Nina came to awareness the way you sometimes come to the surface from a bad dream—slowly, unwillingly, with the taste of it still in your mouth. Darkness pressed in on her from all sides, damp and close. The air smelled like wet stone and old pennies; it tasted like the underside of a life you don’t talk about. When she inhaled, her lungs complained as if they had forgotten what clean air was supposed to feel like. Above her there was a circle of light: not a tunnel, not a passage, not even an invitation—just a distant, indifferent coin of day suspended in the mouth of the world. She was at the bottom of a well, and the fact of it did not feel like an event so much as a diagnosis.
Her knees were pulled up to her chest, arms wrapped around them so tightly her fingers ached, and she could feel her own trembling as a physical thing. Not fear alone—fear was sharp, bright, and quick—but something heavier, something with a slower pulse, like a blanket soaked in river water. Beside her, something shifted with the quiet authority of the inevitable.
A dog sat in the dark. Black as a bruise, black as an unspoken thought. Its fur drank what little light made it down to the well’s floor, and the animal was close enough that Nina could feel its warmth through the thin fabric of her dress. Its eyes held the coin of daylight in two small, steady moons, and when Nina looked at it she felt her throat tighten as if sorrow had hands and those hands had chosen to squeeze. “No,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure what she meant by it—no to the dog, no to the well, no to the way a life could fold in on itself until it resembled a hole.
The dog’s ears flicked. It didn’t move away. It didn’t come closer. It simply stayed, the way certain thoughts stayed—quiet until you tried to ignore them, then suddenly right beside you again, breathing.
She turned her face into her knees and cried until her throat burned. The sound did strange things in that cramped stone throat of a place: it came back to her distorted, multiplied, as if other Ninas were crying too—an echo chamber of selves, a chorus of the same wound. That was the worst part. Not the darkness. Not the cold. The way grief reproduced itself when given walls. And then, because memory had always been a cruel animal, it came: not all at once, not neatly, but in a flicker-show of moments that had no business being so vivid down here. A kitchen table, two adults arguing so hard their faces looked stretched, rubbery with rage. A child’s hands on the edge of the table, fingers white. Laughter in a school corridor, thin and merciless, like rats in the walls. A workplace hallway where people walked past her as if she were a coat rack. A dinner with friends, glasses raised, her smile so practiced it felt like a muscle spasm. Dancing in someone’s arms, the music warm, her heart trying—God, trying—to believe it could belong somewhere. The soft embrace of an older woman who smelled like soap and lavender, the kind of hug that said I see you. Then a man’s face close, too close, words sharp enough to cut, a fight that ended with silence so thick it could suffocate. The montage stopped as abruptly as it began, leaving her with the black dog’s steady breathing beside her, patient, almost kind—the particular mercy of something that does not need to hurry because it trusts you will return to it.
That was how it got you, Nina thought. Not with teeth. With company.
She forced herself upright. The stone scraped her back. Her dress was smeared with black residue—soot, algae, something ancient, as if the well had been waiting long enough to develop its own sediment of sadness. She looked up at that ring of light and felt something inside her twist: desire and despair braided together. That’s the way out, she told herself. That’s the only way out. She stood, legs unsteady, and placed her hands against the well wall. It looked climbable in the way certain promises looked believable when you were young: if you just wanted it badly enough, if you just tried hard enough, something would give. But when she searched for a seam, a crack, anything—there was nothing. The stone was too smooth, hard and slick, like it had been polished by years of hopeless hands. Nina tried anyway, because the mind repeats what it knows even when what it knows is failure. Her nails rasped; her palms stung; she dug her toes against nothing and pushed until her calf muscles screamed. She rose maybe six inches before her foot slipped and she slammed back down hard enough to see stars. Pain bloomed in her shoulder; tears came again, hot and humiliating, as if humiliation were another layer of the well’s dampness. The dog barked once—not loud, not warning, more like punctuation at the end of an ugly sentence. Nina glared at it through watery eyes. “Shut up.” The dog’s tail thumped once on the stone. She hated that it sounded almost like agreement.
She tried again and again, each attempt ending the same way: a few inches of false progress, the slick betrayal of stone, the well taking petty satisfaction in returning her to the floor. After the fourth fall she sat with her back against the wall and stared at the light until it blurred. It would have been easy—so easy—to stop, to fold into herself, to let the well swallow her one slow day at a time. To become a story nobody told because it was too sad, too ordinary. Her chin dipped, eyelids fluttering, and she could almost feel the weight of surrender settling over her shoulders like a shawl. The dog inched closer. Nina didn’t move away. She pressed her forehead into its fur—coarse, warm—and grabbed a fistful of it, not caring if she hurt the animal, as if she could anchor herself to a living thing and keep from drifting into whatever waited at the bottom of giving up. “I can’t,” she whispered. The dog leaned into her. Not pushing. Not pulling. Just present. And in that contact—so ordinary it felt like a trick—Nina realized something: the dog hadn’t pushed her into the well. It hadn’t locked her in, hadn’t laughed at her or told her she was worthless. It had simply followed her down, a companion to misery, a witness to the thing she’d been trying not to name. The dog was not the cause. It was the shape of the consequence.
Nina wiped her face with the heel of her hand and tasted salt and stone. She looked up again. The light hadn’t moved. The well didn’t care about time; the well had all of it. But something was different—or maybe she was. The wall, still smooth, now seemed to have notches: tiny re-entrances, places her fingers might hook, barely there, like the world offering help in a whisper so it could deny it later. She stood slowly, as if she were afraid the thought might break if she moved too fast, and tested one notch with her fingertips. Real. Another, higher. Real. A shiver ran through her that wasn’t fear. “Okay,” she said, and her voice sounded unfamiliar in the well, like the voice of someone who might actually make it. She climbed. It wasn’t graceful. It wasn’t heroic. It was ugly work: knees scraping, nails cracking, breath ragged. Her foot slipped twice; she banged her shin and swore, and the well answered with her own curse bounced back at her like mockery. But she kept moving, because the body is sometimes braver than the story the mind tells about it. Halfway up, her arms trembled; her fingers went numb; the old thought returned with the smug certainty of repetition: You can’t. You never could. You’re not built for this. She closed her eyes, panting, cheek pressed against cold stone. Down below, the dog barked again. This time she heard it differently—not judgment, not ridicule, but a reminder: I’m still here. The sentence had two meanings, and both were true.
When she opened her eyes, the circle of light was bigger. She could see blades of grass at the rim, bright green like something from a different world, and she could smell sun-warmed earth so sharp and clean it almost hurt. With a groan that was half sob she hauled herself the last few feet, hands finding the edge, elbows locking. For a moment she hung there, suspended between the well and the world, thinking: If I fall now, I’ll break. Then she rolled over the rim and collapsed into the grass. The sky above was too blue to be real. She lay on her back, chest heaving, staring up as if she expected it to close like a lid. Sunlight warmed her face, sinking into her skin like something she’d been deprived of for years, and she laughed once—small, disbelieving—then cried again because she didn’t know what else to do with the intensity of being alive.
When she finally sat up, the landscape revealed itself: an open field, wide and empty, the kind of place that made you feel small in a different way than the well did. There were no houses, no roads, no people—just grass moving in the wind like a slow tide. Far off she heard water, a river running somewhere beyond a gentle rise. Nina got to her feet. Her dress hung heavy and filthy, black smudges streaked across it like ash; her hair was tangled; her arms and legs were marked with scrapes and bruises, and she looked—she realized with a strange detachment—like someone who had crawled out of a grave. She walked toward the sound of water, and each step felt like relearning the world: the sun, the wind, the way the ground dipped and rose, the simple fact that movement could be voluntary. At the crest of the rise, the river appeared as a ribbon of moving silver flashing with reflected light. She stumbled to the bank and dropped to her knees. The water was clear enough to show her reflection: a woman in her thirties with a face smeared dark, eyes red-rimmed, lips split, hair wild, an expression caught somewhere between shock and relief. Nina stared until the reflection stopped being a stranger and became—impossibly—her.
Behind her, a bark. Her head snapped around. At the well, a shape moved at the rim, black against green: the dog. For a second it stood perfectly still, a silhouette cut from night, then dropped out of sight. Nina’s stomach clenched. “No,” she said again, louder now, as if the word could be a wall. The dog appeared at the edge again—closer this time, closer in a way that didn’t make sense, as if distance had decided it didn’t matter—then it was out, standing in the grass, looking at her. It had climbed too. Nina backed away until the river lapped at her shoes. The dog trotted toward her, tail low, head slightly down; it didn’t bare its teeth, didn’t growl. It looked—if she allowed herself to think it—almost hopeful. Her fear spiked anyway, because clarity arrived like a cold hand at the back of her neck: she could leave the well, but she couldn’t leave the dog. It had followed her down, and now it had followed her up. She had escaped a place. She had not escaped her arrangement with what lived inside her.
Nina’s hands moved to the hem of her dress. Her fingers shook. She pulled it up and over her head quickly, awkwardly, not caring about modesty in a field with no witnesses, and stepped out of it into the river. The cold stole her breath. She sank until the water reached her shoulders, then pushed off and began to swim. At first it was simple survival—arms stroking, legs kicking, shock demanding attention—but as she moved the water began to do something else: it stripped away grime, soothed the scrapes, slid over her skin like forgiveness. Nina dove under. The world became muffled and blue-green, her hair floating around her face like seaweed; her eyes opened and stung, but she kept them open because she wanted—needed—to see something other than darkness. When she surfaced she gasped and laughed, the sound bright and startled. The dog barked, then entered the river too, splashing clumsily. Its black fur slicked down, making it look smaller, younger, almost ordinary. It paddled toward her, eyes fixed on her face, and Nina swam backward, half laughing, half terrified, as the dog lunged playfully and snapped at the water near her hands. For a moment—just a moment—it felt like normal life, like a summer afternoon with a dog that loved you.
She grabbed a handful of water and flung it at the animal’s face. The dog shook its head violently, spraying droplets. Nina laughed again, louder—until she saw something in its eyes. Not malice. Hunger. Not for flesh, but for feeling, as if each laugh fed it as surely as each tear had. Nina’s laughter faltered. She swam to the far bank and pulled herself out, dripping. The sun hit her skin and turned the cold to steam. She stood shivering, watching the dog climb out too, water streaming from its coat, and for a long beat they stared at each other like two versions of the same truth. “I know what you are,” Nina whispered. The dog cocked its head. Maybe it was only a dog. Or maybe it was the shape sadness took when it grew tired of being invisible—when it decided it wanted a body so it could sit beside you and be chosen.
Nina retrieved her dress from the near bank and found it cleaner now, as if the river had reached for it too. She pulled it on quickly, fabric sticking to damp skin, and walked along the water until she found a tree with low branches. She climbed, arms protesting from the well, but she kept going, branch to branch, until she was high enough that the river looked like a thin line and the field like a giant’s rug. Up here the wind was different. It didn’t just touch her; it moved through her, as if trying to sweep out whatever had lived in her chest for so long. Nina sat on a thick branch and closed her eyes, listening: birds, water, leaves, the sound of the world continuing, unbothered by her private catastrophes. She breathed slowly and, for the first time in what felt like forever, her mind did not immediately rush to the worst memory available. Peace hovered nearby, cautious as a deer. Then, below her, the dog barked sharply. She opened her eyes to see it circling the base of the tree, looking up, paws scratching bark, jumping once, snapping at the air—frustrated. A smile tugged at Nina’s mouth before she could stop it. “No,” she said softly. “Not up here.” The dog barked again—demand and complaint braided together, like a child’s tantrum and an addict’s need.
Nina broke off a small stick from the branch and tossed it. The stick spun end over end and landed in the grass. The dog sprinted after it and pounced, tail wagging, then trotted back with the stick held high as if it had retrieved something precious. Nina stared down at it and felt a strange thought unfold, careful and bright: maybe it could be taught. Not eliminated. Not exorcised. Not killed. Taught—directed—given a job that wasn’t simply sitting beside her in darkness. She threw the stick again. The dog chased it again. Again. Again. Each time it returned, it looked a little less like a shadow and a little more like an animal, something that belonged in sunlight as well as in wells. Eventually Nina climbed down. Her feet hit the ground with a soft thud, and the dog trotted to her side immediately, stick in its mouth, eyes bright. She took it from its mouth; her fingers brushed its teeth—warm, normal. “Okay,” she said, as if agreeing to terms neither of them had spoken. “We’ll do this my way.”
They walked back through the field until the well appeared again, waiting like a dark mouth in the grass. As they approached it, Nina felt her mood shift like weather: the air cooler here, the sunlight less certain, the grass shorter and sparse as if even plants hesitated to get too close. She stopped at the rim and looked down. Darkness—never empty—thick with the kind of quiet that promised it would take whatever you offered and ask for more. She saw herself down there again, scrambling, slipping, crying, and heard in her mind that sour, wrong violin note, like a string tuned too tight, refusing resolution. Images flashed: waiting in the rain for someone who didn’t come, watching a figure walk away, crying in front of a mirror, curled on the floor like a question with no answer. Her grip tightened until her knuckles whitened. The dog pressed against her leg. She understood then that the well was not just a place; it was a habit, a gravity, a story she could fall into again and again because it was familiar. The dog was part of that story—but not the author.
Nina straightened. She wiped her face, though she hadn’t realized she was crying. “No,” she said—not to the well this time, but to the part of her that believed it was inevitable. She turned her back on the darkness and walked away across the field toward the river’s glittering line and the far horizon. The dog followed, trotting beside her, head low now as if listening. For a while it felt almost easy. Then, behind them, came a sound—soft, intimate, and wrong. Not a bark. Not a voice. A scrape from stone, as if something inside the well had shifted position, as if the darkness itself had leaned forward to watch her leave. Nina didn’t turn around. She kept walking, because turning around was how the old story restarted.
She picked up another stick from the grass and held it out in front of the dog. The animal’s eyes fixed on it instantly—bright, eager, hungry. Nina’s hand tightened. “Ready?” she asked, and the dog’s muscles tensed. She threw the stick as far as she could. It sailed and landed in tall grass with a faint thunk, and the dog bolted after it, disappearing into the green. Nina stood still, listening to the rustle of grass and the distant rush of the river. For a moment she was alone in the sunlight, her heart beating hard and steady, as if relearning its own rhythm. Then the grass parted and the dog came back with the stick, tail wagging. Nina exhaled. She took the stick. She threw it again. And as the dog ran, Nina looked straight ahead to the line where the field met the sky and allowed herself a thought without romance, without illusion, without pretending the well didn’t exist: it wouldn’t ever go away for good. But it could learn who was in charge.
The wind moved through the grass like a sigh. Somewhere behind her, the well waited. Beside her, the black dog ran—chasing what she gave it, for now. For now.
A Estrangeira 