Lulu called me Little Match Girl. I had never read that story. At the time, I was allowing myself to ask all sorts of questions and to get lost looking for the answer. Lulu knew that. I asked the hardest questions so I could dwell on them longer and wouldn’t need to be in the real world all the time. The hardest one: why not to die. Who convinced me, where did I get the idea that I’m supposed to be alive.
I looked for the Match Girl story later and found out it was about a girl who is cold, but lights matches and tries to go far into her own imagination, trying to pretend things are good. Of course there’s nothing she can really do, nobody buys her matches, and she is sitting in the snow on the sidewalk of a lonely street. I didn’t think it was my case. We were about to film our first short film together. We had been working on the script, visiting the homes of Cris’s relatives looking for a living room that would have two big windows and a hall, the way I had imagined it to be in the story I wrote.
I had never written anything before that. I had kept a diary, but the writing always addressed God. Those pages were full of commitments to improve myself, and love letters—it had been very easy for me to fall in love since I was five. But when the time came for me to write a story for a class, I didn’t do it until three in the morning of the day it was due. I awoke and lay on my bed, thinking of how humiliating it would be not to show up to class that day, when it was my turn. In my head, always kind of there but in the background, I had the image of a woman who cuts her wrists in her bathtub. She is dying, but then her little niece enters and sees her, and gets in the tub as well. I wrote that, and took it to class in the morning.
There was a band I liked, La Vitriola, that played a mix of rock and jazz and traditional music, but I had never seen any of the members before. Years later I found out that two of them had taken that same class with me, that they had been my classmates. When I met them, I only knew that what they wrote was always good, and that Romero was freelancing for Rolling Stone. I still remember them because that day, when Romero read my story out loud—the whole class sitting near the school’s lake—I heard his voice breaking as he reached the end, and I knew there was something good in that story. They didn’t believe I had written it that same morning. I didn’t know why. I was seventeen then, and never thought anything I did was very good.
I told Cris about it and he wanted to read it immediately. He had been told in a dream that he was supposed to do eight movies about nonviolent violence. He said the phrase made sense. They would be a series about passive acts of violence, like this story of mine, which he wanted to be the first of the sequence. After I was persuaded, Cris pulled Lulu in, and for weeks we read the story over and over, working on the script.

That was three years ago. I am not a writer, I haven’t produced anything besides that piece of luck and I am taking meds now, which has helped me forget about the whole death thing. I barely think about it. I work in a store three blocks down from my house, a little office-supply store near an elementary school.
Yesterday, after I closed the store at six, I walked down the street to the gas station. I don’t know the people who live in that block, the houses are white and have gardens without flowers, but I noticed that two of them have a dog chained to a little red house. I sometimes compare both dogs; they are brown haired and fat, very much alike. Perhaps they are father and son, or mother and daughter, the young puppy having been adopted by the neighbor. Yesterday, there was a girl placing a dirty pot near one of the dog’s houses.
“What do you feed him?” I asked.
“Chicken bones,” she said.
“Some dogs are delicate; they may die if they eat bones,” I said. “Does he always eat that?”
The girl looked at me as if I were an idiot. Of course she always gives the dog her dinner’s leftovers, I thought.
“No,” she answered, and took the pot in her hands again, entering the house.
I kept walking. The smaller dog lived in the next white house, and I stopped near his little red home, but didn’t see him. The lights were all off in the house, and the door was open. From the sidewalk I could see that the house was empty. There were also many shoe marks on the ground. They had moved, and taken the dog with them, I thought.
I opened the small fence-door and looked around, trying to see if anyone was there. It seemed empty, but I feared someone could have been inside still, and decided I wouldn’t enter. I sat in the entrance’s stairs, and looked to the other side of the street. Everyone’s porche lights were lit. Nobody else had dogs in that block. I might have saved the life of that girl’s dog, I thought. I looked over my shoulder, into the empty house, and saw that there was a light bulb left in the hall’s ceiling. I wanted to turn it on, but it didn’t light up when I tried. The house was empty, but it still felt like it was somebody’s home. The chicken-bones girl appeared at the door. She seemed suspicious to see me there, a little afraid too. I walked out.
“My aunt doesn’t live here anymore,” she said.
“She took her dog with her?”
“No,” the girl answered. “I came to close the door.”
She got a key from her dress pocket and locked the house.
“I like dogs very much. Where is your aunt’s dog?”
“The moving van hit him. He’s dead.”
Her hands were in fists inside her dress’s pockets.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Do you go to Einstein? I work in the bookstore across the street.”
“No,” she said. “I thought you were friends with my aunt.”
“I didn’t know her.”
“They found my cousin’s baby dead in his crib. That is why they left.”
It seemed she was expecting that I’d tell her that I was sad, or sorry.
“I’m sorry. I need to go now. Take care of your dog. What is his name?”
“Daisy,” she said.
I walked back to my house; I forgot I was going to the gas station. I felt barren, like every day after I started taking the medication. Everything seemed calm and normal except that all of the questions that I had so eagerly followed when I was younger were still alive in me, though hidden in some part of my head where I couldn’t reach them. I slipped into bed, thinking of the dead dog and the dead baby. Why don’t I have a dog? I thought, right before I fell asleep.
In the middle of the night I awoke feeling a force over my body. It was not a dream, I was awake and there was a big shadow over me, and it wanted to take me to hell. I couldn’t scream, I was voiceless, so I started to pray: Holy Mary, Mother of God. But I forgot whatever came after and the shadow felt heavier, and I was afraid of going to hell. It seemed that my prayer had been strong enough though, because then the force left me, and I fell asleep again.
I wonder if it was a dream, even though it felt quite real. I feel very afraid of dying. I wish I didn’t have to go to the store today, that I didn’t need to walk down the empty house’s road and see its roof from the window of the store. But I know that if I don’t go no one is going to open it.

school girl

The street is quiet. When the children are in their classrooms there are no sounds at all, only the bird that sporadically comes near the store’s sidewalk because he knows I sometimes feed him bread. Today I wait for the bird. When he comes, I observe his feathers very carefully, trying to remember the exact color of his head, the shape of his beak, his maroon legs. There are plenty of details to reflect on when that gray bird comes by, plenty of things going on for me to care about. When he doesn’t come, I don’t have anything to think of. But today I keep remembering the fists in the girl’s dress, her trying to hold the tears inside. I see her holding the dirty pot in her arms, taking the key out, and telling me she doesn’t go to Einstein. And the dead baby.
I haven’t thought about death, about anything really, since we filmed the movie. I insisted on playing the woman’s part. I would be naked in Cris’s grandmother’s tub and that shot would be long, but the only one of that scene. We had bought a pound of red food coloring and mixed it with water, trying to make it seem like blood. When we poured it over the tub full of water it looked pink, like powder cherry juice dissolved. It was not going to work. Cris was very uncomfortable seeing me there naked. He left the bathroom and asked his brother, who was waiting with everyone else outside, to get real blood.
“Get a live chicken in the market,” he said.
Lulu and I talked with the girl we had cast. She was wearing a swimsuit, unlike me, who only had my panties on and was sitting on the tub’s edge, covered by a towel. I had to put my clothes back on because Cris’s brother was taking very long in coming. Cris’s grandma had prepared a meal of soup and fried plantains, and we chatted about college and how the old lady had only finished high school, because when she was our age that was enough. Then her other grandson, Cris’s brother, showed up.
He was in a hurry and Cris jumped off his seat, because if the blood got cold it would coagulate. We run back to the bathroom, I got in the tub and Cris poured a bowl full of animal’s blood on me. I couldn’t think of anything. Cris saw me—my naked little breasts—and pursed his lips, disgusted. His hands were trembling. I was trembling too, not thinking of anything. I felt a little cotton ball in my throat and looked outside for Lulu. The water in the tub was warm, I could see the vapor going up, to the ceiling, and Cris, who had been adjusting the camera for a ten-minute scene of me mute and lifeless, left the bathroom and called Lulu in. He couldn’t stand it. Lulu sat there, behind the camera, and tried not to look at me, or I at her. I felt like I was really dying, without the pain in my wrists though. I was afraid, but not of dying.

“Hello,” says the chicken-bones’ girl, followed by a woman. The girl is wearing the town’s Catholic school uniform, the same school I attended, where they made me plait my hair and wear white ribbons. This girl wears her hair in a bob, a hair-clip near her right temple. I smile at her.
“I’m Ana,” says the woman introducing herself. “My daughter says you were asking for my sister’s dog yesterday.”
“Yes. She told me about the moving van. I’m sorry.”
“We are moving too,” the woman says. “Annie said you like dogs a lot.”
“I do,” I say, and look at the girl, Annie, who is staring at the crayons and colored pencils organized according to their price on the shop’s window. I think this woman wants to leave her dog with me, and the idea doesn’t bother me. I picture myself walking at night with Daisy, painting her little house in my yard blue, cooking a corn flour meal for her every night.
“Are you taking Daisy with you?”
“No,” says the woman. “We have been trying to find someone who would keep her.”
Annie looks back at me, quite serious.
“If you take her, I would like to come to visit,” she says. “Think about that too.”
I nod.
“I’d be glad to keep Daisy. Thanks for thinking of me.”
“Your parents, would they want to take the dog too?” Asks Ana.
“I live by myself.”
The woman looks at my breasts, so small. I know I still look like a teenager.
“I know Ms. Valii,” she says. “She used to take care of this store when she opened it.”
“Ms. Valii opened another store near the high school. I help her here.”
“We leave on Saturday,” the woman says. “We can pass by your house and leave Daisy and her things in the morning.”
I draw a little map for Ana, explaining to her how to get to my house. She knows my neighbors, but it seems she has never heard of my family’s name. She doesn’t insist on finding out, though. Before they leave, Annie comes to the counter and extends her arm to shake my hand. I think she is serious about coming to visit the dog. “Thank you,” she says.

When I was little, perhaps around Annie’s age, I used to go swim in a pond near a river. Once I found a bird’s leg, it was pink and had its muscles still intact. I could pull one of the hair-like nerves and make its toes move as they would if the leg was still attached to a living bird. The kids are going out to play now, they are laughing out loud, and I can see them through the mesh, eating on their wooden tables, pigeons landing by their side, looking for crumbs. My own little bird is chirping outside the store, and two other brown ones accompany him this time. A man passes by on his bike and scares them away from the door. They come back, but I don’t feel like feeding them now.
I am still thinking of Annie. She looks eight, the age the girl we cast for the movie probably is now. I never saw her again, we paid her mother for the yellow dress the girl wore for her scenes, but that was it. Once we finished, I told the girl she was very talented, even though she actually was a mediocre actress. She believed me, and gave me a look that made me think that I had just created a future theatre student. I couldn’t think of anything else to say to her. She seemed happy the whole time, she was five and already acting and she had been told she was good.
“Do you ever think of death?” I asked Lulu when we got to my house that night.
She didn’t say anything, but hugged me very strongly. My skin was still red that night, even after I showered, it turns out that blood doesn’t wash away so easily. I would like to remember, exactly, the way I felt then, the things I had in my mind, so I can catch the same train of thought again and follow it as far as I can. I sometimes think that the evil-force dream that I have is really that voice in my head calling me back, telling me to go inside and decide by myself whether I want to be alive.
My fear is that I still may want to die. The day after shooting that scene, Cris came to my house. I was in my pajamas, but tried to look awake. He told me that his brother had bought two chickens but that their blood didn’t seem enough, so that he had had to go to the old town and chase one of the street dogs that live around garbage cans, famished. I almost vomited. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It is not true. We could never do anything like that to you. I thought you’d laugh.” I must have looked very upset, because Cris apologized all day, and from then on acted as if he owed me something, as if he was in debt to me. I felt naked. It was as if he had understood that the story was something other than just a tale, and he knew it before I myself admitted it.

It is noon, and the parents are now arriving at the school to pick up their kids. I see some mothers talking to each other, laughing, and now the school’s siren goes off as if there were an ambulance fleet about to exit from the classrooms. A man enters and asks me to photocopy a notebook. “From ‘The Noun’ to ‘Adverbs’,” he explains, showing me the yellow phosphorescent titles in child’s hand-writing that mark the beginning and the end. Sometimes parents do that; ask for other children’s notes for their own kids to catch up. I don’t sell anything else after he leaves.
At three, I go for lunch down the street to the gas station. I usually eat in the little café they have for the customers. I don’t want to pass by the empty house. I walk on the opposite sidewalk, but Annie sees me and beckons me with her hand. She is still wearing her uniform, a brown and white pleated skirt and a white blouse that has a brown mark on the collar, Annie’s sweat.
“Daisy is pregnant,” she says. “My mom didn’t tell you that, but I think you should know.”
“Is that why you want to come to visit, to see the puppies?”
“Yes.”
“I might have to give them away.”
“I know,” Annie says. “As long as you don’t kill them.”