In Competition No. 2868 you were invited to take something mundane and filter it through the lens of magic realism.
I have been meaning to set this comp since the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez earlier this year. Master of the fantastical, Marquez conjures a world in which the arrival of one character is heralded by a swarm of yellow butterflies, the death of another by a light rain of yellow flowers.
The entry was peppered with echoes of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but there were traces of Bulgakov too. Frank Upton wins £30. The rest take £25.
‘Thank you for calling Megacorp. Your call is as unimportant to us as every human action and may be recorded for purposes that are unclear. All our operators have identical names right now. Please listen carefully to the following options although they all lead, eventually, to the same outcome. Press 1 to hear this message again, cyclically, for ever. Press 2 to keep perfectly still for seven years, listening. Press 3 to speak to your three-greats granddaughter, who is also your three-greats grandmother. Press 8 to experience the interpenetration of non-deterministic reality with rational unreality. Press 5 to be engulfed by a plot hole. Press 9¾ to find yourself amid a popular fantasy. For all other options, please sacrifice the goat that your family ate last week. After the tone, you will be executed by firing squad and reincarnated as a jaguar. Thank you for calling Megacorp.’
Frank Upton
North Utsire, South Utsire! The move from one to the other had taken him many years — how long, the Viking never knew. How old was he? Still in his forties? Had those oil rigs been there when he sailed out with Olaf Tryggvason all those years ago? Initially they had gone easterly or southeasterly, veering westerly or northwesterly later, variable, four or five… he paused to think: four or five what? Was that the number of mighty kings in the alliance against the ferocious German Bight? The voices from the air had even spoken of the pharaohs — he thought that was what they said.
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