Healing Magic is the Students’ Book of Creative Writing for the 2019–2020 academic year, a collective anthology featuring selected works developed in the workshops of the Escuela de Escritores. This publication forms part of the School’s annual editorial series, created to showcase the literary production of its students across multiple genres: flash fiction, short narrative, poetry, essays, and experimental creative texts.
The volume stands out for its diversity of voices and styles, reflecting the School’s pedagogical approach: encouraging personal expression, refining narrative technique, and exploring imagination as a central tool of literary creation. Each text offers a singular vision of the world—ranging from the everyday to the fantastic, from the emotional and introspective to the playful—affirming that writing can be both an intimate experience and a bridge toward a wider community of readers.
In this edition, Ana Magnolia Méndez Cabrera contributes the flash fiction piece “Eyes of the Living” (Ojos de vivo). Brief yet intense, the text combines expressive economy with symbolic force, demonstrating the power to condense emotion, imagery, and suggestion into a few carefully chosen words.
Eyes of the Living
They called me to retrieve the body of Rogelio Morales. They say he is hanging from a doorway and can be seen from the street. They fear that, with the hurricane winds, he might be blown away and spread his stench. I am the one summoned to collect him since the prosecutor has gone back to his hometown, and I was left stranded—no boat crosses the bay when a cyclone is announced.
What luck, to make my debut in body removal with a suicide. I wonder why it couldn’t have been a murder or a traffic accident.
But no, I had to take down a three-day-old corpse from a rope, precisely today, as the cyclone approaches and the town lies empty. I need a drink—rum or mamajuana. I search the house for something to dull my senses and find a small bottle of rum. I swallow it in one gulp and, though I shudder, I manage to keep it down.
Now I prepare to enter Rogelio Morales’s house, which, despite the neighbors’ complaints, does not reek. I cross the doorway leading to the room where the body hangs. Indeed, he dangles there, and all the shutters in the house are open. I step closer and look at Rogelio’s face. He looks back at me with a certain degree of satisfaction.
