IN/FIDELITY
TWO SHORT STORIES BY CARLA KINZO
Art by eylül doğanay
Translator’s Note
‘Little Dipper’ and ‘She’s My Friend’ appeared originally in Carla Kinzo’s first book of fiction, Ursa menor (Little Dipper, 2024), a collection of brief stories or flash fiction, most under 1,000 words in length. All the stories focus on female characters, whose lives are mostly absent of men. Each story offers a glimpse of the protagonist in an everyday setting or situations in Little Dipper, we see a young mother alone at home with her newborn; in She’s My Friend, an older woman who owns a café talks about another woman.
As in the collection’s other stories, certain formal elements in these two appear to reflect the author’s work as a playwright. They are structured on two of the three Aristotelian unities, those of time and space, thus encapsulating the characters’ lives within epigrammatic scenes. As for action, it takes place mostly in the protagonists’ thoughts and imagination, in what is implied or insinuated, with very little actually happening. Kinzo has said that she is interested in exploring ways of blurring the limits among literary genres (personal email, Oct 7, 2025). While the structure of her stories is often suggestive of the theater, some of her plays establish a meta dialogue with prose and other genres, as for example, her 2018 play Eu sou essa outra (I’m this other woman), based on Liv Ullmann’s 1976 autobiography Changing (Portuguese title, Mutações).
One of the most compelling aspects of Kinzo’s style is her tendency for sparsity and economy of language. Kinzo makes use of pauses, silences, omissions, and suggestions, letting the reader to fill in the gaps. These fissures reveal tensions between her characters’ physical realities and inner fears and apprehensions, as in Little Dipper, or between their motives and dissimulations, as in She’s My Friend.
Kinzo strives to reproduce her characters’ speech patterns and inner thoughts, whilst also highlighting the starkness of her plots, by using short sentences and distinctive punctuation. For example, Little Dipper opens with a paragraph composed by a series of short sentences separated by periods and by slightly longer sentences wherein the clauses are separated by commas, instead of conjunctions or other connectors. The author conveys thus the barrage of worries assailing the protagonist. Kinzo’s diction and syntax present a challenge to her translator and call for creative solutions. In Little Dipper, for example, the narrator describes house plants that withstand direct sunlight and little water, as “rebeldes”—directly translated, “rebellious” or “headstrong”—an uncommon adjective to describe plants. I opted for “stubborn,” which conveys a human attribute and maintains the author’s intended meaning, instead of “hardy.” This story contains many such examples, like the protagonist’s reaction to the mold on the walls, which is described as an almost animated being with free will. Her reaction blurs the line between reality and imagination, while underscoring the character’s loneliness, sense of confinement, and desire to escape her reality.
In She’s My Friend, the protagonist-narrator seems to be an honest and understanding person who is fond of the woman she describes. She speaks in short sentences and phrases, recounting snippets of conversations she has had with others (marked in the text by italics). Yet, the narrator leaves much for the reader to infer. The little she does say suggests she may be an unreliable narrator and urges the reader to question this friendship and her fidelity to her “friend.” For example, she claims the other woman is “lonely” but also states that they don’t really tell each other much. Are they really friends or is the other’s presence just “good for business”?
If the narrator’s fidelity to her “friend” is questionable, Kinzo’s infidelity to the short story genre is undisputable. Her woman-centered stories undermine the idea of a plotline, blur the distinction between reality and unreality, and mislead the less attentive reader. Likewise, her writing opens a space of tension wherein the balance between fidelity and infidelity to the original text encourages and demands the translator’s creativity.
—Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey
TWO SHORT STORIES
Translated from the Portuguese by Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey
Little Dipper
She gave birth three weeks ago. She’s still sore, the baby in her arms. Always in her arms. She fears he’ll forget how to suckle, fears she’ll forget how to angle her nipple in the right direction to his small mouth. A woman’s nipples grow larger and darker so that babies can see them. Babies have big eyes to appeal to caregivers. Her baby has dark eyes. Newborns don’t see well, and she can’t sleep anymore. It took him a full week to latch on properly, he lost more than a pound, lucky he was born a little chubby. Many hours in labor, how many? She doesn’t remember, never really knew. She doesn’t have a mother, just a few female friends. Her husband works every night. She’s afraid. Of lying down and squishing her son, of closing her eyes and dropping him. She holds him in her lap and grips the armchair.
Huddled in the chair with the baby, she notices something different about the room: a dark stain on a forgotten part of the wall, improbable because the sun hits precisely there. It’s the best place for her most stubborn plants, the ones that require direct sunlight and little water like her cacti and various pothos. Faintly outlined, it’s not exactly a stain—she wouldn’t have noticed it if she hadn’t been obsessively staring at the room’s empty walls and unfurnished corners. That’s what she does when she’s on her own: stare.
Because the spot has become a sort of companion, a subtle highlight of her days, she begins to follow that white dwarf’s process of transformation into a red giant, its process of death and expansion. Its contours, initially barely visible, have started to expand uncontrollably outwards, multiplying in new small, dark, sometimes greyish, dots. A strangely contained explosion, as if expanding in slow motion. A cellular division. She positions her armchair below what she now realizes is mold, so that she can try to watch its unimaginable growth with her naked eye: one dot and then two, then another dot, and another. All those seemingly insignificant fibrous bodies cluster to form a somewhat sad-looking sky, but a sky, nevertheless. It’s something she can look at and try to understand: the three hours it takes for the cellular mass of mold to double, according to the manuals; or for that celestial body to trace a random path on the ceiling, according to her eyes. A body both celestial and terrestrial. A damp, insistent point. She’d never try to get rid of that brave life form sprouting willfully on the wall, appearing and growing there for no reason, under so much light and in the middle of so much emptiness.
Slowly and relentlessly, the dark and unstoppable living mass begins to spread from the corner to the whole ceiling, devastating, like ruins viewed from above. If she really looks, if she looks quietly and attentively, she can distinguish miniscule movements among its newer points—and the sound, so low it is shrill, of mold fibers snapping as they break apart to reach the other side.
At these times, she almost reaches her hand toward a filament, as if she is begging to be rescued from something that is crashing down. It occurs to her then that maybe it’s the mass of tiny bodies looking up from below at her and the baby, that they’re standing above it. Maybe it’s her son and her—in their dense bodies, apparently more complex and with more sophisticated ligaments than the points on the wall—that are like distant ruins, with their feeding-time noises; their short walks from the bedroom to the kitchen, the hallway to the bathroom; her strangely high-pitched crying, and his, strangely low. But so what if she looks like a wreck? She can be the sky for that monumental, yet ordinary wall constellation; but how can a single life, appearing from an invisible point, be two different things? There’s so much mystery in mold. She doesn’t mind staying awake with the baby if she can stare at all that just a little longer. Once in a while, she even forgets her own thirst—though she never forgets to spray water in that part of her home when it’s hot. She infinitely postpones purchasing a crib and begins to dream of the day she’ll have the courage to create new types of molds, in other colors and shapes. Her baby stares at her nipple; she, at the adventure unfolding on the wall.
After several months, the blackened ceiling realizes she’s smiling. It begins to suspect that she is daydreaming of the various fruits that will come to rot in this room and breed new mold, the greenish type that grows in apples or papayas and is formed by groups of slight, white filaments, like the North star.
She’s My Friend
People usually roll their eyes when I say she’s my friend. My husband used to do the same, God bless his soul. Perhaps I too roll my eyes when I say, she’s my friend. It’s almost unintentional. It sounds strange when I say it out loud, I think my voice lowers a pitch after, my. friend. “Oh,” the other person replies, and sometimes, “Oh, really?” trying in that oh, in that really, to hide their hesitation, their embarrassment, their suppressed disbelief, oh… Sometimes their perplexity continues in broken, awkward phrases, “Oh gee, but you two are so different, I had no idea, it’s just that you’re such a nice person.” I’m not. We’re different, she and I, but we have plenty in common. She’s been coming here for over thirty years. It began with her stopping by for cigarettes once a week. Back then, my hair was still black, hers already showed some white, and I couldn’t have imagined that one day, she, of all people, would be my friend. She, so unsociable and busy, always writing and carrying a stack of books, and I, well, I run a café and tobacco shop.
After coming in for many months just to buy cigarettes, one day she decided to stay for a smoke. From there, ordering a coffee didn’t take long. For over thirty years, she’s sat outside three times a week, her chair up against the glass door. I go over and wipe the table, I don’t have to ask, nor does she have to say anything. I bring her double espresso the way she likes it, a small glass of sparkling water, which she almost never drinks but I never fail to serve. If there’s a client who probably won’t drink the sparkling water, it’s her—my friend. I don’t mind this little bit of waste. Her stomach is too delicate for such light, bubbly things. She didn’t enjoy the tiny cookies I experimented with serving on the saucer some fifteen years ago either. She would always return them untouched. I stopped serving them with coffee orders. Over the course of the years, her stomach began to determine the direction the café took: no frills. Even after new cafés sprouted up everywhere, serving sweet breads, pastries, four different types of sugar. Some twenty years ago, we began to almost chat. It must’ve had something to do with our ageing eyes. Mine don’t see very well from a distance and they began to linger on tables; hers, more tired than mine, had to look up from her papers every so often. The advantage of nearsighted people is that they see things those with perfect eyesight cannot.
I’m not sure if it was me who wanted to be her friend, or if she wanted to be mine, but she noticed me. I began to ask about the books, curious to read them. I could figure out if what she was reading was just a bit bad or really bad from the way her cigarette dangled from her lips. I don’t always agree with my friend—as is the case with most of my clients who’ve been coming here as long as she has. Some of them are the authors.
Her reaction to their taunts amazes me. I’ve heard all kinds of things, she’s heard all kinds of things: “I’ve heard she tried to write a novel,” “she doesn’t have vocal cords,” “she killed her husband,” “she has an extra X chromosome.” People mock her, “Look, the female vampire of Dusseldorf!” It bothers me. But she just peers over her glasses and does what she has to do. Holding her cigarette between her coffee-stained teeth, she stares at the person, smiles, and gets back to writing. “I don’t know how you can put up with this woman.” It’s because she’s my friend.
Oh… really? If the person seems very disappointed by my admission, I don’t charge them for their coffee. If they try to disguise their disappointment, I offer them a piece of candy along with their change. I want them to come back. Most often, I pat the back of their disillusioned hand lightly, “Let it go, she’s lonely.”
And it’s true, she is a lonely person. Or she must be. She’s my friend, but we don’t talk about certain things. She comes in, buys her cigarettes, doesn’t have to say which brand, doesn’t smile, sits down, I bring her coffee, we exchange glances, she talks about the book she’s reviewing. “It sucks,” she says, handing me the volume, “Here, keep it,” and I’m set for the week. If an author comes in to buy cigarettes, have a coffee, or get a glimpse of my friend, I say, “I’m reading your book.” It’s a sure shot, they’ll come back.
This is all really good for business, her sitting over there, and me at the counter, talking about the books. “Are you enjoying it? I bet the old bag isn’t.” We’re a good team, she and I.
I almost always like the books, though I don’t know anything about literature. I only know about the business, the customers. Reading does me good, especially after losing my husband. Thanks to this friendship, my library has grown; I don’t feel so alone when I close the shop and go home. My husband passed eighteen years ago, I didn’t have to say much to my friend. She understood and began to gift me books. “That’s junk, read it if you can stomach it.”
TWO SHORT STORIES
By Carla Kinzo
Ursa menor
Pariu há três semanas. Ainda dolorida, o bebê no colo. Sempre no colo. O medo de que ele se esqueça como mamar, de que ela própria não se lembre do ângulo certo do bico na direção da boquinha. As aréolas aumentam e ficam escuras para que os bebês possam vê-las. Os bebês têm olhos grandes para atrair cuidadores. Seu bebê tem olhos escuros. Os recém-nascidos não enxergam direito e ela não dorme mais; foram sete dias para que ele pegasse o peito, quinhentos gramas a menos, que bom que nasceu gordinho. Muitas horas de parto, quantas? Não se lembra, nunca soube. Sem mãe, poucas amigas, o marido no trabalho todas as noites, ela tem medo. Se deitar e esmagar o filho, fechar os olhos e derrubá-lo, segue com ele no colo, agarrada à poltrona.
Sentada nela e embolada no neném, notou algo diferente na sala. Uma mancha escura numa porção esquecida da parede, em um lugar improvável porque atacado pelo sol. Sítio das plantas mais rebeldes, as que precisam de luz direta e pouca água, era ali que ficavam os cactos e algumas jiboias. Com contornos diminutos, o ponto não era bem uma mancha—e não teria sido visto, se ela não encarasse obsessivamente as paredes vazias e os cantos sem móveis. Era o que fazia por si mesma, olhar.
Como o ponto era agora uma espécie de companhia, de acontecimento sutil dos dias, começou a seguir o processo de transformação daquela anã branca em uma gigante vermelha, seu processo de morte e expansão. As bordas, no início pouco visíveis, passaram a se estender de modo desordenado para os lados, multiplicando-se, estranhamente contida, em câmera lenta. Uma divisão celular. Posicionou a poltrona debaixo do que começou a entender ser um bolor, só para tentar ver o movimento impossível a olho nu, um ponto e outro ponto e outro ponto e outro. A soma dos corpos filamentosos aparentemente insignificantes formava um céu talvez entristecido, mas ainda assim um céu. Era algo para onde olhar e tentar enxergar. As três horas em que os fungos dobram sua massa celular, segundo os manuais. O caminho sem sentido daquela coisa celeste no teto, segundo seus olhos. Celeste e terrestre. Um ponto úmido e insistente. Nunca tentaria se livrar daquela vida aguerrida, brotada por teimosia, surgida e crescida ali porque sim, mesmo debaixo da luz, em meio a tanto vazio.
Lenta e incessante, a massa viva e escura e incontida foi se estendendo do canto ao resto do teto, devastadora, como ruínas vistas de cima. Se olhasse bem, se olhasse realmente e em silêncio, capturava um movimento minúsculo das pintas mais jovens—e o som, tão agudo de tão grave, dos estalos das fibras de mofo se quebrando para alcançar o outro lado.
Nessas horas, quase estendia uma das mãos para alcançar um ligamento, como quem pede para ser salva de algo que desaba. Foi quando percebeu que talvez fosse aquela massa de corpos miúdos que os visse de baixo, ela e o bebê, e ambos estivessem em cima; talvez fosse ela e o filho, com seus corpos massudos, aparentemente mais complexos e com ligações mais sofisticadas que as dos pontos na parede, que parecessem ruínas vistas de longe—com seus ruídos de mamadas, caminhadas pequenas do quarto à cozinha, do corredor ao banheiro, o choro estranhamente agudo dela, estranhamente grave dele. Mas e daí se parecesse arruinada? Agora podia ser um céu para aquela constelação monumental e ordinária na parede; como podia ser duas coisas diferentes aquela vida única, surgida de um ponto invisível? Tanto mistério nos fungos. Não se importava em seguir acordada, sozinha com o bebê, se fosse para ver tudo aquilo um pouco mais. De vez em quando esquecia a sede, mas nunca de borrifar um pouco d’água sobre aquela parte da casa em dias quentes; adiou para sempre a compra de um bercinho, e começou a sonhar com o dia em que tivesse coragem para criar outros tipos de bolores, outras cores, formatos. O bebê mirava sua aréola; ela, a aventura na parede.
Depois de meses, o teto pretejado percebeu que ela sorria. Passou a desconfiar que aquela mãe devaneava com frutas que pudessem apodrecer na sala para dar espaço a fungos novos, dos que se acomodam em mamões ou maçãs, meio esverdeados e com agrupamentos de fiapos mínimos, brancos como uma estrela polar.
É minha amiga
O pessoal costuma virar os olhos quando digo que é minha amiga. Meu marido fazia isso também, que Deus o tenha. Talvez eu também vire os olhos quando digo é minha amiga. É quase sem querer. Parece estranha a frase em voz alta, acho que meu timbre sai um pouco mais grave depois do minha. Amiga. Ah, a pessoa do outro lado responde, às vezes é um Ah, é?, tentando não demonstrar, no ah, no é, a dúvida, o constrangimento, um espanto engolido, ah. . . Às vezes a confusão continua nas frases quebradas e sem graça, nossa, mas vocês são tão diferentes, não imaginava, é que você é uma pessoa boa. Não sou. Somos diferentes, ela e eu, mas o que temos em comum basta. Faz mais de trinta anos que ela vem. Começou com o tabaco, uma vez por semana. Naquela época meu cabelo ainda era preto, o dela já mechado de branco e eu não imaginava que um dia ela, justo ela, ia ser minha amiga. Ela tão insociável, atarefada, sempre escrevendo, cheia de livros e eu, bom, eu comando um café.
Depois de um tempo vindo só pelo tabaco, ela resolveu ficar pra fumar. Daí pro café foi rápido. Ela se senta lá fora três vezes por semana há mais de trinta anos, a cadeira encostada na porta de vidro. Venho, passo o pano, não preciso perguntar nem ela pedir. Trago o expresso duplo como ela gosta, a água com gás no copinho que ela quase não toma e que não deixo de trazer. Se tem uma cliente que pode não beber a água com gás é ela, a minha amiga. Não me incomoda esse desperdício curto. Seu estômago não foi feito para coisas leves e gaseificadas. Também não recebe bem os docinhos que testei no pires, há uns quinze anos. Voltavam intactos. Acabei tirando de todos os cafés. O estômago dela foi dando a medida certa da tabacaria nesses anos, me conteve do dispensável, ainda mais depois que esses cafés se espalharam, cheios de pãezinhos, docinhos, quatro tipos de açúcar. Faz uns vinte anos que quase começamos a conversar. Deve ter tido algo a ver com nossas vistas envelhecerem. A minha não vê muito bem de longe e passou a cair nas mesas; os olhos dela, mais cansados, tinham de se levantar muitas vezes do papel. A vantagem dos míopes é enxergar onde as grandes vistas não pegam.
Não sei se fui eu quem quis ser sua amiga. Se foi ela quem quis ser minha amiga, mas ela me viu. Passei a saber dos livros, quis ler mais. Dá pra perceber se o que ela lê é só ruim ou muito ruim pelo jeito como o cigarro pende da boca. Nem sempre concordo com minha amiga—como a maioria dos meus clientes, que vêm há quase tanto tempo quanto ela. Alguns são os escritores.
Me admira sua reação às provocações, “dizem que tentou escrever um romance”, “que não tem as cordas vocais”, “que matou o marido”, “que tem um cromossomo X a mais”. Ouvi de tudo, ela ouviu de tudo. O pessoa reage, “olha a vampira de Dusseldorf”. Isso mexe comigo. Ela só levanta a vista dos óculos faz o que tem de fazer. Encara a pessoa, aperta o cigarro com os dentes gastos de café, sorri, volta a escrever. “Não sei como você aguenta essa sujeita”. É que ela é minha amiga. Ah. . . é? Se a pessoa fica muito desapontada com a revelação, deixo o cafezinho fiado. Se tenta disfarçar a decepção, enfio uma bala no troco, quero que a pessoa volte. Na maioria das vezes, dou uma batidinha no dorso da mão desiludida, “deixa, ela é solitária”.
E é mesmo, uma pessoa solitária. Ou deve ser. É minha amiga, mas não falamos as coisas. Ela vem, compra o tabaco, não precisa dizer a marca, não sorri, se senta, sirvo o café, nossos olhares se cruzam, ela fala do livro resenhado, “uma porcaria”, me estende o volume, “toma, fica”, está feita minha semana. Se o autor vem comprar tabaco, tomar café ou espiar minha amiga, digo: “Estou lendo seu livro”. É tiro e queda, eles voltam.
Tudo isso faz um bem enorme aos negócios, ela sentada ali e eu aqui, falando dos livros no balcão. “Tá gostando? Aposto que a bruaca não”. Somos uma dupla boa, ela e eu.
Gosto quase sempre, mas não sei nada de literatura. Entendo de comércio, clientela. Ler me faz bem, ainda mais depois que fiquei viúva. Minha biblioteca aumentou com essa amizade, não me sinto só depois de fechar a tabacaria e voltar pra casa. Fez dezoito anos que meu marido se foi, nem precisei dizer nada à minha amiga na época. Ela me ouviu e começou a me dar livros de presente. “É uma droga, lê se tem coragem”.
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Carla Kinzo, born in São Paulo in 1980, graduated in Film Studies and in Literature from the University of São Paulo (USP) and holds an MA and a PhD in Literature, also from USP. Her short story collection Ursa menor (Little Dipper, 2024), was awarded a State of São Paulo ProAC grant in 2022 and placed third in the National Library Foundation Clarice Lispector Prize in 2024. Her 2019 poetry collection Satélite (Satellite) won the City of São Paulo Book Publishing Award and was a finalist for the Nascente Prize. Her play Dear Kafka (co-written with Marcos Gomes) was awarded the APCA – São Paulo Association of Arts Critics in 2022.
Uroš Bojanović was born in Teslić, Bosnia, in 1991. He has published four collections of poetry. English translations of his poems have been published or are forthcoming in Asymptote Journal and Exchanges. His original poems have been published in Balkan literary magazines like ARS, Kritična masa, Zarez, Tema, Polja, Strane, Poezije, and Fantom slobode. Additionally, his work was included in an anthology of Balkan poets called Soft Tissue. Bojanović lives in Belgrade, Serbia.
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Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey is a writer, scholar, and translator of Brazilian literature, with a special interest in works by female authors. She has a PhD in Latin American literatures from Tulane University and was a college professor for many years. Pinto-Bailey has translated fiction, poetry, and non-fiction by writers such as Maria Valéria Rezende, Conceição Evaristo, and Cristiane Sobral, among others. Her translations have appeared in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, The Ilanot Review, Absinthe: World Literature in Translation, Latin American Literature Today, and other venues. Pinto-Bailey translated, and wrote the critical introduction for, Maria Firmina dos Reis’s abolitionist novel Ursula (1859; Tagus, 2022), the first novel by a Black Brazilian woman. She is also a regular reviewer of books in translation for World Literature Today.