I have an idea for a fantasy story. The catalyst of the events that happen in the story is the death of a young girl and the response of the neighbors accusing a woman of the crime, who turns out to be innocent. But I don't want to depict the crime literally. I want to abstract the initial events to something different: a metaphor representing the crime or accident, the addition of a bizarre detail in the crime, a play on the absurdity of the response to a minor version of the "crime" redefining it (i.e.: people overreact to the stealing/mutilating of a toy as if it was in fact murdering the owner of the toy), etc. I want ideas to get out of my usual thoughts and spark my imagination. What do you "see"?
I do not have an idea for you. I do want to say however that I like this idea and I want to wish you good luck.
Perhaps a lean into Magic Realism, one of the sub-departments within the greater offices of Fantasy Inc.? If it were to be a true Magic Realism story, the death would be genuinely inexplicable, something with tendrils leading away from the normal world of possible events. That's the "magic" of Magic Realism. No powers, no witches, no warlocks, no metahumans, none of those things is ever remotely part of a Magic Realism story. Just an event or happenstance that falls outside the realm of the normal. Speaking to the idea of "the absurdity of the response to a minor version of the 'crime' redefining it", maybe she's not dead-dead. Maybe she's frozen, in stasis, down to her immovable clothing, which would be effectively dead if not actually, and the people could stretch their reactions as though the crime had been gruesome and gory, but only because they can see the frozen women and fear that it could happen to them. Fear is a very potent fount for the imagination. Ideally, in a genuine Magic Realism story, you would be using this happenstance outside of the plausible as a way to say something about the people around the event. Magic Realism always uses the bizarre event as a metaphor to speak about a cultural facet that the writer wants the reader to engage in a sympathetic mode.
I'd try to avoid symbolism. It's quite likely the casual reader won't get it and think, 'what was all that about?' This will be counterproductive. Think about the characters in the story and their points of view. None of them witness the crime. they only hear about it from others, the police who knock on their doors and the speculation and gossip spading through the community. All they're going to know for sure is that the child went missing and her body was found. The specific details of the crime would be obscured.
I don't know if this is entirely true, but it is fairly close. Magical Realism is hyper realistic in logic bounding a small element of magic that has been incorporated. I like using Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" as an example. The story itself revolves around what is obviously an angel fallen to Earth, but the message is held in the realistic and very cruel treatment of the angel in the modern world. I couldn't say that there was NONE of any magical element or character, but their abilities or magical traits are small and treated differently than in a fantasy story. Agreed. The OP may have a good time trying it out. Magical Realism is an odd and niche sort of writing, but it certainly has its fan base and hinges on the ability of the author to turn a solid metaphor.
In that story, though, the angel is a facet out of the Religious epistemology. In Latin culture, we would not equate that remotely to the kind of fantasy magic to be found in Hogwarts or even Middle Earth. It's not the same to us, and it's also not a very typical deployment in Magic Realism. José Saramago's Blindness is a more typical example. The global outbreak of blindness in the story is the element in question. It serves as the metaphor for Saramago to talk about eroding sociocultural dynamics as viewed through a Latin American lens. Or Foer's Everything is Illuminated where the characters all find themselves playing out the end of a story that was written long ago, each a kind of archetypal being tied to events and places, and most importantly, memories that invoke them into being as much as the beings invoke the events and places. It makes a million times more sense if you read the book rather than just see the film because the film deletes the whole storyline about the founding of Trachimbrod. When I hit as hard as I do concerning Magic Realism's "magic" not being the usual thing one thinks of as magic, it's because the usual inclination is to see the word "magic" and go right for wands and spells and witches and wizards, and that's not what's going on. It may occasionally flirt with that, but it's not remotely the main attraction and once people assume that's what they're going to get, it's hard to talk them back onto the proper track. Márquez himself would have a fit if his work were described as such. I've read a few of his interviews and he openly disdains the usual props and tropes of Fantasy as engaged in North America and Northern Europe. Germany is a notable exception in that Magic Realism has a strong literary following there as well.
