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No One Is My Last Name
She is always there, rocking her body back and forth, as if there were an inner music only she can hear. The smile is wide, stretched open, and perhaps for that reason even more disturbing: it reveals the gap where her teeth should be.
She lives with her mother, they said. A sick woman, bedridden, who depends on a government benefit to survive. But the money rarely reaches the right destination. The girl takes part of the benefit to buy beer and cigarettes. When anything is left, she spends it on something stronger — crack, heroin, anything that makes smoke.
She always has a plastic cup in her hand, and she is always laughing. Not a happy laugh, but a nervous one, as if she were mocking everything, including herself. She flirts with the old men by the carts, sits on one man’s lap, asks another for a cigarette, and sometimes tries to steal a sip from the bottle of whoever lets their guard down.
There were rumors that she had once attended university. There were rumors that she could not even read. No one knew her real story, or even her name. When people talked about her, they were repeating something they had heard.
One morning she was alone, sitting on the ground, her head down. She wasn’t laughing, smoking, or drinking. She was just crying, silently. And suddenly she began to laugh, a loud, hysterical laugh, as if her body did not know whether to cry or burst into laughter. She picked up the bottle from the ground, drank what was left, spat to the side and shouted: — My mother died yesterday. Now it’s all fucked. No more benefit. I’ll have to get by somehow.
She started dancing, alone, laughing again. No one in the square looked. No one said anything.
Her own performance for no one.

Shared Address
She showed up uninvited. Nobody remembers the exact day. There was no announcement, no ceremony, no signed contract. One day she was simply there, quiet, taking up a little space beside him. She seemed like a temporary visit — the kind that stops by for coffee and is gone before dinner.
But she stayed.
She went with him on his walks, through the promises made in front of the mirror, through Mondays full of resolve and Fridays full of excuses.
She was there for diets that were born and died. She showed up at gyms that got joined, then ditched. She met doctors, nutritionists, health magazines, specialists of every kind. She stuck around. Loyal.
Over the years, she stopped being a nuisance. She became a witness.
She was there when his hair started thinning. When his knees started complaining about the stairs. When friends disappeared without warning. When the kids grew up, when his parents grew old, when his dreams changed address.
Everyone else left. She stayed.
She knew the truth. She knew exactly how many years had gone by, even when he insisted on pretending otherwise. She was a silent clock he carried around, one he could never set back.
At night, before falling asleep, he'd make a small automatic gesture, almost imperceptible — like someone checking that a presence that never left was still there.
It wasn't affection. It was habit. An old habit, impossible to date, but one that had stuck with him for years.
In the end, he realized he'd spent decades trying to kick her out. And she, for her part, had spent those same decades simply sticking around. Persistent, proving they'd be together forever.
They weren't friends, and they weren't enemies: they were two tenants sharing the same address, splitting a space that got tighter every year.
And when he died, she proved that not even death could separate them. They were buried together, in the same coffin.
Him and her.
His old companion.
His stalker belly.

The House of Six Sins
It was a contaminated family. The aunt lived with her doors open — and her legs too. The gossip said — and perhaps it wasn’t entirely wrong — that she had killed her husband to free the bed, which had since been occupied by men who came and went without leaving a name. And every time one of them left, she would smooth the sheets with an almost religious urgency, as if trying to erase the body that had been there. Then she would sit on the edge of the bed and run her finger over the ring she no longer wore, turning an invisible band as if she could move through time between past and present, depending on the direction she spun it.
The father was a known brute.
Not for his work, but for the short path between home and prison — a route he knew better than any street in the city. And deep down, he never tried for anything else. He carried violence the way one carries a surname: inherited, inevitable, almost sacred. Sometimes, before going out for another fight, he would run his hand over his face as if saying goodbye to himself — not out of regret, but out of habit. He sinned not only in what he did, but in his inability to stop doing it.
The mother barely spoke.
She lived at the back of the kitchen, her body pressed against the stove, as if the heat were the only thing still capable of reminding her she was alive. And as the flame rose, she would run her fingers along her own arm, as if measuring how much longer it would take to disappear. It wasn’t neglect. It was habit. A slow sin, committed without witnesses. And day after day, she let herself burn a little — not only as punishment, but out of omission.
The son sold drugs.
And when business was slow, he sold himself to passing tourists, trading whatever was left of his dignity for a few notes. He never complained. He never chose. He had learned early that the body was just another object in the house — like the broken table, like the stove that burned his mother, like the aunt’s bed. Sometimes, before leaving, he would press his fingers against his own wrist, searching for a pulse he could no longer feel. He sinned not for what he sold, but for believing he was worth no more than that.
The daughter inherited the family’s excess.
She was queen of everything that rotted: the drunk, the displaced, the men who had nothing left — no home, no name, no hope. And sometimes, out of pity or boredom, she would lie with the town’s widows, who could no longer tell the difference between comfort and sin. After they all left, she would gather the buttons that had come loose from shirts, the strands of hair left on the pillow, the traces of perfume lingering in the air — as if trying to assemble a body that had never been hers. She kept it all in her pocket, without knowing why.
Malice was no accident there.
It was inheritance.
And it was on that ground that Cecilia was born.
The only one who wore white. The only one who prayed. The only one who seemed to have escaped. But she — precisely she — was the one who went deeper than all the others. Not because she sinned like them, but because she learned to call her own emptiness faith. And sometimes, when the family forgot about her, Cecilia would run her hand along the wall as if searching for a way out that did not exist. She prayed to no one. Confessed sins she had not committed. Fasted until she fainted. Kept what was broken.
And that was how she became the root of that tree.
The most rotten one.

The House Knew
That night, the wind blew warm.
Not a comforting kind of warmth, the kind that belongs to a gentle summer.
It was heavy, stagnant heat — the kind that seeps into the house and settles into the walls, leaving everything a little more tense, a little more tired.
When he arrived, he was already like that — his head hotter than the wind that still drifted through the open kitchen window.
The door slammed shut.
His footsteps dragged down the hallway, unsteady, but carrying that old aggression she knew so well.
The smell of alcohol arrived before he did.
There was no conversation.
There was never much conversation on nights like those.
He began the way he always did.
A twisted word.
Another, louder.
Then the shove, almost a natural continuation of the first insult.
It was a ritual they both knew by heart.
The house already knew the exact place where each body would hit the walls.
But this time, something happened.
Maybe it was just a moment — a silent mechanism inside her that decided to stop turning.
The knife was there on the table.
An ordinary kitchen knife, its handle worn from daily use.
She picked it up almost without noticing, like someone grabbing the first object within reach just to keep from falling.
The movement was quick.
Clumsy.
More instinct than decision.
It wasn’t elegant.
It wasn’t calculated.
It was a rough gesture, driven by fear and by a strength she didn’t even know she still had.
He stepped back.
For a second, they both stood still.
He looked at his own body, trying to understand what had happened.
She looked at him, as if she were seeing the scene for the first time too.
The door slammed again.
His footsteps faded into the hallway, then the gate, then the street.
The house fell silent.
If he ever came back, he would find that the woman who lived in that house was no longer the same.

The Exile of Herself
Genilda used to say that Cabaceiras never truly left her, even after so many miles of distance. The small town in the Paraíba sertão remained stuck to her memory like road dust on an old leather sandal. It was a town of a tight economy, sustained by livestock, by a small commerce where everyone knew everyone by name, by government jobs, and by a tourism that appeared every now and then in search of dry landscapes, cultural festivals, and movie shoots that transformed the backcountry into a film set.
She remembered her childhood running through hot streets and simple houses, the smell of dry earth after a rare rain, relatives scattered across sidewalks at dusk, long conversations in doorways, and the boyfriend she left behind when she decided to try her luck in Chapecó, Santa Catarina. At the time, it felt like courage. Later, she understood that courage and longing are sometimes born together.
Chapecó felt like another country. And she, an undocumented foreigner. Everything was different. The accent sounded harsh and too fast. The houses had slanted roofs that she found strange, as if they were always expecting some tragedy from the sky. People spoke words that her Northeastern brain took time to decipher. Baita, nona, tchê. Sometimes she understood entire sentences but tripped over a single word, standing there looking at the person with an awkward smile, pretending she had followed the conversation.
In the beginning, she tried to adapt. She tried to neutralize her own voice, like someone trying to hide an accent inside a purse. But she quickly realized that certain things do not disappear. Where you come from keeps living in your mouth.
She felt that kind of silent distance that no one admits to. A constant sensation of being watched like someone who was out of place. As if she were a permanent guest at a party where everyone already knew each other.
But it wasn't just the people who made her feel like a foreigner. It was nature itself.
On a gray afternoon, returning from the market carrying two grocery bags, she saw the sky darken in a strange way. It wasn't regular rain. The wind began to blow cold and aggressive, cutting across her face. Within seconds, she heard a dry banging sound hitting the roofs, the cars, the street signs.
When she realized what it was, she panicked.
Genilda ran to the awning of a small grocery store, protecting her head with her arms, completely soaked, terrified, watching it fall as if the world had gone mad. Never, in all her life in the Paraíba sertão, had she seen anything like it. Rain was already rare enough. But that looked like a biblical plague.
She stood there, breathing fast, hair plastered to her face, eyes wide.
Then she looked up at the white sky and whispered to herself, still terrified:
This is a crazy place… My God… even ice stones fall from the sky here.
Genilda stayed.
Her accent softened over the years, or perhaps she learned to hide certain words like someone storing summer clothes at the back of the closet. Her children grew up calling tangerines "bergamota" and thinking hail in the middle of December was normal. And Cabaceiras? It became a photo in their grandmother's living room, a strange name on a school map, a vague answer in some geography assignment: "It's up north somewhere, I think. Very hot."
Genilda, by staying, gave birth to the other side. It was a victory and a defeat at the same time—for her, perhaps more of a defeat; for her children, just life.
Deep down, Genilda might still feel the dust on her leather sandal. But She no longer spoke of it.
She learned that the cruelest part of longing is not remembering. It is realizing that, one day, you stop needing to remember in order to live.

How Difficult the Life of a Dancer Is
The house was sick, and everyone who lived in it was too. There were not constant screams, nor open violence, but there was a kind of permanent fatigue in the walls, as if the house itself breathed badly. The doors creaked, the old sofa seemed to sink a little more every week, and the kitchen always carried the smell of something that had been forgotten on the stove.
The mother still went out to work. At first she came home early, tired, but still making some effort to keep up the appearance of normality. She washed the dishes, vaguely asked about the children’s school, turned on the television and stayed staring at the screen without really paying attention.
Then she decided to go out one night for drinks with friends from work. That first night was followed by another. Then two. Soon it became three, and eventually she was drinking every night and coming home completely drunk, dragging her feet down the hallway.
The oldest son did not work. He lived off small hustles. It started with small favors for the wrong people: delivering a package here, handing over an envelope there. Then came bigger things, small frauds, goods of questionable origin. He grew up watching the house slowly sink, and at some point he decided the world simply worked that way: everyone trying to survive however they could.
The youngest still went to school, but he had already learned another logic. He stole lunch from the most distracted classmates and sold small items stolen from the hustles his brother was involved in.
The father had gone out to buy cigarettes five years earlier and never came back.
At first the family still invented explanations. Maybe he still had not found the brand he smoked and was still looking. Maybe one day he would return. He never did.
After some time, they stopped talking about him. Silence slowly took over the space that had once belonged to the father, like an old piece of furniture no one has the courage to throw away.
And there was the middle daughter.
She studied in the morning. She sat in the second row of the classroom, copied everything the teacher wrote on the board, and answered questions with a calm that seemed almost indifferent.
At night she worked dancing in a nightclub hidden in a dark alley in the center of the city. Colored lights disguised the exhaustion of the women who danced there. The loud music helped the customers forget who they were for a few hours.
But sometimes, between one song and another, while watching the reflection of her own face in the bathroom mirror of the club, she had the feeling that she was looking at two different people.
One was the girl who still woke up early to go to school.
The other was the woman who danced for unknown men in a place where nobody asked anyone’s real name.
When she returned home in the early morning, walking through the almost empty streets of the city, she felt the silence weighing more than the music of the club.
She opened the door slowly so as not to wake anyone. The mother slept on the sofa, with an empty bottle on the floor. The younger brother snored with the television still on. The older one had not returned yet.
She stood for a few seconds in the middle of the living room, looking at the house that seemed to age faster than anyone inside it.
The house was sick. And no one there seemed to want to get better.
Then she took a deep breath, took off her shoes, walked to her room and said to herself, like someone repeating an excuse:
— How difficult the life of a dancer is.