Emma had every intention of being respectful. She wanted to leave every object in her author’s bathroom precisely where it was when she arrived. With Beatriz in the next room, it had never occurred to her to pick up her author’s matted brush and run it through her own hair. Only now Beatriz was not in the next room, and once Emma allowed herself to pick up her author’s brush and pull it through her hair, it became necessary to do it again, and then a third time.

Outside the bathroom, the apartment was so quiet she could hear the thrum of cars along Rua Barata Ribeiro, or perhaps it was something closer: the persimmons and maracujá softening in the kitchen, or the murmur of her author’s books on the shelves, questioning when she might return.

On her last trip to Brazil, Emma had stood next to Beatriz just outside this bathroom and confessed that she hadn’t been quite as dutiful in her last translation as in Beatriz’s earlier books, and Beatriz had replied that duty was for clergy. For translation to be an art, she told Emma, you have to make the uncomfortable but necessary transgressions that an artist makes.

With Beatriz gone, what might qualify as a necessary transgression was even less clear. In coming to Brazil in her author’s absence, she had put herself on trial. In the bathroom mirror, Emma stared at the reflection of her hand, the brush in it that was not hers but to whose bristles she had just added a layer of her hair. In her mind, a medieval courtroom appeared. The walls were made of stones and her view was from the stand. Dozens of spectators were squinting at her, and looking down at herself, she saw why. Her hands and arms had turned hazy at the edges. Her legs, too. When she reached up to touch her face, it was like passing her hand through vapor. Yet everyone in the gallery was staring in her direction. They could see her, or at least found her legible enough to be tried for her alleged crimes.

Emma tried to think from what book or movie she could be recalling such an odd court scene. Unless perhaps the image hadn’t come from elsewhere and was hers, something she’d been storing up for some time but hadn’t been able to recognize as her own until she found herself alone in this apartment and had lifted this brush to her hair. Until she’d heard the snap of her own strands trapped in its bristles.