"And over the years, in other loves, more real and longer lasting, he never experienced a feeling like that of that Sunday on Rua da Lapa, when he was fifteen years old."

Fifteen-year-old Inácio has been sent to work as a runner for the lawyer Borges. Borges's wife, the full-figured twenty-seven-year-old Dona Severina, fires the young runner's imagination, and she herself finds her own ability to resist temptation sorely tested.

Translated from Portuguese (Brazil) by Juan LePuen
Genre: short story
Length: 4,080 words

Brazil's Machado de Assis, the greatest Latin American novelist of the nineteenth century (1839-1908), also excelled in the short story.