Libro azul con mosca

In 15th- and 16th-century European painting, it was common to depict flies with an extraordinary degree of realism to deceive the viewer and thus showcase the artist's technical skill. We're not entirely sure if what unfolds in these pages are stories, but what is clear is that this book is brimming with flies; small interruptions of reality, brief anomalies of the everyday, discreet trompe l'oeil that, as such, make us see what isn't there, but with a key difference: in these stories, what isn't, ends up being. A man picking potatoes from his garden pulls out the last one, without having yet picked the second-to-last. Not even the third-to-last! A garden where daisies offer answers like "he loves me" and "he loves me not," but also "maybe," or "your cousin," or "colored clothes at thirty degrees," or "X=V(i2‡z)," or "please, not with Enrique, not even as a joke." A woman who swallows a blackbird. A hyperrealist painter who paints a stumble because she "paints what is," not just what she sees. A tap from which a drop drips, again and again, the same drop, always the same drop—it's clear, they're identical!