This is the first and only piece of fiction I have ever set in Brazil. I first went there in 1999 (I think) to do research toward a play. The play never congealed, but my interest in Brazil, which was already very strong, kept growing, and led to two subsequent long visits. While none of the events in the story is based on anything I witnessed or experienced, every location is real and I can see now the story was very much my way of working through some kind of guilt at taking the chance to escape to such a beautiful remote place (where I swam, read, wrote and danced) at the start of the last Gulf war.
It was published by the wonderfully conceived online fiction magazine Five Chapters, which publishes a story a week in serial format. Read it here: