Cidade Maravilhosa

A short story — original fiction from Arquivo Cósmico.

The afternoon was sweltering and the air carried smoke and screams. The favela climbed the hills as far as the eye could reach, shacks of wood and sheet metal stacked on one another like lesions on the skin of the land. Further down, a dark, toothless mouth poured out thick smoke. Above it, with some effort, one could still read the letters that remained on the sign: COPACABANA. No one alive remembered there ever being a subway there. No one alive remembered what a subway was. But the place was still called that.

He went down the alley with his stomach in a knot. He carried a piece of wood wrapped in dirty rags that, from a distance, looked like something else. In his backpack, under a folded coat, the last of the week’s rations.

At the next corner, a child alone was picking through a pile of garbage, eating what she found. Thin enough to count the ribs under the skin. She saw him. She looked at the backpack.

That was when he heard the boots.

Caretakers. Green uniforms, threadbare; worn-out combat boots, still hard enough. They took whatever they found — food, bodies. If they found the rations, they would kill him right there, because searching a man was more work than killing him.

The child opened her mouth. She was going to beg. She was going to beg loudly.

The footsteps came echoing down the alley, through puddles of sewage, closer and closer.

He raised the club. His arms were trembling. Not a child, he thought. A sound about to happen.

He struck. Once, twice, three times, until there was no sound at all — only the dripping of blood and a small hand splayed on the cement, far too small.

The boots passed by. No Caretaker appeared.

He wiped the club on the leg of his trousers. He waited for the alley’s noises to return to their usual flow — the constant agony, all around, that passed for silence there. Then he bent over the body, not knowing what he was looking for. He found nothing. Only a deep tiredness and a dull reverberation in his own skull, as if he had been the one struck.

At sundown, perched on an unstable rooftop, he ate a third of the rations, slowly, watching the city. The horizon stained red behind the smoke. On an exposed copper wire, an old light blinked twice and went out.