In those final minutes before departure to Canis Majoris, people gathered to watch the launch of the American rocket. In Apartment 101, the production assistant and the camera salesman sat in the little front room watching the SBT broadcast. She was negotiating the purchase of the tiny flat. “It’s for a celebrity,” she said.

​

Carlos Borges Avenue was empty, just a layer of soot settling. The whole landscape looked like charcoal.
“A paint salesman could make a killing here,” the camera man thought.
There wasn’t anything left to film, he thought.

The assistant asked about the little rain cakes.
He lit up—“Good memory,” he said, getting up from the fake leather sofa. The seams were cracked.
So much to replace in that place.
The carpet had greasy stains from past events, like when the cat that used to live there dragged a sardine off its plate.
The old woman used to ask if they had carpet in that other galaxy. Probably not.

The assistant pulled the cakes out of the oven with her bare hands.
“That doesn’t hurt?” he asked.
“No,” she explained. “I don’t feel pain. Can’t, even if I wanted to.”

He brought over the thermos and a few cups, placed them on the crocheted doily on the coffee table.
“Strange,” he said.
Yes. A car could run her over, boiling shower water, stubbed pinky toe on the edge of the bed.
Nothing.

He pointed to the TV.
“Hey, that’s my commercial.”
It was Celso Portioli.
He did ads for the cameras he sold. They even played during the soap opera.
“Seriously?”
“Swear to God. Great little pocket cameras.”

A few minutes left before the procedure began. The assistant’s phone rang. It was the actress.
The actress she worked for. The one he watched every evening.
“Hey, darling,” the assistant said.
Screaming on the other end.
“I know, I know—another crisis, you told me.”

​

She whispered that the actress was coming in person. Imagine. That kind of launch would bring anyone out.
“A pleasure, truly,” she said.

She suspected there was no manager. Just a tactic to get a discount.
The cakes didn’t match the mood anymore anyway. It was getting dark.
He thought he’d serve whisky—there was a cheap one in the cabinet.
He put on his polyester blazer, the one he used for work visits.
When he explained how the camera worked, he’d pull one from the saggy inside pocket, just to show how portable they were.

The assistant felt obligated to explain.
The actress wasn’t well.
Since last year, she’d been slowly turning into a cow.
Yes. A literal cow. A bovine mammal.
Unbelievable. But there it was.

Her career—essentially over.
Only film now. Maybe.
Not even theater.
He didn’t understand theater anyway, so he didn’t comment.

​

It started with the nose—widening, getting covered in a rash.
The nostrils grew faster than her ears.
Her nails curled upward like hooves.
Her legs got muscular and long—not bad, all things considered.
But her breasts filled with milk. She had to milk herself every morning.
At five a.m.
She liked to sleep until nine-thirty. Even on shoot days.
Everyone knew—don’t call before nine-thirty.

“Oh right,” he answered, pretending not to mind.

Since the launch had been announced, he’d developed a kind of neurosis. Hard to name.
A craving that blurred into a fear.
He salivated at the sight of exposed thighs, open arms, raw flesh.
At first, he thought it was lust.
It wasn’t.
It was hunger.

​

Yes, shocking. But everything would be clearer once they returned from the new planet.
They’d bring some encyclopedia.
A machine to fix it.
Or it would pass.
Maybe just stress.
Escape from routine.

“Look, it’s starting,” he said.
The reporter explained this was the first human mission near Canis Majoris, the largest star in the Universe.
You could fly toward it for a hundred generations and never cross it.
It was a dimensionless point of light.
Too big to be a point. Too big to explain.

Everyone wanted to move to its orbit.
Since it was first shown on TV, something in the soul of things had shifted.

​

The doorbell rang.
The assistant opened the door. Recognized the actress beneath a now more prominent layer of fur.
She introduced them. He said he was honored. Pretended not to notice anything strange.

“Are you watching Fausto’s broadcast?” the actress asked.
“No, SBT.”
He needed to check a lottery bond commercial during the break.
Oh, sure.

During the ads, the actress glanced around, looking for familiar faces.
He pulled out one of his personal cameras—his own, not for sale—and took a selfie with the two of them.
The assistant showed it to the actress.
They chose one where her face was more diagonal, both eyes showing.

The actress surveyed the domestic decor, exhaling through wide nostrils.
Sad.
From Copacabana’s beachfront to a studio apartment with doilies and linoleum, haggling with a man who clearly didn’t live there.
The real life was on Canis Majoris.
She hoped to reincarnate as another sacred animal—but next time, on Canis Majoris.

The launch began.
Father Fábio de Melo sang the event’s official theme song.
Glória Pires recited poems she’d written herself.
MRV Construction had passed out colorful ribbons to the audience.

The platform began to dematerialize.
The porcelain Dalmatians on the shelf started to rattle.

“That’s funny,” the salesman said. “Almost like it’s shaking, isn’t it?”
It was.

​

And not just that—Canis Majoris glowed in the sky, through the temporal rift opened by the platform.
He was filled with a brutal, radiant hunger.
You could see the light through the window.
Everything shook.
Buildings cracked at the joints.

The actress, under her fur, lost it at the vibrating frequency.
They tried to calm her, tried to talk.
She kicked.
One violent blow to the assistant’s skull.

She hit the floor. Cranium dented.
But seemed fine.

The salesman grabbed the horns.
The beast reared back.
He reached into his waistband. A pocketknife. Sharp blade.
He stabbed her throat.
Sixty, seventy times.
Poked until he found the jugular.

​

The blood came hot, pulsing weakly.
Covered him and the assistant.

​

—

The assistant woke up clean, in a fresh nightgown.

The sunlight was slanted, mild yellow.
He had cleaned the entire apartment.
He was eating steak in front of the TV.

“That’s her, isn’t it?”

“Sort of. It’s just steak.”

“There’s a woman’s head in the closet.”

“I know. It’s the previous owner of the apartment.”

The assistant sat on the sofa.
Asked about the launch.

The sun filtered softly through the crochet curtains.

“I made coffee. Help yourself.”

She thanked him.

Canis Majoris gleamed in the sky.
The TV showed a miniature of what was happening outside.
Celso Portioli was about to interview a technician about the next steps of assimilation—
Right after a stunning dog training demonstration.

​

THE BOOK

How to Summon the Devil and Conjure Low Spirits

Coleção Geração PR10

Kafka Edições​

Sérgio Lutav

Originally from Maringá, in the state of Paraná, he is a fiction writer, designer, and researcher in technology and culture. He holds a Master’s and a PhD in Culture and Technology from the University of Jyväskylä, in Finland.

His book Paramedia proposes a literary theory on how we consume digital texts, first presented at the Media in Transition conference at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

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He is also the author of the digital fictions Categories and Chrysalis (2009), both recommended by Folha de S. Paulo. His earlier work Novel (2008) was featured on the blog of MoMA San Francisco.

His novel Capricórnia (published by Editora Patuá) was released in 2015. More about the author and his work can be found at lutav.co.

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How to Summon the Devil and Conjure Low Spirits was selected by Paulo Sandrini for the Geração 10 collection, featuring authors from Paraná who emerged during the 2010s.