When she got home, Damaris was as happy to see the dog as the dog was to see her, and she petted her for a long time, only stopping when she looked down at her hands and saw they were covered in filth. She decided to give her a bath. The sun was still beating down and Damaris needed to rinse off the heat and sweat of her walk. She bathed the pup in the washtub using the blue laundry soap and brush, much to the displeasure of the little dog, who hated water and lowered her head and hid her tail.
Afterward, as the dog was drying in the last rays of sun, Damaris washed some underwear she’d left to soak and then bathed herself as well. Since the shack had no shower, they always bathed in the washtub without taking off their clothes, using a totuma gourd to pour water over their bodies. The late afternoon was spectacular. The sky looked like it was on fire and the sea turned purple. Night was falling 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, in 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 bit like pinpricks—were in a frenzy. Rogelio went out for the banged‑up old pot they kept under the house, filled it with coconut jute, and set it alight. When the jute started to burn, the clavitos disappeared for a little while, but no sooner had the smoke cleared than the bugs came back in strength, and they had to flick rags to fend them off. They couldn’t watch the novela in peace. It was so hot that Rogelio had sweat stains under his arms, and a stream of water ran down Damaris’s sideburns.
“Isn’t it ever going to rain?” she complained, waving her rag.
Rogelio said nothing in 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 be able to fall asleep.
After midnight, when the infomercials came on, a single flash of lightning suddenly exploded, so close that for a second everything lit up. Damaris jumped in fright, the lights went out, and a torrential downpour began, with lightning, thunder, and so much rain it was as if buckets of water were being dumped onto the roof. But the air cooled, the clavitos disappeared, and Damaris, knowing the dog was safe in the gazebo, went to bed.
The following morning it was still raining hard, and since she’d been awake all night, Damaris got up late. The ground was cold and wet, and the pot where they’d burned the coconut jute the night before was now in the middle of the living room catching water from a leak. The power hadn’t come back on and Rogelio was sitting in one of the plastic chairs in front of the darkened TV, drinking coffee he must have made in the gazebo.
“Dog of yours made a mess last night,” he said.
Damaris grew alarmed, not at whatever it was the dog might have done but at the punishment Rogelio must have given her in Damaris’s absence.
“What did you do to her?”
“Me? I didn’t do shit. But she ripped your bras to shreds.”
Damaris rushed out to the gazebo. She couldn’t see the sea, the islands, or even the town—nothing but the rain, white as a gauze curtain in the distance, coursing like a river down the roofs, walkways, and steps throughout the property. Damaris was drenched when she got to the gazebo. Her panties and Rogelio’s undershorts, which she’d hung on the clothes rack the night before, were still in place. Only her bras, three of them, lay on the floor, shredded. The dog wagged her tail timidly, guiltily, but looked fine. Damaris examined her head to tail, and such was her relief at finding the dog safe and sound that rather than a scolding she gave her a hug and told her it was okay, that she got the message and would never give her another bath, not ever again.
*
Damaris continued to pamper the dog until she ran off and got lost in the jungle. It happened one night when Damaris was on her own. Rogelio had gone out fishing on a wind‑and‑tide. Danger, Olivo, and Mosco had just eaten by the gazebo and Damaris was rubbing her pup’s head goodnight, about to go into the shack. Suddenly Danger started barking in the direction of the jungle. The other two dogs went on alert and then hers emerged from the gazebo and trotted the few meters 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 extremely 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 were getting more and more worked up, hackles raised and barking furiously. Damaris started calling the pup, trying to calm her down and get her to come back. “Chirli!” she yelled, for once not ashamed to say out loud the name her cousin had mocked. “Chiiiiirliiiii!” But suddenly Danger bolted and they all followed, even her dog, who took off into the jungle with them.
Damaris could hear them barking and moving around in the underbrush. Given that she was barefoot and it could be a snake—most likely a lancehead; nocturnal, vicious, and poisonous—all she could do was keep calling from the gazebo. She tried different voices—furious, neutral, sweet, imploring—with no luck, and then everything went quiet and she could no longer hear any barking, or anything at all. Before her lay nothing but jungle, still as a beast that’s just swallowed its prey.
Damaris went into the shack, put on her swamp boots, grabbed the machete and flashlight, and headed for the jungle the same way the dogs had gone. At no point did she fear the things in the jungle that she was afraid of: the dark, the lanceheads, the wild animals, the dead—Nicolasito and Josué and Señor Gene—the ghosts people talked about when she was a girl. Damaris was not surprised by her bravery. She had only one thought: the pup was in danger and she had to save her.
She was walking through the undergrowth without going too far in, so as not to get lost in the dark, shining the light in every direction, making noise and calling to her pup, and to Danger, Olivo, and Mosco. When none of them came back and nothing happened, she decided to venture further in. She went to the gully separating the Reyeses’ property from the neighbors’, to the fence by the main road, out onto the bluff, and as far as the milpesos palms, where the only trail out that way came to an end.
Damaris could only see whatever she aimed the flashlight at—parts of things: a huge leaf, a tree trunk carpeted in moss, the wing of an enormous moth covered in eyes which, surprised by the light, took flight and fluttered in panic around her head. Her boots got caught in the roots and sank into the mud, she stumbled and slipped, and, to keep her footing, put her hands against surfaces that were hard, or wet, or coarse. Things brushed against her, things that were rough, hairy, prickly, and she startled, thinking that they were a spider, a tree snake, a bloodsucking bat; but nothing bit her except for the mosquitos, and she didn’t care and kept searching in the dark. The air was so muggy that it stuck to her skin like slime, and it was as if the cacophony of frogs and crickets—as unbearable as the music at the disco in the next town—came not from the jungle but from inside her head. Then the flashlight started to dim, and she had no choice but to return to the shack, weeping and defeated, before it went all the way out.
Damaris fell asleep instantly, but her dreams left her feeling she’d had no rest. She dreamed of noises and shadows, that she was awake in her bed, that she couldn’t move, that something was attacking her—it was the jungle that had stolen into the shack and was coiling around her, covering her in slime and filling her ears with the unbearable sound of all its creatures until she herself turned into jungle, into tree trunk, into moss, into mud, all at the same time, and then she found her pup, who licked her face in greeting. When Damaris awoke she was still alone. Outside a fierce storm lashed down, wind whipped against the wood planks, thunder shook the ground, water streamed through cracks and floated into the shack.
She thought of Rogelio, out on his miserable boat in the fury of this awful storm with nothing but a life vest, a rain slicker, and some plastic sheeting for protection, but she worried more about her pup, out in the jungle, soaking wet, frozen stiff, scared to death without Damaris there to save her, and she wept again.
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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.
