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when a song ended, their owners carefully moved the machine’s bent brass arm onto a new wax record.
    “Victrola! Victrola!” the other children laughed and shouted. Luzia’s head fell into her chest. Emília believed she was crying. Suddenly, Luzia reared up. On their way to school she and Emília often passed goats grazing on weeds. When the animals fought, they rammed their enemies with their foreheads, then flicked their faces upward to pierce an eye or a belly with their horns. Luzia rammed the boy headfirst. She would have stepped back and done it a second time if their teacher, Padre Otto, had not stopped her. He led the weeping boy, his mouth and shirt bloody, inside the church. After the incident, people began calling Luzia Victrola. They did it secretly at first, but the name caught on quickly and everyone, even Padre Otto, used it. Before long, Luzia disappeared and Victrola took her place.
    Before her accident, Luzia had been boisterous, playful. People called her the yolk and Emília the white, a nickname that had irritated Emília because it implied that her little sister was more concentrated, powerful. After the fall, Luzia was replaced by Victrola, who was quiet and brooding. She liked sitting alone and embroidering scraps of fabric that sat in piles in their home. On those throwaway cloths she stitched armadillos with chicken heads, panthers with wings, hawks and owls with human faces, goats with frog legs. At school, Victrola was uninterested in their lessons. There were no desks in the schoolroom, only long tables with wooden benches that hurt Emília’s backside by midmorning. Jesus hung on the front wall, above Padre Otto’s desk. The paint on Christ’s feet was chipped, revealing a gray gesso. He stared at them with pitying eyes as they did their lessons. Victrola stared back. She scratched her stiff arm, as if trying to make the bones come alive again, and squinted up at the Jesus. Padre Otto knew Victrola wasn’t paying attention during lessons but, believing she was consumed by Christ’s suffering, he didn’t chastise her as he would Emília or the other children in class. But when Emília saw her sister’s green eyes glaze over she knew Luzia was looking past the Jesus, lost in her own imagination. Her sister often went into this state at home. She burned rice or spilled water or sewed in a crooked line until Emília shook her and told her to wake up.
    Although Luzia had come out of her accident alive, she’d left some vital part of herself behind, in another realm where no one could reach it. She’d left Emília to deal with the town’s vicious gossips, their aunt’s superstitions, and her own changing body, which grew suddenly ample and soft. Emília no longer wanted to squat in the dirt and poke at ant holes or crack clay wasps’ nests with farm girls her own age. Their games seemed dull and uncultured. Luzia, too, wanted no part in the games but for different reasons. The girls made fun of her arm, her size, and Luzia inevitably fought them, tugging their hair and bloodying their noses. Emília was the only one who could calm her sister. So they were left alone, isolated in Aunt Sofia’s sturdy house, with only their sewing and their family’s portraits to comfort them.
    Three framed portraits hung in the front room of Aunt Sofia’s house. As a girl, Emília liked to climb onto the wooden sewing table where Aunt Sofia measured and cut cloth. She would place her hands on either side of the framed pictures. The whitewashed wall felt cool and powdery under her palms.
    The first photograph was a black-and-white wedding portrait of her parents. The edges were warped from rainwater that had trickled between the roof tiles and seeped into the frame. They sat side by side, her father’s hand blurred over her mother’s. They looked frightened. His hair was oiled slick and parted in the middle. His skin was a pale gray while her mother’s skin, obscured slightly by her chin-length