Back home, Damaris greeted the dog with a happiness matched only by the dog’s own eagerness to see her, and she stroked her for a long while, pausing only when she looked down at her hands and discovered they were smeared with dirt. She resolved to give the animal a bath. The sun still hammered down, and Damaris longed to wash away the heat and the sweat from her walk. She scrubbed the pup in the washbasin with blue laundry soap and a brush, much to Chirli’s displeasure, for she despised water and lowered her head and hid her tail.
Afterward, as the dog dried in the last rays of sun, Damaris rinsed some underwear she’d left soaking and then washed herself as well. Since the shack had no shower, they always bathed in the washtub without removing their clothes, using a totuma gourd to pour water over their bodies. The late afternoon was breathtaking. The sky seemed to be aflame and the sea took on a purple hue. Night was descending by the time she hung the underwear on a small drying rack she kept in the gazebo and placed the dog, still affronted by the bath, on her bed—a small mat folded in two that Damaris had covered with old towels.
It still hadn’t rained that night, but they had to close the door and every window in the shack because the clavitos—tiny mosquitos that bite like pins—were in a frenzy. Rogelio went out for the battered old pot they kept under the house, filled it with coconut jute, and set it alight. When the jute began to burn, the clavitos disappeared for a moment, but as soon as the smoke cleared the bugs returned with renewed force, and they had to flick rags to keep them at bay. They couldn’t watch the novela in peace. It was so hot that Rogelio had sweat stains under his arms, and a rivulet of water ran down Damaris’s sideburns.
“Isn’t it ever going to rain?” she complained, waving her rag.
Rogelio offered no reply and went off to his bed. She stayed up watching TV, knowing that between the heat and the clavitos torturing her she’d never manage to fall asleep.
After midnight, when the infomercials came on, a single flash of lightning suddenly exploded, so close that for a moment everything lit up. Damaris jumped in fright, the lights went out, and a torrential downpour began, with lightning, thunder, and so much rain that it felt as though buckets were being dumped onto the roof. But the air cooled, the clavitos disappeared, and Damaris, confident the dog was safe in the gazebo, went to bed.
The following morning it was still raining heavily, and since she’d been awake all night, Damaris rose late. The ground was cold and wet, and the pot where they’d burned the coconut jute the night before now sat in the middle of the living room catching rainwater from a leak. The power hadn’t returned, and Rogelio was seated in one of the plastic chairs in front of the dim TV, sipping coffee he must have brewed in the gazebo.
“Dog of yours made a mess last night,” he said.
Damaris grew alarmed, not at whatever the dog might have done, but at the punishment Rogelio might have given her in Damaris’s absence.
“What did you do to her?”
“Me? I didn’t do shit. But she tore your bras to shreds.”
Damaris rushed out to the gazebo. She couldn’t see the sea, the islands, or even the town—nothing but rain, white as a gauze curtain in the distance, streaming like a river down the roofs, walkways, and steps across the property. Damaris was drenched when she reached the gazebo. Her panties and Rogelio’s undershorts, which she’d hung on the rack the night before, were still in place. Only her three bras lay shredded on the floor. The dog wagged her tail timidly, guiltily, but seemed fine. Damaris inspected her from head to tail and, relieved to find the dog uninjured, she pulled her into a hug and told her it was okay, that she understood the message and would never give her another bath, not ever again.
*
Damaris continued to pamper the dog until she ran off and vanished into the jungle. It happened one night when Damaris was alone. Rogelio had gone out fishing on a wind‑and‑tide. Danger, Olivo, and Mosco had just eaten near the gazebo, and Damaris was brushing the pup’s head goodnight, about to retire inside the shack. Suddenly Danger started barking toward the jungle. The other two dogs became alert, and then hers appeared from the gazebo and trotted to Danger’s side. There were no houses or people in the direction they were barking, so Damaris assumed it was an animal—an opossum, a hedgehog, or a peccary that was lost or sick. Since there was no moon, it was incredibly dark, the only light coming from the bare bulb in the gazebo. She couldn’t see or hear anything in the distance, but the dogs grew more and more agitated, hackles raised and barking furiously. Damaris began calling the pup, trying to calm her and coax her back. “Chirli!” she yelled, for once not ashamed to say aloud the name her cousin had mocked. “Chiiiiirliiiii!” But suddenly Danger bolted, and they all followed, including her dog, who disappeared into the jungle with them.
Damaris could hear them barking and moving through the undergrowth. Barefoot, she worried it could be a venomous lancehead; nocturnal, deadly, and dangerous—so all she could do was keep calling from the gazebo. She tried different voices—angry, neutral, soft, pleading—with no luck, and then everything fell quiet and she could hear nothing at all. Before her lay nothing but the jungle, unmoving as a beast that had just swallowed its prey.
Damaris went back into the shack, slipped on her swamp boots, grabbed the machete and the flashlight, and headed into the jungle the same way the dogs had gone. At no moment did she fear the dangers she was afraid of: the dark, the lanceheads, the wild beasts, the dead—Nicolasito and Josué and Señor Gene—those ghosts people spoke of when she was a child. Damaris did not doubt her own courage. She had only one thought guiding her: the pup was in danger and she had to save her.
She moved through the undergrowth without venturing too far, careful not to lose her way in the darkness, shining the light in every direction, making noise and calling for her pup, as well as for Danger, Olivo, and Mosco. When none of them returned and nothing stirred, she chose to press further in. She crossed the gully that separated the Reyeses’ property from the neighbors’, went along the fence by the main road, stepped onto the bluff, and reached as far as the milpesos palms, where the only exit trail ended.
Damaris could only see what the flashlight illuminated—fragments of perception: a colossal leaf, a moss‑fringed trunk, the wing of a gigantic moth speckled with eyes that, startled by the beam, fluttered around her head in a panic. Her boots snagged on roots and sank into the mud; she stumbled and slipped, bracing herself on surfaces that were hard, slick, or coarse. Things brushed against her—rough, hairy, thorny—and she flinched, fearing a spider, a tree snake, or a blood‑sucking bat; yet nothing bit her, only the mosquitos persisted, and she paid them no mind as she pressed on in the dark. The air hung heavy and humid, clinging to her skin like slime, and the chorus of frogs and crickets roared inside her skull as if the jungle itself were blasting from within, like a nightclub’s music. Then the flashlight dwindled, and she had no option but to retreat to the shack, weeping and defeated, before the beam died entirely.
Damaris dropped into sleep instantly, yet the dreams left her feeling unrested. She dreamt of noises and silhouettes, of lying awake in her bed, unable to move, as if something inside the jungle had slid into the shack and wrapped itself around her, slick with slime and filling her ears with the impossible chorus of every creature until she herself transformed into jungle—into a tree trunk, into moss, into mud, all at once—and then she found her pup, who licked her face in greeting. When she woke, she was still alone. Outside, a fierce storm lashed the land, wind tearing at the wooden walls, thunder rattling the earth, water streaming through cracks and seeping into the shack.
She thought of Rogelio, out on his miserable boat, braving the storm’s fury with nothing but a life vest, a rain slicker, and some plastic sheeting for protection, but her worry grew stronger for her pup, out in the jungle, soaked, frozen, terrified without Damaris there to rescue her, and she wept once more.
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From The Bitch by Pilar Quintana, translated by Lisa Dillman. Copyright © 2026 by Pilar Quintana. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
