The garden is a rational space of order and care where nature is directed and chance is abolished. Left behind are the dark jungle or the uninhabitable desert. The seven masterful stories by Valeria Correa Fiz explore different moments in the lives of her characters in which nature (their own or outside) overflows: a slaughterhouse under a flood, an Eiffel greenhouse on the pampas, an apartment next to a cemetery, a hotel owned by philo-Nazis, a bar that was the inn of an anti-colonial patriot, the Retiro Park in Madrid or the Parque de España in front of the Paraná River. The garden can also be understood as the Garden of Eden, which symbolizes the lost possibility of beatitude and a state of perfection to which one tries to return because where there was a garden, the question remains. Why do we abandon that rational and ordering action that enables peaceful life? What dark forces, desires and violence overwhelm us and drive us to lose that civilized space? Is the garden from which we were expelled or from which we decided to exile ourselves a lost paradise or a half-built one that never finished rising?

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I like to give injections. Asses tell things that faces hide. They are like the second reading that good stories offer you, a way of rereading. Undergarments and the way someone lies down, pulls down their pants so the needle enters the flesh, and the speed with which they pull them up when it's all over also count.

There is a lot of story locked in the bodies.

I like older women who wear lace thongs. And the comical side of serious men who wear underwear with colorful prints. Or conversely, men with broad smiles who wear dark interiors. There are scrawny asses, greedy asses in the flesh and in the soul. And also, energetic round little butts, as well proportioned as they are capricious: like a cherub. Flabby asses clad in pretentious monogrammed black silk underwear. I like big butts, very white and fluffy, that silently reflect a sedentary and imaginative character: the asses of people from the interior who sip glasses of liquor and read old novels while eating chocolate.

There is a world there, under the clothes and in the flesh.

–Lower your pants –I say and I prepare to read what the hand timidly reveals to me.