My experience of people's life stories from my work as a narrative therapist consistently destabilised distinctions between imagined/magical and real experiences. I came to realise that the day-to-day magical realist juxtapositions I came upon were encounters with people's daily lives, as lived, that have remained unacknowledged within the literatures of counselling. In this paper I speculate about the possible reasons for "smoothing" magical realities into rational realist accounts within the literature of counselling. I tell short stories that illustrate people's magical/realist manoeuvres out of impossible life circumstances towards different possibilities. I argue that just as writers on the margins have subversively written themselves into different spaces, people at the social and psychological margins have found imaginative pathways around life's walls. (Contains 4 notes.)