On Liliana Colanzi’s 'You Glow in the Dark'

On September 13, 1987, in the city of Goiânia, Brazil, not far from the country’s capital, a small capsule of highly radioactive material was stolen from an abandoned hospital. Although the site, the Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia, required high security, its former owners had neglected the place and squatters and looters had frequented it, intermittently, over the years. That day, the guard tasked with protecting the radioactive remains did not show up to work, and scrap merchants Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira took a radioactive capsule with them. Once at home, they removed its protection, tried to open it, and broke one of the layers that covered it. They felt nauseous, but blamed their food. They ended up selling it to another scrap merchant, who deemed the glowing capsule charming and thought it would make a lovely ring for his wife. When she refused it, the pill kept being passed around from hand to hand, progressively broken down and admired as a magical artifact. This resulted in the worst radioactive accident in South American history, placed only two levels under the seriousness of Chernobyl.