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THE NATURAL WORLD CELIA LISSET ALVAREZ Lizards They’re perfect killing machines, you said to me, dead serious, scheming something about their silent universe, the constant shock of their existence. Despite living your whole life in Florida, you thought your house impermeable. In a shoe or on a towel, in your impermeable mind, they broke up the model-home machine in which you lived. If you’re going to live in Florida was not something you wanted to hear, scheming how to stop the arrogant intruders from existing, how to cast out their soft souls from your universe. I thought you would air-condition the universe, caulk the canyons, make the globe impermeable, throw a tarp over the mountains until all existence followed your superior plan, ran like a machine. The lizards took their long pauses, scheming slow as a hurricane off the east coast of Florida. This is how your people came to Florida, you said, refusing to accept a universe in which one’s hopes and schemes were blown away by the impermeable will of another tyrant’s war machine. To give in is to betray one’s own existence. This planet has its own existence. When the storm crawled through Florida, no shutter, no generator, no machine could hold up the walls of your small universe. The house was unroofed, exposed, permeable, ungirdled as a woman done with scheming. To you, it was the lizards scheming, the slow, inevitable pace of their existence finally amassing enough evil to permeate your runaway life, your bungalow Florida. To you, it was personal, this cracked universe, a failure of your warplan, your inferior machine. No matter: you started scheming to leave Florida, to not live out your existence in a flawed universe. Sometimes one must give in to impermeable machines. ...

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