Leigh Loveday

1939

When she first notices him, she’s just a child. She has to be. In the sizzle of mounting summer on Belém’s hazy riverfront, Luíza and her semi-feral friends roam wherever they want, killing time however they can.

He lives here on the urban fringes too, a rainforest exile. But he keeps his distance from the children with their unthinkable freedoms. He hides among detritus, among the things people throw away. Long limbs folded into his den, he waits for them to go.

But Luíza has something about her. She narrows her dark eyes. Without even knowing what she’s looking for, she knows he’s there.

1942

She is older now, but remains ungoverned. While she still sometimes runs with her friends, Luíza has come to spend most of her days with the capelobo.

He showed himself reluctantly at first, coyly, trying to keep his claws, his strange snout, his ungainly form in shadow. But she was fearless.

Now they adventure out from the landfill and across the city, seeking treasure in alleys, hunching on roofs eating mangoes plucked from the trees or fried fish plucked from the market. They are as inseparable as they are unlikely.

Once, high on a church among gargoyles, she finds one that looks like him. She laughs, and he is uncertain at first, but takes its savage grin as a compliment. He is, after all, content.

1967

So much happens in these turbulent years. Changes at the heart of the Brazil she knows; the deepwater churn of personal sacrifice. She lives and loves angrily and loses so much. Others can see the lines of age and strain on Luíza’s face, even if the capelobo cannot.

Life’s wear and tear has pared down their bond to a thread so weak he can no longer even approach her.

He feels this absence, mourns it in his own ponderous way. But in time he ceases his solitary roaming of the old haunts, the rooftops, the skyline grotesques. He returns to a life of separation, to the place of discarded things.

2024

Bare walls. Echoing beeps. A hospital is no place for the capelobo. But he comes anyway, out of habit, out of a loneliness still unsure of its final form. He understands that Luíza’s time is ending. And he has never completely left her. 

Though everyone else she knows is gone, he cannot make her notice him again.

He tries another way.

In the morning, the nurse screams when she discovers the impossible gargoyle, the splintering where something of immense strength has hauled it in over the windowsill.

Luíza is roused by the commotion. She senses the room’s newly disordered shadows, turns her head. The ghost of a smile reaches her eyes.

Late that night, with effort, she frees her hand from beneath the sheets. Carefully, the capelobo takes it. The contact fills him with slow, complicated emotions.

The line on the bedside monitor falters.

With her last breath in this world, Luíza thanks him for being there.

Leigh’s prompts were: A Landfill, a Cryptid, and a Gargoyle

He said of the challenge: “The Unknown Life of Luíza’ is a fresh-out-of-the-oven 500-word story that ended up taking a very different form to what I first imagined. That’s what I love about story prompts though!”

Leigh Loveday grew up in industrial south Wales and now lives in the English Midlands, besieged by cats and foxes. He edits videogame blurb by day and writes fiction aggressively slowly by night, with stories so far landing in the likes of Hearth and Coffin, Icebreakers Lit and Shoreline of Infinity.
Find him loitering online at @leighloveday.bsky.social