In one of the pages of this book, a character who buys cats from town to town watches the sea and thinks: both a horizon and a stone's throw is harmful. Feeling cloistered in the face of vastness is precisely what happens to human beings trapped in this handful of stories: a woman who does not sleep with her husband but does not allow her to masturbate; a man who left the gun at home; the wife of an inmate who in turn becomes his prisoner; a girl with polio and magical powers. Incomplete compasses Sombrerudos that get away with it. Heroes of fear. With a patient narration but at the same time vigorous and firm, the prose of Alfonso López Corral gives us unhurried, well-bred by the evil sun of northern Mexico. In his stories, time becomes alive and he runs barefoot. Suddenly we feel that we have just interrupted a private ritual of which the whole place is an accomplice.