{"id":11252,"date":"2025-07-10T17:59:39","date_gmt":"2025-07-10T15:59:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/?p=11252"},"modified":"2025-07-10T18:36:05","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T16:36:05","slug":"nix-a-short-story-by-carina-bacelar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/nix-a-short-story-by-carina-bacelar\/","title":{"rendered":"NIX – A SHORT STORY BY CARINA BACELAR"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inside, for the first time, the kitchen is in no hurry. Standing there alone, with no bounds to any item in that kitchen, I suddenly see all the containers, all the appliances, all the spices on the shelves and all the colors of the eternally streaked cabinets, eternal yet unprecedented, like looking at a well-known body plated up in a coffin. When something ends, its edges acquire a hardened geometry. The twilight has grown quite a bit darker since I got lost in these thoughts, and I refocus on the only reason for this visit. So I grab a soup spoon, get the purple packet from the pantry, and proceed to break the setting silence in the living room:<\/span><\/p>\n

Where ‘s Nini?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nobody shows up. I try again. Nothing. The strange sensation of speaking to one, listening to my own voice isolated in this place. My voice and that living room, so many times, Christmases, Antonio’s birthdays, the day I showed the printed flyer of my first exhibition, my finger on the plastic smoothness of the pages, Ana saying you’ll go far, girl, but did I go too far? Answerless, I search through the apartment rooms, starting with the parents’ bedroom. The bed made, the cream sisal bedspread slightly stained, the sweetness of those who tolerate mishaps, spills, and hopefully they’ll tolerate mine too. The mural with travel destinations, the same couple smiling in front of monuments and tourist spots, all awkward poses, no wonder I\u2019ve always called Jorge a boomer. I look under the bed, in the ensuite bathroom, I’ve already checked the balcony and nothing. Back to the living room, I call out once more in vain. Maybe I should cross the frontier I’ve been trying to avoid: Antonio’s room. There, the same mess from when we met at the end of college, the desk\u00a0 filled with coins and important documents and stickers and paper clips and papers, prescriptions for allergies and World Cup album stickers. I check for our photos that used to be in frames at the bedside table, dorky photos: me, giving him a little kiss on the cheek with my hair still long and windblown, a selfie of drunken smiles at someone\u2019s birthday party. But the small table is empty. When I turn sideways, they’re all together, stuffed in a corner of the desk, removed from their usual places as etiquette requires in these situations. I reach for the stack of images and examine them one by one, any sign of anger, a crumpled corner in the paper? The photos seem intact though, covered by a thin layer of dust only.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nix doesn’t seem to be there either. I call once more. Back to the hallway, I open the door to the small bathroom with red walls, nothing. The towels hanging in the shower stall are dry \u2013 everybody has been at the beach house for two days. When Antonio asked me the favor, in a few words message, he said that only I could do this, she was used to me and you know how she hides, yes I know, that’s the only reason I haven’t panicked yet, and they needed to be sure that the person in charge would find her, would make sure she was okay, eating properly, drinking water, asked me to watch her eat a meal and give them news. Of course, I’ll take care of it. The next second, I regretted accepting. The second after the next second, I thought I would never have been able to refuse.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Back to the living room, there she is. Nix comes out from the sofa area and approaches the intersection with the hallway to Antonio’s room. She comes to me slowly. Hi! Remember me? Of course she remembers, she has to remember, it hasn’t even been a month since I last set foot on this house. She stops and looks at me. I get down on all fours and crawl in her direction. She stretches towards me without leaving her spot, and for a moment we stay like this, similar and frozen. Nix always disappears among the furniture when there are visitors in the house. And for years she treated me as a visitor. In the last few months, when I was secretly considering to stop coming to the house, Nix finally approached me. On weekends, she would watch TV on my lap, spend minutes receiving pets, to everyone’s surprise. She loves you, Antonio would say, and Ana would add that I had received the final approval to enter the family, which somehow disturbed me: was that a sign? For yes? For no? Maybe Nix knew, through some supersonic, unreproducible language, that I was about to leave. And decided to see me. Maybe she had seen everything even before I did, in what perhaps every human emanates in these hours in superhuman language, subhuman language. Or maybe not.<\/span><\/p>\n

Keeping Nix on my sight, I open the little packet and put a small pasty food portion on the spoon. She had been eating little, Antonio said, and this was the only way to make sure she would eat enough. She keeps looking at me, motionless. I extend the spoon and she sniffs, quickly licking it. Come on, sweetie, eat. She hesitates, takes a suspicious bite of the paste, but continues and makes it disappear. So I serve another portion and she repeats the sequence, stares at me, hesitates, tongue first. She chews slowly, swallows even slower, my knees start to hurt from waiting, pressed by my body weight against the hard floor that’s cold even at the height of Rio de Janeiro’s summer, but I insist with the spoonfuls, until there’s only a thin broth left. She doesn’t want it anymore. Nix, please, just one more. Sulking, she retracts. I set the spoon on the floor, a few inches from me. She undoes her position and gets closer. She approaches me, and when I think she’s going for the food and my duty will be fulfilled with total success, she passes past the spoon, stops next to me and places her paw on my hand\u00a0 on the floor. I see her small\u00a0 black paw on the back of my hand, follow to the green of her eyes, then I dive into Nix’s green and so open eyes as if they were a pool, the pool that Antonio and I jumped into in the middle of a party and which, although it wasn’t instant love, I don’t even know if I believe in that, was of a sweetness similar to the sharp affection of a little meow, arms open, a small laugh that flattened all the other party guests, there I disbelieved in minutes as it happens when we find everything that is truly good, like jumping fully clothed into a pool with newly met stranger at a New Year’s Eve party, this date that is going to repeat itself in a few days and we won’t see each other, he’ll be at his relatives’ beach house and I’ll be at a friend’s penthouse full of nameless faces, as he once was, but I’m afraid that never again a stranger will have in the depths of their life a house with an actress mother and photos taken at ridiculous angles and musical instruments hanging in the bedroom playing little meows inside green eyes. Upon my hand, a fuzzy black thing that says it’s okay, and I don’t even know if it really says it’s okay but I hear it clearly, clearly without any sound, without language, without words, I know by the shape of the four united fingers that form that small paw, the four humans that would occupy that house on weekends, in that tiny weight on my hand, I hear it clearly in subhuman, superhuman language. And when Nix removes her paw I see myself the size of a microbe on the dome of her eyes, I see myself as I am, and in a somewhat ridiculous way, I hear myself speak after so much silence: thank you, my friend. See you next time. Before leaving, I look for Nix and I don’t find her, and when I turn off the kitchen light, the last light to turn off, I see two small stars in the distance, and I try to outline within myself the twinkling holes in the night so that I don’t forget them, so that they remain exact somewhere within me, but we can never guarantee that something will stay forever. Unless we take photographs, like the ones Antonio sent two months later, Nix sitting calmly on my lap, on his parents’ living room sofa, about two weeks before we separated. Your friend passed away today, he said. Below, two black heart emojis, like <\/span>her paws.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

Carina Bacelar is a Brazilian journalist and writer born in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Her debut book,\u00a0As Despedidas<\/em> (The Farewells), was published in 2021 and won the national Mozart Pereira Soares Award for young authors.<\/p>\n

In 2024, she published the chapbook\u00a0Dancing Queen<\/em>\u00a0as part of Editora Mapa Lab’s\u00a0Aqui+Agora<\/em>\u00a0(Here+Now) collection. Her stories have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including\u00a0Festa<\/em>\u00a0(Editora Aboio), Revista Tra\u00e7os, and Pr\u00eamio Off Flip. She also writes\u00a0Arte na Praia<\/a><\/em>, a monthly newsletter on Substack (in Portuguese).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inside, for the first time, the kitchen is in no hurry. Standing there alone, with no bounds to any item in that kitchen, I suddenly see all the containers, all the appliances, all the spices on the shelves and all the colors of the eternally streaked cabinets, eternal yet unprecedented, like looking at a well-known […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":11277,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,108],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11252"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11252"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11352,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11252\/revisions\/11352"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yun-berlin.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}