Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 37 i Popshot Magazine

Julie Findler was excited. If there was ever a night to dress herself up and get her hair looking all nice, this was it. She was fifteen years old, on the brink of adulthood, and she had woken up that Tuesday morning in the bed she’d always slept in, in the house she’d always lived in, knowing tonight was going to be the best night of her life. Tonight, on the twenty-second of March 2011 at roughly seven o’clock, Julie Findler was going to get her best friend back. Julie and Michelle had bought the tickets six months ago. They’d used Michelle’s dad’s computer. He had one of those new Apple Macs and an unstable enough relationship with his daughter to let her use it whenever she pleased. Julie and…

I think I’ll just disappear into the house. But then I end up at this party. It’s not like any party I’ve ever been to. My brother is there (but which one?). And a famous actor’s wife. And enemies I haven’t thought of in years. Really, are they still knocking about? My oldest friend also appears. He’s visiting from a life abroad where he’s become a great success. Enough people have taken him seriously now that I can’t call him a dreamer anymore. He says, Sometimes I even dream in another language… He holds court, talking in my general direction, paying me no attention. When he says, ____’s coming later, it should set alarm bells ringing, because wouldn’t the name mean something? But all I think is, Is she? Okay,…

I loathe my hands. The insipid, weak flesh and creped knuckles. The pooling skin at the finger joints and the puffy nail-beds. The click and ache. The limitations. * I buy countless lotions and creams – almond, peony, aloe, olive – a kaleidoscope of nail polishes. Gold and silver rings with gemstones that click together like scarabs. I endure tattoos: delicate dog roses that ramble across the knuckles, encircle my thumbs. I massage, I paint, I bedazzle. I loathe them still. * I sit on them until they go numb and I am momentarily free of them. Submerge them in hot washing-up water, watch them turn red and angry as writhing lobsters in broth. I bury them in the vegetable plot, see them subsumed by earth like bleached worms burrowing…

Every time your palm gripsthe ripest round of my cheek,I think of his handsgripping the handle of a chef’s knife,slicing tomatoes for dinner. When I spread the threads of your hair outacross the pillow while you sleep,those tender fans of stemsare carved from their placeagain and again and thenforgotten in the scraps. As the slick of your teethgraze against my neck,I wonder how much pressure it tookfor the serrate to separatepulp from flesh, body from skin. Even as you split your legs between mine,my breath on your breath,those seeds spill out all over againon the cutting board,clinging to each other’s shapewithin a river of juice. When you turn awayto open my door,the only thing I seeis the square of his backleaving me barefoot in the kitchen,sauce seething over the burner.…

Andrew Haener andrewhaener.com Brooklin Holbrough brooklinstormie.ca Cyndy Patrick cyndypatrick.com/illustration Daisy May Morgan @_daisymorganart_ Dina Razin dinarazin.com Gail Gosschalk gailgosschalkillustration.com Gary Venn garyvennillustration.com Guille Manchado guillemanchado.com Hayley Sinnatt hayleandshine.com James Merritt jamesmerritt.uk Kamal Kuz behance.net/kamallls77960a123 Karen Stopler karenstolperillustrations.com Katelyn McKenna katelynmckenna.com Katie M Green katiemgreen.co.uk Laura Brannigan laurabrannigan.com Mikayla Bader mikaylabader.com Millie Baker milliebakerillustration.co.uk Neil Webb neilwebb.net Peter Roman behance.net/peterromanart Rung Sheng Chou behance.net/rungshengchou Sammi Shen sammishen.com Seb Westcott iamseb.co.uk Torsten Carlisle behance.net/torstencarlisle WE NEED YOU The beautiful illustrations that make Popshot really pop are produced by a team of creatives every issue. If you’d like your illustrations to appear in the magazine please get in touch with a link to your portfolio. illustration@popshotpopshot.com…

and the kids are dressed uplike it’s the end of daysThey’re busy plundering lollipops from the sweet bowlleft out by a neighbour we hardly knowand I’m wondering what the world will be like in their haunted futureI’m not afraid of a bang or a whimper to end it allNot afraid of witnessing the fallinevitable as it has becomeI’m just so very scaredof what those few extra degrees will meanfor this pack of excited school childrenwho are so full of sorcerywith their witches gowns, broomsticks and wandsbecause there just might not be enough magicin these desperate days to comestrong enough to undo our past…

There have been times when other people walked these paths. Times when there were no paths. When people’s daily tasks revolved around pleasing the gods, pleading for the eternity of their souls — or their remembrance. Times when Sappho was a living girl. “You know, I’ve been kinda getting into ancient Greek literature lately, of all things…” She was so highly praised. They called her the tenth muse, the mortal muse. “Have you read her?” Yet only one poem has survived in full the three thousand years journey. The rest are only fragments. Never to be recovered. “I thought this was a ghost story.” But you knew. We were young and quite a bit pretentious and I loved you. And maybe it wasn’t fair play me going for such a…

There’s a version of this story that sees Marguerite in a museum, laid on her bed behind a glass wall, while tourists file past to gawp at the only wonder of the world that’s breathing. Marguerite has had to work hard to keep herself from becoming a museum exhibit, or a fairground attraction, or a government secret, or a subject of scientific enquiry. But she hasn’t had to work hard to stay alive. Her bones by now should be dust. They would be, but for all the surgery and the replacements. With each operation the replacements get better, as medicine advances, so each time she feels more comfortable and more mobile. Compared to how long she has spent in retirement, her working age was negligible. But she need not work,…

Alice didn’t want to go to Granny Joan’s house and Granny Joan didn’t want her to come. Alice spent the journey with her long chin turned to the car window. Her mum’s words skittered off her shoulders like rainfall. “Bit of space… not coping…” Alice saw people in colours. It was just a thing. Her mum was purple-nearly-black. She used to be sky blue but things change. Her dad had been yellow, a very important streak of hope in their family. She couldn’t see her own colour. All she knew was that when she and her mum mixed together they became a dreary boggy brown. Granny Joan’s house was an old milking parlour in the middle of nowhere. Amidst all that green, Joan glowed red. Dragon’s breath. Fury. It made…

Monty the Clown stumbled back to his room after the post-show drinks and collapsed on his bed. Ringmaster Raoul wanted to celebrate his birthday and insisted that the entire circus troupe join him. It had been a merry old time to see the troupe drinking together – strong-men, acrobats, knife-throwers, lion-tamers – but now Monty was feeling the effects. He lay on top of the sheets, fully clothed. His face was covered in white paint with a rosy-red circle painted on his cheeks and nose. This was bad. Monty always washed off his face paint after a show. He had to. Ever since the incident. The wash became a post-show ritual from which he never strayed, much like an athlete taking an ice bath. Without fail, Monty would plunge his…

He’d been having a rough few weeks. The band he was in weren’t going to make it, it looked like. He’d realised the songs he was writing with his bandmate – the keyboardist – were bad. Terrible, really. Really terrible. If they were narrative, they were forced; if they were abstract, they were pretentious. He’d tried his hand at shifting the rhyme a word earlier (instead of It’s you I miss, You I long to kiss he had I miss you, Long to kiss you). It hadn’t worked or not worked. He had the same words and a headache. The headache persisted. Morning came and the fogginess hung around. That sunrise, that new day (as referenced in many life-affirming songs), was not to be his. The beach, though, acted as…

For four days every monthI prepare for the bats. Inside the organ, thousandsof throbbing eyes peer religiouslyin the direction of the mouthof the cave. They arrive at dusk, a coal cloudbreathing like a crude blacklung, loose and sticky and mattedplasma panic flapping throughpits, trapped for days, lack of airturning them dark, destructive. When they appear pumping, flutteringit is a ceremony. Fruits, laidat the altar, are shelled and setfor sucking, palm branches fan outfor the bats to recover, absorb into the diminterior, scratches, clicks faintly echoing. For nine months I need the bats to migrate southfor winter, where there are richer soils, sweeterfruits. Or hibernate – sleep so deeply nature transitionsinto every season, dizzy and peaceful from what is requiredto stay alive. I need the bats to leave me so I…

You never RSVP’d to the party. You planned to spend tonight huddled in your bath, heat pad stuck to your belly, the porcelain glossy with blood. But the landlord will think you’re a serial killer. He’s half right depending on who you ask. When you watch the huddle of mothers, gathered around the soft play castle as if they’re waiting to witness a beheading, you count those you assume would call you a killer. The one with the eighties perm has a cross around her neck but wears a miniskirt. The one with box-dye black hair wears skull earrings but named her baby Miracle. When you watch Joey, freshly seven with fresh cuts on his knees hit the pinata four times, you imagine a baseball bat to your abdomen for…

The first time Eliza Grey laid eyes on the baby was at dusk in a slow-moving railway wagon on a rain-swept stretch of the line three miles west of Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, England. She was sixteen years old, unlettered, unworldly, with eyes dark as the rain, hungry because she had not eaten since the night before last, coatless and hatless because she had fled in the dark without thinking where she could run to or what she might do next. Her throat still bore the marks of her employer’s thumbs, her ribs the bruises from his boots. In her belly grew his baby, though she did not know it yet. She had left him for dead in his nightshirt with a hairpin standing out of his eye. She’d…

Damn kids shouldn’a been up here in the first place. Up to no good, I’ll bet, takin’ their drugs and havin’ their sexual relations. On a school night, too. I blame the parents. If it was up to me I’d send ’em all to Vietnam, teach ’em some discipline. Anyhoo, here they were, thinkin’ the old stadium’s abandoned, not expectin’ to find the old groundsman still livin’ here. I think I scared ’em. Serves ’em right for messin’ up my evening kickin’ back with a bottle of Jim Beam and a Johnny Cash LP. I tell ’em they shouldn’t be up here, and I ask if they ain’t never heard about the Quarterback. They ain’t, so I tell ’em the story about the ghost that haunts the place, how some…

I’m the only Dad at Mia’s seventh birthday party. Holly and I wander through the open side gate, and she slips from my hand and joins a gaggle of children on the bouncy castle in the garden. It wheezes under their weight. The mums are chatting, intermittently calling out, “not so rough,” between the rubber turrets. I only do the school drop-off. No one lingers then, so I recognise faces, which child goes with which parent, and who drives what, but nothing useful like their names. A woman comes over. She smells of icing sugar. “Hi, I’m Mia’s mum. Help yourself to virgin Pimm’s over there. We’ll do a piñata soon. You wouldn’t mind helping me put it up, would you? You’re nice and tall.” I’d have said yes, even…