by Zoé Mahfouz

Olivia was my best friend. She told me her name came from Kalamata olives. When I first moved in, she offered me a purple floral sleeveless dress with white flowers all over it so we would match. Her place was spectacular; there was an ivory piano and a bass she couldn’t play. I asked her why she had them displayed, to which she whimsically responded, “There’s an exception to every rule.” We shared a laugh, a fleeting moment of complicity. I was heartbroken when she moved out without notice just a few days later from my virtual village.

Zoé Mahfouz is a multi-talented artist—an award-winning bilingual Actress, Screenwriter, Content Creator, and Writer whose works span fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, featured in over 60 literary magazines and best-of anthologies worldwide. Her poetry, written in the thirteenth-century Japanese haiku form, has been published in Ginyu Magazine, a respected journal of avant-garde and contemporary poetry, and The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers. Her writing is often described as “very tongue-in-cheek”, “kookie”, and “random”.