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Short Story Published in Revista Autorretratos (October 2023)
I wrote the short story ‘Chinelos’ during the early years of my life in the United Kingdom, shortly after arriving in 2020 in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. Like many people living abroad at that time, I felt suspended between places: physically in Britain, but emotionally still very much in Brazil.
The story began with something deceptively simple — a pair of flip-flops.
In Brazil, the traditional rubber flip-flops held by a strap between the toes are almost universal. They belong to the everyday landscape of life: practical, cheap, and everywhere. In Britain, however, I quickly realised that they occupy a very different place in the social hierarchy of footwear. Even in warm weather people rarely seemed to wear them. Whenever I mentioned that I was trying to write a short story inspired by flip-flops, the reaction was usually a mixture of puzzlement and mild amusement.
Yet my own pair — pink Havaianas with glitter on the soles — were a daily staple. I wore them constantly at home, sometimes even with socks during the colder months. At a time when travel was severely restricted and returning to Brazil felt impossibly distant, those flip-flops became one of the few objects that still carried the texture of home.
That sense of displacement gradually became the emotional centre of the story.
In ‘Chinelos’, the protagonist searches for a lost pair of flip-flops in her house in London. What begins as a trivial domestic search slowly opens a chain of memories that move between past and present, between Brazil and Britain, and between two versions of the self: the girl she once was and the woman she has become. The object becomes a small container for memory — holding traces of class, family history, grief, and migration.
Unlike another short story from the same period, ‘Espelho Cego’, this piece was not written with a specific question about disability or identity politics in mind. Instead, it emerged from multiple rewritings of a narrative built around a small everyday object — an exercise in character exploration that gradually revealed deeper emotional layers.
The main character, which I already had the rough outline of, found a little bit of ground to grow as well. She is now one of the two protagonists of m new novel and creative component of my PhD. Future readers of my novel – hopefully will have real-world readers! – will find many things in present in it in this short form version of Eliza, and a lot of missing things as well. That’s because this was just the unbaked dough. The fully prepared version is in the oven at this gery moment, and will look nce, fluffy and brown soon.
The story was published in October 2023 in the Brazilian literary magazine Revista Autorretratos, an independent digital publication dedicated to contemporary prose and poetry.
Read my story in the full magazine here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h9UZX9SRoFJbYHDDfzyQwvLNjuNt2aJU/view?usp=drivesdk
