drivers tried to solve the problem.
When the traffic lights began failing, Belo Horizonte did not collapse.
It merely stopped pretending it had rules.
One SUV climbed onto the sidewalk.
Another tried to follow, misjudged the space, and hit the car in front.
A motorcycle slipped between them through an opening whose existence Euclid himself would probably have disputed.
The rider gained a few meters, crossed the intersection without looking, and hit another car head-on.
For a moment, he ceased to be a motorcyclist and became a projectile.
Farther ahead, a driver entered an intersection without enough room to clear it. When he realized the shit he had done, he tried to reverse and drove into a store.
The man behind him decided to do the same thing.
He hit the first car from behind, spun, and took out half the sidewalk tables of a barbecue restaurant.
A third driver managed to block an ambulance.
In less than a minute, nobody was moving and almost everyone had personally contributed to making things worse.
The horns erupted.
The city had reached the terminal stage of Belo Horizonte traffic: sirens tearing through the air, a hysterical symphony of horns and people shouting at the same time — enough noise to make sure nobody heard anybody while everyone kept doing stupid shit with absolute conviction.
Ahead of me, one of the dead cars had left a narrow gap between its rear bumper and the curb.
On the road, no chance.
Across the sidewalk, maybe.
I put it in gear.
The car ahead tried to move forward at exactly the moment I needed the gap.
The driver looked at me.
Then at my steel bumper.
Then at his flawless paint.
I watched the calculation happen.
Remaining payments, insurance deductible, resale value.
He backed off.
For decades, Belo Horizonte had operated under the law of the stronger SUV.
That morning, natural selection had passed a small constitutional amendment.
I put one wheel up on the curb.
Then the other.
The pickup tilted.
Blackface stuck his head out the window and sniffed wind, smoke, and chaos as if this were the best outing of the week.
I scraped past a tree and drove a few more meters along the sidewalk.
That was when I heard the shout.
— HEY!
I looked in the mirror.
The blonde had managed to lower the SUV’s window.
The door was still locked.
The car was shouting in Mandarin while a thin stream of smoke escaped from underneath.
— WAIT!
I stopped a few meters ahead.
Not out of chivalry.
The dead traffic helped.
She pulled the handle.
Once.
Twice.
Nothing.
— OPEN, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!
The door did not open.
The driver’s window, however, came all the way down.
She looked at the opening.
Then at the smoke.
Made a decision.
She pushed her arms and torso through the window, braced her hands against the outside of the door, and started pulling herself out.
The opening was not particularly large.
The position was not particularly dignified either.
She twisted her hips, rested part of her abdomen on the window frame, and tried to find something to push against with her legs.
That was when I confirmed the rest of my memory.
It was not the same miniskirt from months earlier.
It was another one.
Just as short.
Short enough to turn that emergency maneuver into something considerably more interesting than any vehicle safety manual would recommend.
The heels were different too.
Pretty.
Expensive.
And completely useless for escaping a burning car.
The blonde pulled out one leg and, for several seconds, remained in that impossible position, half inside and half outside the SUV, while the skirt rode a few centimeters higher than she had probably planned for that morning.
I did not look away.
I have never had much talent for hypocrisy.
The heel struck the window pillar and caught.
— Shit!
She shook her foot.
Nothing.
Tried again.
This time it came free.
The second leg followed faster.
For a moment she was practically lying across the window frame, searching for balance, before sliding down the side of the SUV.
She landed badly on the asphalt.
Her ankle rolled far enough to worry me for half a second.
She swore, recovered her balance, and stood.
Everything apparently still where it belonged.
At least the blonde was consistent.
She did not necessarily repeat her clothes.
She repeated her decisions.
Considering the miniskirt, heels, window, and fire, it was a respectable performance.
Something on the dashboard was flashing red.
You did not need to know Mandarin to understand red.
I eased out the clutch.
— HEY!
I moved a little more than a meter.
— WAIT, GODDAMMIT!
I looked out the window.
— Take me with you!
— Where?
— Anywhere that isn’t here!
That was finally an argument.
— What about your car?
Another crack came from under the SUV.
— Fuck the car.
There.
She went back to the window, shoved half her body inside, and grabbed whatever she could reach.
Phone.
A huge handbag.
Two shopping bags.
Another crack.
The smoke thickened.
She looked at the shopping bags.
Then at my pickup.
Dropped both.
The handbag stayed clutched to her chest.
— No fucking way. It cost twenty-eight thousand.
— Then ask the bag if it knows how to drive.
The look I got would have dismantled a Gen Z boy before he found the right button on his phone.
A tongue of flame appeared beneath the SUV and ran along the floor before climbing the side.
She ran the few meters to the pickup.
I opened the passenger door.
— Get in.
Blackface occupied practically the entire seat.
— Floor.
He looked at me.
— Now.
He dropped, offended, into the passenger footwell.
The blonde got in handbag first, body second. One heel caught on the running board, she released another curse, and pulled the door shut.
The cab smelled of cigarettes, diesel, dog, and several decades of limited concern for aesthetics.
She stopped for a second, looked around, and made an expression difficult to classify somewhere between disgust, shock, and regret.
— My God.
She breathed through her mouth.
Behind her, the SUV was properly burning now.
Heat distorted the air and dry cracks came from the battery like small gunshots.
— My car…
I put it in first.
— Former car.
I stepped on it.
The pickup dropped off the sidewalk, hit the asphalt hard, and entered the gap between two stalled cars.
An SUV tried to close me off.
I did not stop.
He did.
Another driver honked.
I ignored him.
I scraped the bumper against a post and, as a bonus, inaugurated the bodywork of a brand-new Mercedes with a magnificent scratch.
None of it deserved my affection.
I accelerated.
In front of a pharmacy, three delivery motorcycles occupied the only open corridor between the sidewalk and a line of dead vehicles.
There was no room around them.
I went through.
One fell into another.
The third joined them.
The delivery riders came running out of the pharmacy after us, swearing and waving their arms as if I were also responsible for the price of gasoline, the ethanol mixed into it, and the end of civilization.
I was already too far away to attend the hearing.
A bang came from behind us.
The rearview mirror flashed for an instant.
The blonde ducked instinctively.
Blackface barked.
I did not look back.
Kept going.
For a few seconds she said nothing, still trying to catch her breath. Then she looked down at Blackface, squeezed between her feet.
— Your dog is huge.
— He knows.
— Does he bite?
— When he thinks it’s necessary.
She was breathing fast and still clutching the handbag as if it were civilization’s last liquid asset.
— My name is Nellie.
— Nellie?
She made a terrible face.
— Cornélia.
I looked at her.
— Cornélia?
— I hate it.
— My great-grandmother was named Cornélia.
She turned slowly toward me.
— See?
— What?
— It’s a great-grandmother name.
— She lived to ninety-seven.
— You’re making it worse.
— I was trying to sell longevity.
— That’s why it’s Nellie.
— Right, Cornélia.
— Call me that again and I’m getting out.
I looked at the chaos around us.
— Excellent timing for a threat.
She snorted.
— Nellie, then.
— And you?
— What?
— Your name.
— Doesn’t matter.
— Of course it matters.
— Not today.
— You’re unbearable.
By then it was no longer an opinion. It was a diagnosis.
I turned on the radio.
98 News was still broadcasting.
The first reports were confused.
Problems affecting certain electric vehicles.
Then hybrids.
Then several brands.
One reporter mentioned an authentication failure.
Another said cyberattack.
One expert urged caution.
Another mentioned a remote update.
Someone was talking about industrial sabotage.
Nobody knew.
Maybe it was an attack.
Maybe a defective update.
Maybe a digital certificate had expired.
Maybe someone had changed a single line of code and discovered too late that millions of cars depended on it.
In the twenty-first century, all of those possibilities could produce roughly the same number of dead people.
We got off Prudente any way we could, cut through São Bento between stalled cars and blocked streets, and started climbing toward the highway.
Sometimes on asphalt.
Sometimes on the sidewalk.
Once across a landscaped median where there was probably a municipal sign asking citizens to protect the vegetation.
At that point, urban botany had lost priority.
Every intersection presented a new problem.
Cars sideways.
Traffic lights out.
People trying to turn back.
People trying to push forward.
Motorcycles appearing where no physical space seemed to exist.
My pickup had an older technology.
Keep moving.
But reaching the highway did not mean leaving Belo Horizonte.
It took us hours to reach the BH Shopping interchange.
By the time we finally began making our way out, the afternoon was already well advanced.
98 News poured out place names.
São Paulo.
Rio.
Brasília.
Then Buenos Aires.
Miami.
Lisbon.
Madrid.
Paris.
The problem was no longer Brazilian.
Nor Chinese.
Nor, apparently, merely automotive.
Enough.
I switched to 98.
Without the News.
Grafitte was just starting.
Dudu and the others were still trying to make jokes while the world came apart outside.
— When the bogeyman goes to sleep, he checks under the bed to make sure Chuck Norris isn’t there.
I laughed.
Nellie turned toward me.
— You think that’s funny?
— Very.
Another one came.
— Chuck Norris has counted to infinity. Twice.
This time she smiled.
It was the first smile I had seen from her.
Beautiful.
Irritatingly beautiful.
Then Chuck Norris lost airtime to the end of the world.
The jokes stopped.
The radio began dumping reports that nobody seemed able to fully confirm.
Hospitals were running on generators.
Payments began to fail.
Trains stopped between stations.
Cell networks became intermittent.
Airports began closing.
Data centers were going offline.
Then came the fires.
Substations burning.
Transformers exploding.
Traffic jams blocking ambulances.
Lines forming outside gas stations with no fuel.
Supermarkets closing when payment systems went down.
People forcing the doors.
The first looting began as opportunism and turned into mobs stripping stores.
Shops were emptied in minutes.
Groups ran through the streets carrying food, electronics, alcohol, and anything else that fit in their hands.
The police showed up where they could.
Where they could not, everything else did.
Logistics stopped being delayed.
It started disappearing.
And when the airports began to close, the problem stopped being confined to the ground.
Reports came in of aircraft losing communication, vanishing from radar, and, in some cases, crashing.
Nobody yet knew whether it was the same failure.
By then, it hardly mattered.
It had become impossible to tell where malfunction ended and panic began.
Versions multiplied faster than facts.
Ten minutes later, one station said one of the crashes had never happened.
Another showed footage of a crash that, according to someone online, was five years old.
Videos circulated of airports on fire, audio from supposed pilots, messages attributed to military officers, and maps covered in red dots that nobody knew who had created.
A guy in a WhatsApp group swore China was behind it.
Another said Russia.
A third blamed the Americans.
Somebody else was certain it was a solar storm.
And, naturally, someone had already concluded it was aliens.
Governments denied.
Experts contradicted one another.
Influencers explained.
Which, at that point, may have been the most worrying sign of all.
Every new piece of information arrived with three debunks, four theories, and one video stripped of context.
Truth was now traveling more slowly than panic.
While the radio continued distributing competing versions of the apocalypse, the buildings began to thin out and Belo Horizonte finally fell behind us.
That was when I remembered Gordo.
I stopped at his gas station on the edge of the city, behind the old highway motels that had, at some point, been recycled into gourmet shopping centers.
Belo Horizonte had that talent: even decay eventually got indirect lighting and an artisanal menu.
Gordo’s station had looked run-down before the crisis and, for that very reason, the crisis had failed to make it much worse. It did not attract much attention either.
I had ordered a few supplies from him for a weekend in the mountains.
Beer.
And a good piece of flank steak, because two days in the mountains was no reason to eat badly.
Picanha, no. The idiot president’s promise that picanha would rain down upon the people was still waiting for favorable weather conditions.
Coffee.
A bag of bones for Blackface — the kind that, given the price of meat, people somewhere in Brazil were probably already fighting over at the butcher’s counter.
Diesel cans.
Batteries.
And a couple of boxes of 12-gauge shells.
Ordinary things for two days away from the city.
By coincidence, almost exactly the same kit needed to watch civilization collapse.
Gordo’s gas station was closed.
The pumps were dead.
His boteco next door was still open.
Some systems require satellites and two-factor authentication.
A Minas Gerais boteco requires only a door, plastic chairs, and someone willing to sell cachaça.
I parked sideways in front of the place and got out.
On an old television behind the counter, Gordo was watching footage of burning cars and streets in panic.
— I knew those electric pieces of shit were going to cause trouble.
— You didn’t know shit.
— Yesterday I just didn’t have proof yet.
— That’s still not the same as knowing.
The argument was not worth having.
I started loading the boxes into the bed.
Gordo filled a Lagoinha glass with cachaça to a level that turned a shot into a character decision.
I drank.
Nellie stayed in the cab with Blackface.
Two minutes later:
— GET HIM OFF ME! GET HIM OFF ME!
I went back.
Blackface had his nose practically glued to her leg.
Nellie was trying to retreat inside a cab with nowhere to retreat to.
— MAKE HIM STOP!
— Blackface.
He looked at me.
Then went back to her leg.
— Do you have a dog? — I asked.
— Yes.
— Female?
— Yes.
— In heat?
She froze.
— How do you know?
— I don’t. He does.
She looked at Blackface.
— Sophie was in heat.
— Sophie?
— My Pom.
— What the hell is a Pom?
She took a breath.
— A Pomeranian.
— Ah.
I looked at Blackface.
Then at her.
— Of course.
Sophie.
A Pomeranian.
Thousands of years of artificial selection had taken the wolf and reduced the project to a neurotic pedigree pom-pom.
Blackface came from a line shaped over generations for work, vigilance, and combat — dogs bred to obey fast, run faster, and take danger seriously.
Then Nellie stopped trying to push Blackface away.
— Sophie…
Her voice changed.
— She was at home.
I said nothing.
— My dog was at home.
And she started to cry.
Not over the car.
Not over the handbag.
Not over the followers.
Over Sophie.
It was the first time I saw Nellie forget Nellie.
I made no joke.
Neither did Gordo.
He stood behind the counter watching her for a few seconds. Then he picked up the bottle of cachaça, raised it toward me, and said:
— Take it.
That was all.
I understood Gordo’s wisdom perfectly.
Sometimes a friend helps with advice.
Other times he hands you the whole bottle and asks no questions.
I took the cachaça and held it out to Nellie.
— Here.
She wiped her face and looked at the bottle as if I had offered her aviation fuel.
— I don’t drink cachaça.
— Today you don’t drive an SUV either.
— Was that supposed to make sense?
— Not really. Drink.
She hesitated.
— How much?
— Enough to stop thinking for a few minutes. Not enough to start finding me likable.
Nellie took a sip.
Choked immediately.
Coughed.
Closed her eyes.
— This is horrible.
— Finally, something working exactly as intended.
She took another sip, much smaller.
This time she did not cough.
She handed the bottle back.
Changed her mind.
Took it again.
Had one more sip.
— Don’t comment.
— Didn’t need to.
She stared at the bottle for a few seconds.
— I think I’m a little better.
— Go back.
— No.
— My dog is there.
— I know.
— Then go back!
I pointed at Gordo’s television.
On the screen, a column of smoke was rising over Belo Horizonte.
— Going back now isn’t rescuing a dog. It’s adding two people and a Malinois to the missing-persons list.
— She has a name.
— I know.
— Then say it.
— Sophie.
She went quiet.
— If it were Blackface, you’d go back.
I thought before answering.
— I’d want to.
— Then go back for her.
— Wanting to doesn’t make the road safe. I don’t even know if we’d make it to your place. And if we did, we might not make it out again.
— That’s an excuse.
— No. That’s the limit.
She stared at me.
— About Sophie, right now, I can’t do a fucking thing without risking the three of us. About you, I still can.
She opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Turned away.
Cried in silence.
Blackface rested his head in her lap.
A few seconds later:
— He’s drooling on me.
— He is.
— Aren’t you going to do something?
— Do you really want me to interrupt this moment?
She looked at Blackface.
— Son of a bitch.
— Not sure if that was for me or him.
— You decide.
Then she bent down and ran a hand over his head.
Blackface accepted the affection without objection, pressed his muzzle against her, and stayed there.
There.
Decision made.
Blackface had adopted the blonde.
We finished loading the boxes.
I went back behind the wheel. Nellie stayed in the passenger seat; Blackface was in the footwell between her feet.
Other cars began stopping in front of the station.
People looking for fuel.
Information.
Anything.
Frightened people become unpredictable very quickly.
I opened the glove compartment.
Nellie went silent.
Inside was the old short-barreled .357 Magnum that had belonged to my grandfather.
Beside it, an open box of ammunition, two packs of cigarettes, and a box of tadalafil.
— My God.
— Which part?
— Let’s start with the gun.
— We can.
— Is that registered?
— The paperwork died with my grandfather.
She pointed at the tadalafil.
— And that?
— Prostate.
She read the label.
Then looked at me.
— Of course.
The way she suppressed the smile made it perfectly clear she believed absolutely none of it.
I looked in the rearview mirror.
A man was approaching the pickup bed.
He was not coming to ask for directions.
He stopped.
Looked around.
Went around the rear on the passenger side and disappeared from my field of view.
— There’s a guy messing with your stuff — Nellie said.
Before I could react, she opened the passenger door.
— Blackface!
The Malinois launched like a spring.
To reach the door, he had to go practically across her lap.
Nellie threw up her arms and swore as more than twenty kilos of dog crossed her dignity at high speed.
The man by the pickup bed heard the bark too late.
He turned.
Backed away.
Blackface reached him.
The side of the pickup blocked part of the scene.
I heard a scream.
The man reappeared, stumbling backward.
More people started moving toward us.
I had no interest in finding out where that would end.
I took the .357.
Raised it through the open window.
Fired one shot into the air.
The blast silenced the station for a fraction of a second.
It was enough.
— Blackface!
He came back.
The man ran.
Nellie pulled Blackface back into the footwell and slammed the door while I was already putting the truck in gear.
— You fired a gun!
— I did.
She waited.
— That’s it?
— Would you prefer a PowerPoint presentation?
She started laughing.
Nervous laughter.
Almost disbelief.
— Blackface nearly tore a piece off that guy.
— He didn’t. He just explained private property in a remarkably direct language.
She laughed harder.
— Is that supposed to make me feel better?
— A little.
— You’re sick.
— And you’re still here.
She looked at me.
— I am.
This time she did not add anything.
We went back to the road.
By the time I paid attention to the radio again, Grafitte had ended.
98 News was now operating as an emergency service.
Water.
Hospitals.
Blocked roads.
Fires.
Fuel.
They were asking people to avoid unnecessary travel, help elderly neighbors, and stay away from burning batteries.
They were asking people to remain calm.
That morning, Belo Horizonte had honked because everyone believed they were the center of the Universe.
That night, a voice on the radio was trying to convince them it might be useful to care about one another.
We climbed BR-040 after dark.
That was where I saw Belo Horizonte for the last time that night.
Greater BH was glowing in the distance.
Millions of lights maintaining the illusion that something was still normal.
One section went dark.
Then another.
Then almost everything.
There was no explosion.
No flash.
The city simply disappeared.
It was much more frightening.
Nellie put down her phone.
Blackface raised his head.
I slowed down.
Behind us, millions of people were discovering how much of civilization depended on a wall socket.
The engine kept running.
The radio kept talking.
That night, it was enough.
Farther on, around Jardim Canadá, gas stations were surrounded by lines stretching out onto the highway.
Some pumps had no power.
Others had power and no system.
Drivers carried fuel cans.
Charging stations displayed neat rows of dead vehicles, perfectly aligned and completely useless.
Nellie looked at my fuel gauge.
— Aren’t you going to fill up?
— Full tank. I refuel before I hit reserve.
— That’s irritatingly sensible.
— Don’t spread it around.
98’s signal began to deteriorate as we approached the turnoff for Ouro Preto.
The announcer’s voice faded in and out beneath static, but we could still understand him.
— We’re now receiving new information from international agencies.
A pause.
— I want to emphasize that much of this information has not yet been confirmed.
His voice no longer had the same tone as the earlier bulletins.
— Images are circulating, apparently recorded in Ukraine, showing large flashes on the horizon, columns of smoke, and missiles crossing the sky.
Another pause.
— Some appear to be long-range. It is still impossible to confirm where they were launched from or what their targets may be.
Nellie slowly turned toward the radio.
Said nothing.
I took a drink of cachaça.
Lit a cigarette.
Blackface had his head out the window, muzzle pointed into the wind, sniffing the end of the world with the enviable serenity of someone who had no idea what was happening.
The radio crackled.
— We’re also receiving reports of alerts in other countries.
The voice cut out for a moment.
— Sirens and emergency alerts are being reported in different parts of Europe. We are also receiving information from the Middle East and Asia. Missile-defense systems are being activated. Fighters are taking off. Airspace is being closed.
More static.
When the signal returned, the announcer was speaking faster.
— We now have reports of alert protocols being activated in the Americas as well.
Nellie looked at me.
There was no trace of irony in her face.
— Is this happening all over the world?
I drew on the cigarette.
— Looks like it.
— “Looks like it”?
— Best I’ve got.
She folded her arms around herself and looked back at the radio.
— My God…
The announcer continued.
— We urge caution regarding material circulating on social networks. Some images have already been identified as old. Others have been manipulated. There are videos that may have been generated by artificial intelligence.
A pause.
Then his voice changed.
Barely.
But enough.
— Some images, however, have been verified by more than one source.
Nellie went still.
The radio continued:
— There is still no official confirmation regarding the number or nature of the detonations.
Detonations.
That word did more damage inside the cab than missiles.
Nellie reached over and gripped my forearm.
The announcer took a breath.
— We also do not know whether these events are connected to the global technological failure. There are reports of malfunctioning warning systems, interrupted communications, and military responses that nobody can explain. And there is…
He stopped.
When he continued, he no longer sounded like a man reading a bulletin.
He sounded like someone trying to tell the country, without saying it outright, that the situation might be far worse than anyone imagined.
— And… there are also reports of actual attacks underway. We have not yet been able to confirm them independently.
Nellie tightened her grip on my arm.
— Could this turn into a nuclear war?
I took another drink of cachaça.
Looked at the road.
— Maybe it already has.
This time she did not ask for a better answer.
Hours earlier, cars had started stopping.
Now the radio was talking about missiles, defense systems, and detonations nobody could confirm — but which were already too serious to ignore.
The problem was no longer getting the machines to work again.
It was stopping frightened men from trusting systems that might no longer know the difference between reality, error, and lies.
98’s signal weakened again.
The announcer’s last sentence came broken through the static:
— …remain calm… we’re trying to confirm…
Then static.
I turned off the radio.
Blackface kept his head out the window.
Nellie kept holding my arm.
And I kept driving.
The roads got smaller.
Then empty.
Then dark.
— Where are you taking me?
— To the mountains.
— You have a house there?
— More or less.
— Does it have a roof, water, and food?
— Yes.
— Then I’ll accept “more or less.”
We continued along secondary roads, then onto dirt roads.
I drove the last stretch mostly from memory.
As we left the main road behind, the world began to change volume.
First the sirens disappeared.
Then the engines.
What remained was the low rumble of the pickup, the tires on dirt, and insects sounding from the brush.
The air changed too.
The smoke was behind us. Here, the air smelled of soil, grass, and running water.
After a full day of watching machines fail, cities burn, and people run, that darkness felt almost indecently peaceful.
I stopped in front of a fence secured with chain and padlocks.
Got out and opened it.
Drove the pickup through, stopped on the other side, and locked everything again.
The track inside the property was narrow, almost swallowed by vegetation.
The headlights swept over the creek first.
Then the vegetable garden.
Then the chicken coop.
Farther ahead, the trailer appeared.
Simple on the outside.
Almost disappointing.
Beside it stood a slightly crooked shed. Under the eaves, three fishing rods leaned against the wall.
We had arrived.
I stopped in front of the trailer and shut off the engine.
For a few seconds, nobody moved.
Then we got out.
Nellie looked around.
Blackface jumped from the cab.
His feet had barely touched the ground when he stopped.
Ears up.
Something heavy moved behind the shed.
Branches shook.
Nellie grabbed my arm.
— What is that?
— Easy.
A pig emerged from the darkness.
Enormous.
Not some cute little piglet from a pet-food commercial.
A pig of bureaucratic proportions.
Low belly.
Large ears.
Almost no neck.
The confidence of something heavy enough not to need debates about hierarchy.
Nellie stepped back.
— He’s gigantic.
— It’s one of his defining features.
The pig saw Blackface.
Blackface saw the pig.
For a few seconds they both stood still.
— Are they going to fight? — Nellie asked.
— I don’t think so.
— You don’t think so?
— I didn’t sign a contract with either of them.
Blackface lowered his front end, rear in the air.
Invitation to play.
The pig answered with a grunt and took off.
Nellie stepped back.
So did I.
Experience.
The pig ran past the dog, made a surprisingly sharp turn for something that size, and came back.
Blackface went after him.
Within seconds, the two of them were racing around the chicken coop as if digital collapse, fires, and a possible nuclear war were administrative problems belonging to another species.
Nellie stared.
— Your dog plays with a pig.
— He’s socially flexible.
— Does this happen all the time?
— More than it should.
The chickens, already perched inside the coop, watched the chase with the silent superiority of creatures that had seen the scene before and concluded that both participants were intellectually inferior.
— Come on.
She looked at the trailer.
— This is it?
— This is it.
I opened the door.
Inside, the trailer was still small.
It just stopped being simple.
I turned on the light.
A screen on the counter woke up showing battery charge and instantaneous power draw.
There were books, maps, and a workstation. The old 12-gauge hung in a rack above the door. A radio hissed quietly on the counter. Cables disappeared behind furniture. Outside, the small wind turbine kept turning.
She stepped in slowly.
— All of this is working?
— What needs to be.
— With the grid down?
I pointed at the monitor.
The battery charge rose and fell with whatever the panels and turbine were providing.
— The grid doesn’t get to decide everything here.
She ran a hand over the counter.
— So you hate the internet.
— No.
I looked at her.
— I hate technology that stops being mine when somebody on the other side of the planet turns off a server.
She said nothing.
Even so, I checked whether Starlink was showing any sign of life.
It took a while.
Blinked.
Tried again.
Then it went green.
— I don’t believe it — Nellie said. — It’s working?
— More or less.
She looked at the screen.
— So the end of the world still has internet.
— Elon Musk survived at least one more night.
The connection was unstable.
But it existed.
Messages began coming through.
Then my phone rang.
My son.
I answered immediately.
— Dad?
— Talk to me.
— We’re okay.
I breathed.
Only then did I realize I had been holding it.
— And your mother? And the boss?
— They’re fine too.
My ex-wife and my daughter-in-law were with him. They had gone to visit relatives of my ex in southern Minas Gerais.
I heard voices.
Cutlery.
People talking.
— What are you doing?
— Barbecue.
Of course.
The planet might have been entering a nuclear war, but there were few better places to wait it out than a family farm in the interior of Minas Gerais.
Spring water.
Food on a wood-burning stove.
Chickens in the yard.
A pig in the pen.
Firewood stacked.
People who knew how to fix almost anything with wire and old tools.
And enough relatives to turn any global catastrophe into Sunday lunch.
The Minas family, gathered at an aunt’s farm, had responded in the only culturally plausible way.
By firing up the grill.
— And my granddaughter?
The camera turned.
She was in the pool.
— Grandpa! Look at this!
She showed me a huge frog that had apparently fallen into the water and been immediately incorporated into the game.
— He’s gigantic!
— I can see that.
— Can I keep him?
— Ask the frog.
She laughed.
While the world was collapsing in real time, my granddaughter was negotiating the adoption of an amphibian.
My ex appeared on screen.
Everyone was fine.
When I hung up, I stared at the dark screen for a few seconds.
There was no clever comment to make.
Nellie was leaning against the counter.
— Your granddaughter is beautiful.
— She is.
— You’re different when you talk to her.
— Different how?
— Less unbearable.
— Was that a compliment?
— Don’t waste it.
She smiled.
Outside, Dogmeat appeared near the door. Blackface was behind him.
— Your pig has a name?
— Dogmeat!
— Dogmeat?
— My son named him.
She looked at the enormous pig, then at Blackface.
— Is that a name or a long-term plan?
— Depends on how the world ends.
She laughed.
Her phone began syncing.
Dozens of notifications.
Comments.
Alerts.
WhatsApp.
Her finger moved across the screen.
Stopped.
Her face changed.
— Sophie.
She turned the phone toward me.
I got Sophie. We’re okay.
That was all.
It was enough.
Nellie pressed the phone against her chest.
Sat down.
Cried.
Blackface appeared in the doorway, panting and dirty with soil.
He heard the name Sophie.
Came inside.
Started sniffing her leg again.
— Don’t even think about it.
Blackface disagreed.
After a while, she took a deep breath.
— Can I take a shower?
I pointed toward the creek.
— There.
She waited.
— You’re serious.
— I am.
— There’s no shower?
— There’s water.
— That isn’t what I asked.
— It’s what I’ve got.
— It must be freezing.
— It is.
— You’re a caveman.
— A clean caveman.
She grabbed a towel and left.
The night was clear.
Full moon.
The absurd May heat still lingered in the ground and in the body.
Nellie reached the creek.
Looked around.
Took off her clothes.
No ceremony.
Stepped naked into the water.
The first contact tore a curse out of her that probably startled several nocturnal birds.
— THIS SHIT IS FREEZING!
— I warned you.
— YOU COULD HAVE WARNED ME BETTER!
— You said it must be freezing. I said it was. What else did you want, a siren?
She told me to go somewhere predictable.
Went deeper.
Breathed.
Lowered herself to the shoulders.
The moon laid white reflections across the water.
I was near the trailer, but it would be dishonest to claim I was not looking.
I looked.
A lot.
Now, finally, I could check whether memory had exaggerated.
It had not.
Nellie noticed.
Raised one eyebrow.
— Comfortable over there?
— Very.
— Pervert.
— Observer.
— Same thing with a better vocabulary.
I did not answer.
She did not cover herself either.
She looked at me for a few seconds.
Then dove under.
When she surfaced, her breathing slowed.
The day seemed to leave her along with the heat.
Then Nellie looked up.
Stopped.
Without city lights, the sky was covered in stars.
Not a few.
Thousands.
The Milky Way cut across the darkness.
— I’ve never seen this.
— You have.
— Not like this.
— It was just never dark enough.
She kept looking.
For the first time since I had met her, she did not reach for her phone.
No photo.
No video.
No post.
Just a naked woman in freezing water looking at something that had existed for billions of years without needing an audience.
Minas Gerais had to go dark for Nellie to discover that the sky was still on.
She stayed there for a long time.
Cooling off.
When she came out, she wrapped herself in the towel.
Looked at me.
Smiled.
Said nothing.
Neither did I.
We went back to the trailer.
I cooked the flank steak in a heavy skillet, opened two beers, and found enough bread to turn it into a meal.
We ate.
Drank.
We talked less than would have been normal for two people who had spent the entire day together and still knew very little about each other.
Maybe because that night the important questions were different.
Who was alive.
What still worked.
What would be left in the morning.
At some point, Nellie stopped sitting on the other side of the table.
Then there stopped being enough table between us.
The rest of the night did not need a report.
We slept little.
I woke early.
Old habit.
The morning was quiet.
No horns.
No engines.
Not even that constant city noise you only notice when it disappears.
After so many years in Belo Horizonte, the silence felt almost physical.
Blackface prowled around the chicken coop.
The pig rested near the vegetable garden.
A little later, Nellie came out of the trailer.
She was wearing one of my faded Iron Maiden T-shirts and a pair of boots too big for her.
Not exactly rural workwear, but it improved the landscape considerably.
Hair a mess.
No makeup.
Still beautiful.
Maybe more so.
She stopped in the doorway.
— Do you always wake up early?
— Almost always.
— Even after…
She stopped.
I waited.
— After what?
She narrowed her eyes.
— Don’t get excited.
— Poorly phrased question.
— Idiot.
I picked up the sack of corn.
— First lesson.
— I haven’t even had coffee.
— Neither have they.
She took a handful of corn.
Scattered it.
The chickens retreated as a group.
Nellie looked at them.
— They’re afraid of me.
— Excellent judges of character.
— Fuck you.
— We’re making progress.
The pig appeared behind her almost silently, an impressive achievement for something that size.
He shoved his snout near the sack.
Nellie jumped.
— FUCK!
The pig backed away.
Blackface barked.
I laughed.
— He wanted to help.
— He almost killed me!
— It would be embarrassing to survive Belo Horizonte and die feeding a pig.
She pointed at the animal.
— How much does that thing weigh?
— A lot.
We went back to the trailer.
I made breakfast.
Eggs and bacon.
Thick toast with butter and honey.
Coffee with milk.
Nellie sat down and stared at the plate for a few seconds.
— That’s enough calories to feed a family.
— I can take it away.
She pulled the plate closer.
— Don’t even think about it.
She started with the eggs.
Then bacon.
Then almost an entire slice of toast.
On the second, she spread on more butter and let the honey run over the edges.
— I spent years pretending breakfast was fruit, granola, and some tasteless oat thing.
She took a bite.
Closed her eyes.
— Vegans don’t know what they’re missing.
— Some do. They just chose suffering.
She was already attacking another piece of bacon.
— Fuck calories.
— The apocalypse is doing wonders for you.
— Shut up and pass the honey.
I passed it.
She devoured everything.
While I finished my coffee, she began exploring the shelves.
Dostoevsky.
Shakespeare.
Machado de Assis.
Homer.
Hemingway.
Orwell.
Asimov.
Koestler.
Worn books, underlined and full of notes.
Through the open door, Nellie noticed the fishing rods under the shed’s eaves.
— So you actually fish.
— Badly.
She turned toward me.
— Finally, something you’re willing to admit you’re bad at.
— The fish are hostile witnesses.
Then she saw the typewriter.
Beside it was a thick stack of pages.
She ran her fingers over the keys.
— You write?
— Sometimes.
— On a computer?
— When I want to revise.
I pointed at the typewriter.
— When I want to think, I use this.
— That’s absurdly old-fashioned.
— It works.
— You have a fetish for old things.
She realized the full reach of her own sentence.
— Oh my God.
— You opened the door.
— And you ran through it.
As we finished breakfast, she told me a little about her life.
Content creator.
Lifestyle.
Personal branding.
Campaigns.
Partnerships.
Hundreds of thousands of followers.
At some point she mentioned that she had opened an OnlyFans account as Plan B.
— And did it work?
— I never posted anything.
— Then it wasn’t a plan. It was an open tab.
She drank her coffee as if she had said nothing unusual.
— So what would my Plan C be?
I looked out the window.
The pig was trying to reach something on the other side of a fence.
She followed my gaze.
— No fucking way.
— Promotion comes with responsibility.
— That thing weighs more than I do.
— Considerably more.
— I’ll take OnlyFans.
— The pig seems to agree.
She picked up her phone.
Starlink was more stable now.
She probably had the biggest piece of content she would ever produce sitting in her hand.
Cars going insane.
Fires.
The escape.
The gunshot.
Belo Horizonte going dark.
The refuge.
The creek.
The possible end of the world.
Millions of views.
She stared at the screen for a few seconds.
Then set the phone on the table.
Face down.
— You’re not going to post it?
— No.
— Why?
She ran a finger along the rim of the mug.
— Maybe there are things I want to remember without showing anyone.
I said nothing.
That deserved to remain free of sarcasm.
After breakfast, I showed her the rest of the property.
Not as a guided tour.
Just where to find the things she might need.
The water came from an intake upstream in the creek. A pump filled the reservoir.
Power depended on whatever was available: sun, wind, batteries.
The shed held tools and an old diesel generator for when the rest was not enough.
— How long can you stay here?
— I don’t know.
Nellie stopped.
— You don’t know?
— I know we can stay quite a while. How long depends on what breaks, what runs out, and what we screw up.
— Finally.
— What?
— Something you don’t know.
— I have a list.
— Can I see it?
— No.
She smiled.
That afternoon, the end of the world began to be quietly walked back.
Power was returning.
Hospitals were coming off their generators.
Some aircraft were landing again.
Governments had managed to contain the situation.
Barely.
There had been missiles.
There had been responses.
And there had, in fact, been a few nuclear detonations in Ukraine.
A few.
Fewer than it had seemed the night before.
Still enough to remind the world that almost everything could have ended much worse.
If the world was still there, somewhere in the chain of command someone had not pressed the next button.
Maybe more than one someone.
As communications returned, so did the corrections.
Some aircraft reported as shot down were sitting safely on runways.
Some cities that had been “destroyed” were still standing.
Some explosions were old footage.
Some speeches were fake.
And some images had never existed outside a machine.
The damage was real.
The rest was harder to measure.
For several hours, nobody had known exactly where fact ended and fabrication began.
Nellie was reading updates on her phone.
— So it didn’t end?
— The world?
— Yeah.
I looked around.
The creek was running.
Blackface slept in the shade.
Dogmeat rooted around near the chicken coop.
— Not yet.
She let out her breath slowly and went back to the screen.
— The manufacturers are telling people not to try starting affected cars until further notice.
— Sensible.
She kept reading.
— They’re going to send an update.
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
Then she started laughing.
— An update…
— The Universe has a sense of humor.
The causes were still under investigation.
Attack.
Sabotage.
Authentication failure.
Defective update.
Human error.
Governments were looking for someone to blame.
People were dead.
Fires were still burning.
Entire regions remained without power.
Infrastructure had been destroyed.
Even so, we had come too close to keep treating the whole thing as a hypothetical.
Stock exchanges remained closed. Maybe out of prudence. Maybe because nobody yet had the courage to put a number on the disaster.
The banks, however, were already functioning well enough for one essential activity.
Collecting.
In Belo Horizonte, thousands of cars that had cost two hundred thousand reais were still dead.
The payments weren’t.
Nellie looked up from her phone.
— My car could be scrap and I still have to pay for it?
— You’ve finally found a truly resilient technology.
— What?
— Debt.
She stared at me.
— You can be an asshole even after the end of the world.
— Technically, the world is still here.
I thought about it.
— It was just a warning.
That afternoon, Nellie went back to the typewriter.
More specifically, to the stack of pages beside it.
She picked up the first.
Then another.
Started reading.
Quickly at first.
Then slowly.
I was in front of the monitors when I noticed that her silence had changed.
— When did you write this?
— A long time ago.
— How long?
— Long enough.
In the manuscript there was a city without lights, a road climbing into the mountains, a sharp-tongued blonde, and a man who seemed to trust old things a little too much.
There was a dog too.
Nothing was the same.
Everything was far too similar.
After something happens, old stories develop the strange ability to look like prophecies.
The mind fills in the rest.
It was a good explanation.
Rational.
Probably true.
I said nothing.
Later we went down to the creek.
Nellie took a few pages with her.
She sat on a rock in the sun, feet in the water.
Read for a while before closing the manuscript.
— Is the man in this story you?
— Every writer lies when answering that question.
— And the woman?
— Her too.
— She’s very annoying.
— Very.
— But pretty.
— The narrator seems to think so.
— The narrator is kind of a pervert.
— Literature requires complex characters.
She lowered her feet a little deeper into the water.
Looked at the creek.
Then at the mountains.
— Are you going to stay here?
— That was the plan.
— So this is it? Chickens, that absurd pig, fishing, books, and that hideous pickup?
— It got you here.
— That doesn’t make it prettier.
— Not everything has to look good in a photograph.
She folded her arms.
— Was that aimed at me?
— If the shoe fits, we just saved time.
She smiled.
Then turned serious.
Pulled her feet out of the water and stood.
— Can I stay a few days?
— Yes.
— That’s it?
— Stay until things settle down. Then you decide.
— You don’t decide for me?
— No.
— You’re not even going to try?
I looked at the pig crossing the property with Blackface behind him.
— I can decide one thing.
— What?
— Tomorrow you feed that.
She followed my gaze.
The pig stopped.
Grunted.
— No fucking way.
— Lesson starts at seven.
— Fuck you.
She walked past me.
Stopped.
Came back.
Stepped too close.
Looked straight into my eyes.
Then kissed me.
Briefly.
No ceremony.
Pulled away.
— Don’t get excited.
— I’m sixty. I conserve energy.
She looked at me like someone already in possession of enough experimental evidence to challenge the claim.
— That lie lost credibility last night.
Blackface watched.
So did Dogmeat.
— Too much of an audience now.
Nellie laughed.
That night, I went to the shed.
The fishing rods were leaning near the door.
I turned the pickup’s key.
The old diesel caught immediately.
Cough.
Vibration.
Smoke.
I shut it off.
There was nothing I needed to check.
Maybe I had simply wanted to hear a machine do exactly what was expected of it.
Light came from the trailer.
Nellie was standing near the typewriter with the manuscript open.
She turned one page.
Then another.
— The Lagoinha glass.
— I know.
She kept one finger on the line.
— Explain it.
I thought.
— I can’t.
This time she did not press me.
Outside, Blackface barked.
Dogmeat answered with a grunt.
The creek kept running.
Starlink kept working.
Nellie reached the last page.
Went still.
At the top of the sheet were three words.
The same three that for years had sold cars, the future, success, and the comforting idea that dreams could be bought in monthly installments.
BUILD YOUR DREAMS
Nellie stared at them.
Picked up a red pen.
Slashed through all three.
Underneath, she wrote:
FUCK YOUR DREAMS
She looked at me.
— Better.
I did not argue.
It was.
She dropped the pen, grabbed my shirt, and kissed me.
Then gave me a gentle push toward the bed.
For the second time in two days, I decided it was prudent to obey.
Maurício Veloso Brant Pinheiro, PhD
Professor of Physics, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Founder, Author and Editor, AI-Talks.org
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Editorial transparency note: This article, as with all articles published on this site, was conceived, directed, written, and reviewed by Prof. Maurício Veloso Brant Pinheiro. Artificial intelligence was used as an assistant for editorial refinement, formatting, image generation, SEO metadata, and publication workflow.
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