MOHAMED SAID RAIHANI’S GUIDELINE TO
MOROCCAN SHORT-SHORT STORY
Ezzeddine Maazi
Short-Short
Stories
Translated by Mohamed Saïd Raïhani
-1-
The Rain In The Garden
With the blue felt pen,
pencil, ruler, cherries and the yellow-covered blank copybook on her table, the
little school girl sharpens both her thinking and her nerves to keep listening
to the school-mistress sitting on her leather chair:
- “Period of
plastic arts for third-class elementary pupils. We will learn how to draw
clouds, rainfall, the formation of ponds and swamps with incineration using
colour pencils”...
The brilliant girl
sharpens the pencil and leans forwards to draw line after line closed circles,
periods, curved forms, trees, fruits... alternatively colouring with the colour
pencils and sharpening them one by one.
High
above, lies the vast blue sea and the rest of the painting a question mark. She
was painting what was running around in her mind.
There
stands the school-mistress next to the blackboard to
explain the techniques before
pacing again between the
rows to examine her pupils’ works.
On
paper, it was rained so hard that the
little girl turned so sad. Her painting was stained with her dropping tears.
She felt sorry for the demolition of the houses, the collapse of the buildings
and the scattering of the flowers
in the garden...
-2-
Ismaen’s Painting
Little Ismaen sat down before the weird painting to
meditate it.
It was a work by a painter
who had composed a blank space with a black square.
He started to sing.
He turned right and
left to see if anybody cares.
Suddenly, he had a
prompt wish to get into the same blank space that the painter has left empty.
***********
* The writer, Ezeddine Maazi, is a Moroccan short-story writer
born in 1960 in Sidi Ismael,
near El Jadida City. Author of:"Diaries Of
A School-Master High Up In The Mountain” (In Two Volumes: 1998-2003), "Love In Grown-Ups’ Style" in 2006 (Short-Short stories).
SAMPLES OF
MOROCCAN CONTEMPORARY SHORT-SHORT STORY
SAMPLES OF
MOHAMED SAID RAIHANI’S SHORT-SHORT STORY
|
Ghandi Forever |
Eskimo Law |
Order of Cheating |
King Edward Lover |
Love & Marriage |
|
The Fifth Gender |
The Man & The Dog |
Humiliation |
Nobody Sees Me! |
Apocalypse, Now! |
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