Juana has a friend.

PositionLATITUDES - Short story

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

JUANA HAS A FRIEND who lives in Bogotá and whose principal distraction is buying new cars, taking them apart completely, and making gorgeous, gigantic iron flowers out of the pieces. These flowers, as we'll call them, have the strangest and most varied forms, yet as much as the nuts eventually leave behind their corresponding bolts and the axles begin to spin freely without the useless weight of wheels and ball-bearings, they keep holding onto a memory, a mechanical image of what they once were. And this is how a fantastic analogy is formed between the flowers Feliza creates with her acetylene blow-torch and her tin-cutting shears, and their immediate precursors, which all continue to carry out their fated functions, even within the rigidity of her new steel frameworks. The rules of this analogy allow for the most improbable identifications, and the most obvious pairings don't always turn out to be the real ones.

For example, a carburetor doesn't necessarily have to turn into an orchid, despite the apparent formal affinity that governs its design. And a broad piston with its wide-eyed axle simply won't have a place in one of these pastoral scenes, given that, in the eyes of a lay person, it could take on the form of a poisonous. indestructible grey toadstool in these landscapes sown with springs and overshadowed by an adjustable tree made of levers, all of which Feliza constructs under the warped shade of a fender.

But there actually are some stable...

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