Spectator competition: a magical realist shipping forecast (plus: a dialogue in verse between God and man)

Since the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez earlier this year, I have been meaning to set a comp with a magical realist twist and I finally got around to it with this latest challenge — to take something mundane (a parish council meeting or the weather forecast, for example) and filter it through the lens of magic realism. 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. Where Remedios the Beauty floats, ‘as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end’, into ‘the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her’. Magic realism is not everyone’s cup of tea, and when it’s done badly it’s horrible. On the whole, though, you did pretty well. The entry was peppered with echoes of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but there were traces of Bulgakov too.