Lucy Vickery

Magic touch

issue 11 October 2014

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.

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