Satisfied Sarcophagi Collected Short Stories

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Mary, or the Honor of Serving

In the beginning when the universe was formless and empty, when God inhabited a hole in the earth and his twin brother slept in the heavens, a few remnants of humanity lived in the depths blurred by creative thought, a North African hotel with a sea view.

Mary swallowed her lips and stopped using her cunning sex to watch the street. She spent her life leaning on the balcony between her grandfather Jeremy and her sister Anne, who was as incoherent as a fish in a bowl and just as provocative. Captive to this interminable wait, Mary hardly spoke; her mouth threaded with white smiled at the world and the world greedily grabbed her throat to observe her better. To her neighbors, she was more fascinating than a dead woman.

Jeremy closed the shutters of his heart and hung a weathervane from the wound that adorned his forehead. The wind blew across his face, erasing the sadness and disturbing his wrinkles. “Circus,” said Anne scornfully.

In the street, the idle crowd spilled onto the grassy sidewalks. A man strode forward majestically. Slumped on the back of a camel, he turned one black eye in the swampy mud of its socket, powerfully present to all the women hidden behind the warm blinds, and the blazon of infinity shone on his forehead like a flower of flesh.

Mary recognized the intense odor he emitted and threw him a glance like a floodlight over the heads of the crowd. She gripped the railing, and the palms of her hands came away with stigmata from the wrought iron roses. She understood that the brute hidden in this man would tear the earth from her belly with his own teeth and plunge her four limbs, emptied of violence, into a spiral of soft foam. Purple from non- disseminated pollen, she laughed loudly and denied being menopausal.

Jeremy watched the fresh- cheeked moon, every inch of his jowls trembling with an unknown joy. Mary moved with complete piety, brushing the rhododendrons that embellished the view out of the way, and called with all her might to the man on the increasingly sluggish camel. He lifted his head, oblique eyes showing no alarm. He was a murderer.

From his long, intelligent reed, the camel let the essences of his digested meal flow. Embedded in the mountain, the river ruminated on its banks and the air smelled of rain. “The die is cast,” screamed Anne, showing her sweat- pearled pubis to the street that rolled toward the sea, and white condors, equipped like yachts, threw probes into the waves’ jubilant waters.

In front of the North African hotel, there was a bar, poorly managed and little known, furnished with couches and little barrels. Dirt lay undisturbed on the floor and the boss dozed at the register with hands tucked in her lap.

The murderer drank his wine, suppressed his fly engorged with wind, and stuck his thumb in the servant’s mouth. His most recent crime had him itching. “Free to drink, to dislike, to turn the universe like a rotten egg in my pocket, free to reach the last decimal point of the sexual problem, I’m bored.” He teased the servant, “How much wine to fill a coffin?”

Satisfied Sarcophagi.Collected Short Stories by Joyce Mansour
Translated from the French by C. Francis Fisher. Edited by C. Francis Fisher and Garrett Caples
Publication date: August 4, 2026

You can find the book  HERE

 Joyce Mansour was born in England in 1928 to a Jewish family of Syrian descent who moved to Egypt when she was still an infant. She grew up among the English-speaking elite of Egypt. Despite her privileged childhood, she was deeply scarred by the loss of her mother to cancer at 15 years old and the death of her first husband six months into their marriage, when she was just 18. She learned to speak and write in French when she married her second husband, a Francophone Egyptian, and was exiled to Paris when Nasser came to power. Mansour was part of the inner circle of Surrealists, a close friend of André Breton and the most significant poet to join the group after World War II. She wrote 16 books of poetry, as well as prose works and plays. She lived in Paris, France until her death in 1986 at age of 58.

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Posted: November 1, 2026 at 10:17 am