Popshot Magazine Issue 35

If you’ve ever jumped into cold deep water, you’ll know that the human body can be transformed by this extreme change of state. Sure, you might end up listening to the sound of teeth chattering inside your head, but in those moments when your skin screams to adjust, lungs bursting for breath and legs kicking out, you might feel properly alive. Is there anything else, besides oxygen, which we so instinctively crave? A cool drink of water might keep us quenched and vital. But even a few inches of H20 can cause death by drowning. Is it this compelling tension that makes us yearn for a dip in the sea? All the while knowing that with one swipe of its foamy white paws, water could undo us. Our bodies are…

I wouldn’t exist if my parents hadn’t crossed the sea.I remade myself along Manchester and Wigan canals,walked frozen rivers in Beijing, returned with the snow.I melted and sweated and sobbed over brilliant women,then ran and cycled and starved till I nearly broke apartbecause I hated my body, allowing myself one mercy:sweet, sweet water. Now, every morning in the shower,I caress my solid, full form, tenderly rub it with bergamot.I live in a small, magical flat, rain outside the window. But whether or not I did my time with water, listen here:nobody can question my identity, my fluidity, my tidescrashing, bursting, roaring, whispering, the way I shiftbetween octopus and otter and eel and invisible energy.Words float over me and away. I am salt, weird flowers,tiny beings waiting to speak, a universe…

He was just shifting the tether of his harness from the port jackline to the starboard when the wave crashed into the cockpit and washed him out of it. He felt himself lifted over the lifelines, bounce once on the hull, then slip into the broken surface of the sea. So this was how it happened, he thought; this was how it came at last. The water began to fill his mouth as he tried to breathe. Then the next wave lifting, and he was back in the cockpit again–sprawled on a locker, seawater draining out the scuppers. Twisting hard, he grabbed a stanchion, found the tether with his other hand, and clipped it on–then swung back round and grabbed the helm, spewing water from nose and mouth. "How unlikely…

I start with oblique ice slaps, one foot heel in the shore of rocks. My eye blinks of brine and coarse forearms gasp above and below oxygen-soaked microscopic fish bones. The bones kiss and bite and I move my blue skin to the softer space with soft algae nudges, bending seagrass, and the green hum fills my lungs. The porous wrinkled warmth. All finger pads at rest. The dream momentum of my sight is backwards. Now sleeping upside down black daylight, a dark float of muscle and mud. I open and close. I taste mayflies and smell of rain. The space holds me and wants the rain, dances still asleep. We whisper like the wind and wait for the rain. We look down, look up, myself watching myself, a facsimile…

They call the island Speur-na-Mara, because it lies uncertainly on the boundary of sky and sea. It’s nearly invisible from the mainland, but as Calum MacAoidh’s little ferry—barely more than a motorised tin rowing boat, really, unchanged after all these years save a few more dents and a couple more layers of paint—bobs fearlessly across the iron-grey water, the island appears to expand suddenly from the empty horizon; first as a shadow, then slowly consolidating itself into bluish rock that appears as if it might still at many moment disappear in the thin sunlight. The ferry, I notice, even has the same wooden crate of lifejackets that must date back to at the least the seventies, with its laminated safety instructions dutifully printed but never followed, now peeling apart at…

It's dark morning and the lake is cold from last nightthe dew drops knew of the child who died there some time agothey say it was murder but it’s as if someone is still thereit was something like a vapour, misty, a leaning downcrouching figure, it seemed a shadow cast by the immature morningbut the night will come when it will change into a newer figureshowing its ever-changing eyesthe silhouette is still not clear but the mother is happyto see the child again as she moved even closer to embrace the longingwhen everything melts and a white mist was left on the dark waterbut a little voice still callsthe mother stares around heraround the lakeeverywhereThen she's gripped by a handpulled downjust like the other women who saw their children there.…