Zoé Mahfouz

July 2025 | fiction

Jellicle Song For Jellicle Clint 

Not long ago, after I started devouring my Chicken McNuggets, this old man, who by the way I’ve never met in my life, tells me that normally food is forbidden inside the cinema, so my first thought is oh, he must be hungry with all that skin that’s falling off him like a blobfish put out of water, so I offer him a nugget, and he says he will allow it but it wasn’t like that back then I tell you that, are we still talking about the chicken I ask, he follows by saying that back in the seventies he used to work in a cinema and most cinemas had leaking roofs, which sounded odd because humidity helps your skin stay hydrated and look younger and that man looked almost as dry as a tardigrade in the Atacama Desert, he then says that in addition to the water infiltrations there were mice everywhere because of the food scraps that people made around the seats, so the cinema decided to buy a cat called Clint to chase the mice, and when there were no more mice, Clint had no home to return to, so this old man whose sweat gland functions have clearly deteriorated during this conversation, decided to adopt Clint and he fed him normal processed food for the next twenty years of his life, then he went to Paris with Clint and met Clint Eastwood at the George V, they took a glass of champagne together which didn’t make up for the missing thirty percent his body needed to achieve his sixty percent normal water intake, so he decided to go back to London, he stood still outside in the wet soil and that allowed him to grow and grow and grow until he turned into a magnificent cardinal flower, and right before he was about to perform for the funeral of another dry king he turned progressively brown and felt the moisture wasn’t enough anymore, so Clint stepped in, put him in a sink filled with water, and his topsoil started feeling damp, that’s when he realized he should probably cancel his paid Patreon membership to this odd fantasy podcast he’d been listening to before his billing date to ensure he wouldn’t be charged for the next period, but as he was about to reach for his phone Clint put his paw on his mouth and whistled shush, and Clint in Boots was way more persuasive than Puss in Boots, and that is how this old man got his military discharge.

Zoé Mahfouz

Zoé Mahfouz is a multi-talented French artist: an award-winning bilingual Actress, Screenwriter, Content Creator, and Writer whose work spans fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her writing has appeared in over 70 literary magazines and best-of anthologies worldwide, including Cleaver Magazine, OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters, NUNUM, as well as Ginyu Magazine, a respected journal of avant-garde and contemporary poetry, and The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest newspapers. While her fiction is often described as “very tongue-in-cheek,” “kookie,” and “random,” her poetry, which ranges from seventeenth-century eerie Japanese haiku and haibun to more classical forms and the occasional ekphrastic poem, draws on anthropological strangeness and sharp mythological references. In contrast, her other poetic and prose works lean into a darker, more introspective register. They weave fragmented narrative with sensory overload and philosophical undercurrent, exploring themes such as psychiatric care, neurodivergence, and the collapse of identity.