A selfless villager finds her annual act of kindness is at risk of being misconstrued in Lucy Brown’s short story. Illustration by Zoë van Dijk.

There never was a horse chestnut tree in my garden. Still, the children came, year after year, leaving with pockets full. I had tea with their mothers on the patio, cooing as the little ones tromped through the leaves and occasionally came up with a prize. Autumn became my favourite season, those few weeks of bustle recompensing me for the rest of my solitary existence. Then, the leaves shrivelled into a brown sludge that eventually slithered into the pond. The fish hid, the birds stilled, and that was my excitement spent until spring, when the tree began its hardy rebirth.

But there never was a horse chestnut tree at the bottom of my garden. It was an oak.

People didn’t look up, that was their error. They didn’t study the tree so they didn’t question the miraculous conception, nor the excessive number of yearly births. If they had colluded, perhaps I would have been discovered, but it wasn’t that kind of village anymore. Since the school had closed, the mothers had stopped communicating, seeing each other as competitors. The elder generation died or kept themselves above the fray. I was neither a young mother nor an elderly resident, not even a long-term one, so there was no one to tell tales. Until now, there had been no danger of discovery.

It had started simply enough. Many of the horse chestnut trees around these parts lined the roads. That would have been fine were the roads thick enough to accommodate pavements, but they weren’t. Cars pelted through the village, paying no mind to the safety warnings. Only a parent completely blasé about their child’s safety would risk foraging at the roadside, and I’d only met a few of those in my time. The rest of the trees seemed to be in back gardens. Not the gardens of the young mothers, you understand; no, they didn’t have room to swing a rat, let alone a cat. They used the village green for all recreational activities, where some enterprising parish councilman had long ago decided to hack down the trees, not least because grass was easier to maintain than sprouting wood with an agenda of its own. That left the remainder of the coveted inner-village trees hidden away in the gardens of cantankerous ‘originals’ who hated the infiltration of the new developments and would sooner let the children get run over at the roadside than share their sanctuaries.

I’d seen the state of affairs when I moved in and I’d wanted to help. The lack of a horse chestnut tree in my garden was a hindrance, it’s true, but only a minor one. It took planning, diligence and, most of all, determination.

So I rose as soon as dawn broke. Bundled up in dark clothing, pockets stuffed with plastic carrier bags, I hastened to the roadside. The odd car zoomed by, but I heard them and flattened myself into the hedge or against the trunk of a tree. When I’d collected last night’s debris, I hurried home. The next part took skill. I couldn’t just toss them haphazardly amongst the oak’s leaves. No, the job was worth doing properly. Split casings had to be married up with similar-sized conkers and half-buried under crunchy leaves or rolled away for that added frisson of excitement. All this had to be done under the cover of gloom, before my neighbours were likely to see.

Until this year, it had worked. Then, towards the end of July, I’d made the horrific discovery: root rot. It was as ugly as it sounded. At the very moment my leaves should’ve been green and luscious, they were yellowing, fluttering to the ground like flambéed post-it notes. The canopy above, once impenetrable, was shot through with cannonballs. The worst offenders by far, though, were the new roots protruding like buffet tables from the trunk of the tree. The pus seeping from them ate into my heart.

What could I do? I looked it up on the internet and learned the tree would have to come down. I dithered throughout August, unable to grasp the nettle that would consign me to the footnotes of village history — the woman who used to let the children collect the conkers that fell in her garden. It may have been different had I a year to acclimatise myself to the alteration in status, but two months was no time at all. So, I hesitated until it was too late to stem the catastrophe.

The tree was standing; the children would expect conkers for their pockets, and that’s what they were going to get. I’d indulged in subterfuge to satisfy them for a decade; I could surely facilitate a little more to prolong this pleasure of mine for one more season.

It was all a matter of preparation. This year, I started much earlier. It was leaves I collected under the lightening skies, dragging bags full back to stack around the trunk and its protruding roots. They mulched up quickly, staining the ground but offering little in the way of protection. When I surveyed the scene from afar it looked convincing enough, but some parents weren’t content to survey their youngsters from a distance. I had to change tack.

I drove fifty miles to a garden centre and purchased thirty bags of compost. Under cover of darkness, as August faded away, I created an extra layer of ground above the bulging roots that petered off somewhere along the lawn. It didn’t look exactly natural, but I’d been fooling these people with an oak tree for years — I couldn’t start crediting them with sharp wits now. Over the compost, I peppered leaves, a sprinkling every day that eventually appeared passable. Then the annual conker collection began in earnest. I baked cakes, stockpiled sweets and waited for the first knock at the door.

It was an old customer who dropped by first: Mrs Dupree and her nine-year-old daughter, Angelica. I’d been welcoming her to my garden for years now and she was a favourite. Usually, I was happy to spend time listening to her chattering, polite child that she was, but this time I was only half-listening. My attention was devoted to the ground, her interaction with it, the way it looked when her hands delved into the leaves and came up with a conker.

When the ordeal was over, I felt better. My decrepit tree, dying even as I watched, had passed one test. There was nothing to suggest it wouldn’t survive them all. After that, I settled a little. I enjoyed my hostess role, enjoyed the exhaustion of my early-morning jaunts to the roadside. We were perilously close to our daring escape, the tree and I, when disaster appeared in the form of Ms Foxton.

Ms Foxton and her small son Angus were recent patrons of one year standing. She was the type I endured in order to welcome the rest. Angus was a sickly boy, no nursery school for him, but long days fussed over by his mother instead, leaving him with the social skills of a squirrel. I’d acknowledged last year, while watching a grey-tailed friend play chicken with another of my visitors, that the comparison was perhaps an insult to the squirrel family.

The mother was no better. She kept me at arm’s length, emphasising the ‘Ms’ of her name and crinkling her nose if I sissed instead of zizzed. All the rest were ‘call me Pam’ types, insistent on first-name terms, but not Ms Foxton. She treated me like a public service, my cakes like an inferior version of those she bought at Waitrose. I would’ve gladly turned her away but I couldn’t afford to arouse suspicion.

From the moment Angus romped into my garden, I was on edge. Many mothers hung back with their cup of tea, but not Ms Foxton. Angus cried if he was deprived of her company for a few minutes and she, of course, indulged him to the letter. So, together, they approached the tree and I held my breath. To my relief, she didn’t have eyes for anything but him and they passed half an hour hunting through the leaves together. I prowled the patio, doing my best to keep an eye on them while pretending to tend my potted plants. Until she gathered him up to go, I honestly thought I’d gotten away with it.

He threw a tantrum. He wanted to stay, he wanted more conkers. I knew full well that they had the lion’s share of today’s haul in her bag but I kept quiet, mindful that a word from me would merely compel her to stay and be an inconvenience.

Her response to his tantrum was pitiful. She didn’t reprimand him, either for being naughty or greedy. No, she pandered to him and said he could go back to the tree – and back he went. He ran like a demon and, in spite of his mother’s entreaty, slipped head first into the leaves, his skull breaking his fall.

The garden was silent for a terrifying few seconds then his scream shattered it. Birds fled from the living trees, squawking to each other in indignation as they zoomed away. Ms Foxton leapt forward, her tights plopping into mud as she kneeled beside him. She touched his head, murmuring, begging, while he bellowed his misery and flailed about like an otter. Then Ms Foxton did what I was praying she wouldn’t — she started scrabbling at the leaves around his head.

I moved forward. ‘Mrs – Ms Foxton, would you like me to help you get him inside? I could –’

‘Don’t you touch him,’ she interrupted, then her search came to an abrupt halt as she reached the protruding root. Her eyes swept up the tree, taking in the browning trunk, the cracked branches and the dearth of canopy foliage. ‘It’s dead,’ she murmured. ‘The tree’s dead.’

Her horrified eyes swivelled to me, even while Angus howled beside her. She was sizing me up as a crackpot, as a paedophile, and jumping to conclusions. With someone else, throwing myself on their mercy might’ve worked, but not Ms Foxton. The horror was gradually replaced with the satisfaction of power and she finally hoisted her screaming son up.

‘The whole village will know about you,’ she spat as she carried Angus to the side gate. ‘And the police. You just wait, you freak.’

My body took that as a direct order. Even after she slammed the gate, I stood motionless, gazing at the offending symptoms of root rot and wondering where I’d made the wrong turn. It would all come out now; the oak tree, the dawn collections, the recent leaf-foraging expeditions and compost mountain. Was any of that against the law? I hadn’t charged for entry, I hadn’t even advertised. It was a verbal understanding, but if that was based on deception then was it a crime? For some reason, I’d never thought much about it.

Root rot. Why root rot? And why now?

‘Mrs Connolley?’

I didn’t know how many times the voice had repeated itself before it permeated my preoccupied mind. But when it filtered through, I jumped out of my skin, thinking it was the police already, or perhaps villagers with pitchforks. Turning, I found my neighbour, Mrs Hoskins, leaning heavily on her walking stick and swaying slightly. I must have been lost for quite some time for her to make it this far into my garden.

I tried to smile. ‘Oh, Mrs Hoskins. Is it the toilet again or another fuse?’

‘Are you all right, pet?’ she asked.

‘Oh, I…’ My eyes were still fixed on the tree, the damn tree.

‘Is it rotted through?’ she questioned, waving her stick at the trunk.

I flinched. ‘It’ll have to come down.’

‘And that Mrs-Smarmy-Whatsherface — what did she have to say about it all?’

My brain was slow to unfog but then I stared at her. ‘Ms Foxton, you mean?’

‘Aye, that one. Only reason she calls herself ‘Ms’ is because her husband’s having it away with thingymabob from the farm. Did you know?’

I shook my head.

‘No, no, you’re out of the loop. Anyway, don’t be fretting on about her. Whatever threats she’s made, she’s a bit short on friendly folk in this village. I doubt they’ll last the year out round here.’

This new information baffled me. Mrs Hoskins knew more about all the goings-on than she had a right to. An icy feeling settled in my stomach. What else did Mrs Hoskins know?

As if following my train of thought, she tapped her stick against the tree trunk. ‘Nice thing you’ve been doing for them kiddies. Keeps them safe, keeps their parents quiet. Lot of work for you though, pet,’ she added.

‘I don’t mind it. Well, I didn’t,’ I corrected. ‘It’s over now. Does everyone know?’

She cackled. ‘Not any of them halfwits you’ve been letting loose, don’t be worrying about that. How they expect their kiddies to grow up with half a head on their shoulders is beyond me. They don’t look up, do they? Or, if they do, they’re so daft that it makes no difference.’

I burst out laughing. The few birds that had ventured back following Ms Foxton’s outburst squawked and scattered again.

When I could breathe again, I asked, ‘Did nobody think to tell them?’

A wicked smile slid across her wrinkled features. ‘Well, pet, we thought about it. Then we thought better of it. Come on, lass, do you want a cuppa? I’ve got Martha and Jean coming round, we can have a natter.’

I took one last look at the decaying tree then squeezed her outstretched hand. ‘That’d be grand, Mrs Hoskins.’

A poem by Matthew Fieldhouse, written to address the vast differences between oneself as a child, and as an adult. Illustration by Tobias Hall.

This is the bow and arrowed child,
the supple, soft, bone marrowed child,
the sherbert sweet, marshmallowed child,
with a mouth that’s full of maps,

and rosebud sap,
the kind that coarses through his limbs,
fills his head with playground planets, penny sweets and bruising shins,

that summer skin,
with grit packed scars on mud packed knees,
fills his eyes with cornfield continents, paper planes and clambered trees,

such jamboree,
but as the molten years flick by,
I’ve painted that marshmallow child in Dulux One Coat White,

now out of sight,
layer on layer of matt emulsion,
he’s covered now, white smothered now, this act of adult expulsion,

a strange compulsion,
but on occasion comes a day,
where the paint gets chipped, emulsion splits and that child comes out to play.

Joshua Preston’s flash fiction piece addresses the sudden nature of loss and the various aspects of weight associated with it. Illustration by DAQ.

Death is tragic enough without having to get the dead down from the ceiling. No one knew why it happened, but starting one late-summer afternoon, the freshly dead refused to drop as gravity intended. As though the last breath was wind in their sails, steadily they ascended like balloons, disappearing into the clouds. All across the world, patients lifted from their hospital beds and families came home to loved ones bumping the ceiling fan.

As society struggled to adapt, disappearance became synonymous with death. If someone slipped on the ice, what was there to catch them? If they went through the windshield, up they veered like rockets, never to come down. Crime scenes were harder to discern without a victim. On flights, fewer people fought over the window seat.

For those caught in trees, powerlines or the nets above the busiest intersections, families held funeral services called ‘Release Aerials’. Some traditionalists insisted on anchoring down their loved ones, but this was abandoned when too much rain (or not enough) turned a cemetery into an empty field. At these Aerials, pallbearers held gold cords tied to the dead who, wrapped in fine cloth, hovered above them. Following a blessing and a few words from loved ones, the cords were released. Higher and higher they went as, in the eyes of onlookers, tears obscured the view.

The lightness of the bodies was an illusion. As they drifted away, the weight was heavy on the living. On the walk back to the car, footsteps scraped the ground.

Every religion claimed credit for the exodus, with some viewing it as evidence of the end times, blaming modernity and the Federal Reserve in equal measure. Others saw it as a sign of God’s love, mankind at last rising to Heaven or Jannah or Svarga. But with so many bodies now being thrown into the cosmos, many already knew what it took an ecologist to say: each death made the world a little smaller. Both literally and figuratively. The weight concentrated, and although no one knew when the heaviness would leave, there was relief, as well as fear, when at last, all became dark and there was lightness in the fingertips.

Inspired by conversations with his 92-year-old father-in-law, John Rowland’s poem considers the ultimate adventure. Illustration by Bren Luke.

Somewhere, in a quiet place,
On some other day in some other year,
I’ll learn what I need to know.
I’ll see the fear for the lie it is,
Let my spirit slip the lines,
Set sail on a course newly charted;
A course only I may follow.

Those who remain here will remember
The bits and pieces they still hold.
They’ll paint a picture or frame a photo
Believing they knew me through and through.
But the real me will be in the wind,
Leaving only shadows and ripples behind.
History will, as always, be incomplete,
Images captured in the twilight,
Details hidden by the approaching night.

A young boy finds his summer taking a peculiar turn when his mother goes missing in Ethan Chapman’s short story. Illustration by Cristian Fowlie.

My father stands on the edge of the pier with a cigarette hanging limply from his mouth, watching me as I come up for air. I clamber into the boat and take off my goggles. I look over at him and shake my head and watch his posture sink ever so slightly, then I slink to the bottom of the boat and lie on the floor out of his eyeline, dripping and spreading and congealing.

For the past twenty-five days, he has stood on that pier sucking cigarettes down to their nubs, watching me as I search the lake for some sign of her. I’ve found nothing. The water is deep but clear, and as I search under its surface, I watch fish rush past and crabs crawl sideways away from me, as if suspicious to turn their backs. But, despite the water’s clarity, there’s only so much I can see.

After a while I sit up. He’s still there but I don’t look at him. Instead, I look around the lake and feel the last of the summer’s heat around me, trapped and lingering, pleasant yet oppressive, and then feel that cool slice of something else underneath. It’s a late August evening and, while it’s been hot and muggy for most of the summer, a chill has now attached itself to the breeze, signalling that autumn looms just over the horizon and with it, school. Flies hover above the surface of the water in the evening twilight, bouncing and dancing around each other while some steal away and land on my burnt shoulders. I beat them away and then grimace from the touch. From the weeks being out here in the heat, day after day, my sun-dried skin has wound itself taut around my body; any touch or movement threatening to split it into dusty pieces of parchment on which is written the memories of my summer. I’ve spent nearly every day of it looking for my mother.

Twenty-eight days ago, my mother and I were both laid on the grass by the lake. It was a warm morning and threatened to be an even warmer afternoon. We had brought a picnic and around us lay scattered remnants of sandwiches, biscuit and cracker crumbs. The summer holidays had only just started and everything felt full of possibility, the way a bright morning feels before it reaches mid-afternoon and those possibilities look different. We had lapsed into silence, not from any argument or disagreement but a mutual trailing off into thought. I lay propped up on an elbow watching an ant struggle with one of our sandwich crusts while my mother stood a short distance away at the edge of the lake. A pier jutted out farther down the shoreline like a solitary finger but she made no move toward it. She just stood there, toes in the water, staring out into something. I gazed at her for a while then turned to watch the ant steal away our leftover sandwich, falling off the picnic paper and flopping into the grass. When I looked up, she was gone. I frowned and looked towards the pier but couldn’t see her. I looked back toward the place she had been and saw the water rippling, as if trying to reassert itself after being disturbed.

Had she gone in?

I looked up and down the shoreline but her clothes were nowhere to be seen. Had she walked in with them on? I looked around, expecting her to be over by a tree or lying on the grass but she wasn’t there. She had gone.

I sat still and waited for her to reappear, until the seconds turned into minutes and every second after that became a sharpened object that needled more panic into me. I called her name, softly at first, and then I began to shout for her. My anxiety began to swirl while the water remained calm. Birds chirped somewhere out of sight. Everything was normal, everything except the torrent that was pulsing and building inside of me, the surroundings shimmering and dulling around me, pulling in and out of focus as if I were looking at them through a broken screen. The day became too hot, the light reflecting off the water too bright, everything vibrating and threatening to explode.

I screamed variations of her name as if trying them on for size: ‘Mum! Mother! Mummy!’ She responded to none of them.

At some point, I stopped calling for her. I waited there until evening, just sat there, my throat raw and in pieces, until eventually a numbness crept over me. There was no worry or anxiety anymore. That had vanished along with my mother. Now there was only an acceptance. I just somehow knew that she wasn’t coming back.

I watched the shadows steadily reach out from the bottoms of things as night took over from day and hoped that my cries might still be carrying to wherever she was, reverberating off the water like skipping stones or flashes of light. But, when the shadows began to engulf everything and she still hadn’t returned, I picked up the picnic basket and walked home.

After I told my father what had happened he disappeared for a couple of days. A few afternoons later, as I sat in the kitchen, I watched his truck pull back into the driveway. A small wooden rowing boat lay in the bed of it. I watched him get out and stand by the door.

‘Son,’ he called. ‘Son?’

I didn’t respond because in that moment I felt a stab of something close to fear. It was hard to pinpoint why I felt that way. Maybe it was a premonition, a vague fear of what his grief stricken brain had cooked up for me in the days that he had been gone. I didn’t know what the boat was for but I wanted no part of it, so I stayed quiet. I watched panic begin to stretch taut across his face. He shouted for me then and I watched as he came bounding up to the front door and through it. When he saw me his face slackened with relief and he leaned against the door, breathing deeply. As he stood there I took notice of his greasy complexion, so damp I could almost see my reflection. I took note of his patchy facial hair on a face that he normally kept clean shaven. I took note of his bloodshot eyes that looked like they hadn’t closed in months; that appeared raw, burned, as if they had stared too long at something hot and inflamed. I tried not to look at any part of him, and when he told me to get into the truck I did so without looking up.

‘We’re going to find your mother,’ he said as we drove down the dirt road that led to the lake, and then began to repeat it like a mantra. ‘We’re going to find your mother. We’re going to find your mother.’

I had been looking down into my lap since we had left the house, not glancing at him once, but I looked up at him then and when I did, I saw a man at his wits end; his brain feverish and his eyes maniacal. He vibrated and twitched and jittered as if he had been hurriedly scribbled into existence. I quickly looked back down again and tried to forget what I had just seen. This person sat next to me wasn’t my father anymore.

When we reached the lake, I sat holding my seatbelt tight, staring at the spot where my mother and I had sat a lifetime ago. Part of me had expected her to be sitting there, waiting for us. Expected her to come over laughing and apologising for her cruel joke and for all the worry she had caused us. But there was nothing. I felt more emptiness begin to steal over me.

My father got out and went around to the back of the truck. I listened to him struggle and curse before finally getting the boat off the truck bed and down into the water. I heard him come up from the lake toward the side of the truck and every instinct told me to get out, to run, to get away from this desperate man who only looked like my father but inside was something different altogether. But I didn’t. I sat still as he opened the door, let him take a hold of my arm, let him put me in the boat, and I sat in silence as I let him push me out into the place where my mother had vanished.

For the last twenty-five days, this is what I’ve done, day after day. My father will help me untie the boat, help me into it and then push me out. Watching me with a cigarette attached to his lips, he’ll expect me to dive in and search the lake for a body, for clothing, for something tangible, because to him it just doesn’t make sense for her to disappear. But I’ve covered every part of the lake — every square inch, every round inch, everything. She isn’t here. She’s gone and I wonder when will enough be enough? When will stubbornness give way to doubt and doubt give way to acceptance? When will he know what I know? When will he assume defeat? Tomorrow I know we’ll carry on with this never-ending search. It’s become an obsession and I’m unsure whether he’s doing this to punish me because he blames me for her disappearance, or because deep down in his half-eaten psyche this makes sense to him. The two of us are trapped in our own fever dreams, me in one world being cooked by the elements and him in another, his obsession bubbling over in his overcooked brain. How long can this continue? What happens when school starts? Will I even return? My friends who I’ve not seen all summer will see that I’m not there. Will they wonder where I am? Or will I just disappear like my mother, forgotten, nothing more than an empty desk that’s eventually filled by another.

That part of my life already feels like a life lived by another person. All my memories of school and friends seem far away, like a dream that’s dissolving more and more by the day. I feel detached from it, unsure now if that life ever happened to me at all. My mother has dragged us into murky waters and now we’re stuck in our own little mad corner of the world as my father threatens to drag me away from what’s sane, from what’s real. There’s a chasm between us now that’s deeper than any lake or ocean and it’s becoming hard to remember what any of us were like before this.

But I have a secret. My father doesn’t know that I’ve stopped looking. He doesn’t know that for the past twenty-four days, I’ve done nothing but dive to the bottom, chase fish and admire the strangeness that exists under the surface of things. It’s a little foothold in a summer holiday that hasn’t been my own.

That’s not to say I didn’t look initially. That first day, spurred on by my own guilt and my father’s obsessive drive, I dived down there looking for my mother like a madman. I scraped my way along the bottom, searched under rocks, scratched and dug holes in the floor, doing nothing but kicking up dirty clouds of earth. I felt responsible and needed to find her or at least a part of her, something to make my father happy, to mend what was broken. But she didn’t want to be found. She still doesn’t.

So I pretend to go along with my father’s obsession. Burning in the heat, the water steaming as my cooked body dives into it, I pretend to search the lake. And sometimes, while he thinks I’m searching for my mother, I’ll sit on the lake floor and watch my father’s form from the pier break apart and shift in the current, his body splitting and connecting in varying degrees of completion as he stands there hoping and praying that I’ll find her. And I’ll feel safe from him for just a little while. But each time I stay under a little bit longer, because one day I know I won’t come up. Because underwater is where I can finally breathe.

Set in the foggy calm of the Faroe Islands, Matthew Landrum’s poem revels in the present moment. Illustration by Daria Skrybchenko.

On foggy morning when the world recedes and leaves you
islanded, wake to quiet in the house and stand at the window,

rubbing sleep from your eyes, and imagine the mountains
and forests have dissolved,

folded into banks of clouds, that the sea
has also gone. Even the future could be

elided, with all its questions and possibilities, gain
and gloss, leaving you with an endless present – this kitchen,

hardwood cool beneath your bare feet, your breath misting the pane
and the mists beyond. Let future tensing and faith in visible things

give way to pressing blankness, an end without world.
Pour tea. Be anchored by a mug, the ceramic warm

and heavy in your hands. Everything has been reduced
to steam, to breath, to fog.

A deceitful creator of strange creatures finds his scepticism challenged in Alys Hobbs’ curious short story. Illustration by Phil Couzens.

Ralph was in the workshop late, winding gauze around wire, his fingers gummed together with glue and tufts of hair. The lamp flickered. In the empty apartment upstairs a grandfather clock counted the minutes. Other than that, all was quiet. No carriages on the road outside. No voices on the street. No one else awake in the world, it seemed, but Ralph himself.

He bent low over the table, his hands darting, stitching, moulding. Every now and again, he bit off a stitch or changed his brush. A glass jar, mottled and stained, sat on the bench beside him, awaiting its inhabitant. This was going to be a good one; a two-headed rat with little human hands and a lecherous mouth. A thing of true evil, Ralph would say. As he worked, he practised the patter under his breath, his lips twitching, his eyes reddening and stinging as the hour slid by.

Discovered in the catacombs of Paris, he would mutter in a quivering voice. Smuggled over on a ship just last week. I hear many of the crew came down ill on the voyage, complaining of terrible dreams. The captain hasn’t been seen since they docked…then he’d look around anxiously, maybe dabbing at his forehead as though he were fighting a fever himself. It’s a strange one, this, and I’ll be glad to be rid of it.

And then they would barter a little, he and the fairground owner, or the barman at the Blind Tiger, or Mrs Beet at the curiosity shop — whoever he decided might give him the better deal. He would sweat and tremble and shake his head until they reached a price that pleased him; and then he’d hand it over, slowly, almost regretfully. And of course they would take it, his twisted, sneering little forgery. They’d take it though part of them knew all too well that it was a shill. They’d take it because the wondering child gaping out from behind their eyes wanted it to be true, needed there to be such things as the strange nightmares he sold. Because, if such things were real, what else might there be? Angels, perhaps, or glittering life beyond the void?

They would place it on a high shelf or in a window, make it the star of a new exhibition, and people would come from all around to see it, to feel their flesh crawl and their hearts flutter in horrified delight.

Meanwhile, Ralph would be kicking his feet up somewhere with a fine bottle of whiskey and a hearty meal, living a life of relative luxury and grinning himself to sleep — for a week or two, at least, until the money ran out. Then, it would be back to the workshop, to the wires and glue, the boxes of hair, the scraps of fur and the glass eyeballs, the bottles of teeth he’d picked from stray cat skulls and trapped mice, and all the other trims and trappings that made up the ghastly parade.

Ralph was not an honest man, but he saw himself as an entertainer of sorts. And if so many fools wanted to spend their money gaping at mutated rodents and skulls with too many eye-sockets and six-fingered monkey paws, he would surely meet the demand. There was always someone who would buy. Sometimes big collectors and business owners like Mrs Beet, who used the curiosities to drum up customers. And some strange types, too, who would pay in clammy handfuls of odd currency and gaze at their purchase with hunger. Ralph did not care much for their sort, but as long as they kept him in bed and board, he wasn’t exactly going to turn them away.

Besides, he had worked hard to build himself a solid reputation in town. ‘A Specialist Collector of all Things Supernatural’ his calling card read. He made sure to maintain an air of mystery about his person, never giving away where he came from or where he lived, and making sure that he was often seen scuttling about clutching old books and misshapen tools with apparent purpose. These things just seem to seek me out, he would say with a shrug. It’s as though they’re drawn to me, and I to them, like we’re supposed to find each other. It’s always been the way, ever since I was a boy…

His listeners would widen their eyes, and speak in hushed tones, saying how strange, how bizarre, how exciting. They would gape at him, and then at whichever monstrosity he had built, regarding it with trepidation and barely-disguised lust. Then they would pay up, and Ralph would have to bite his knuckles to stop from howling with laughter as they left.

The grandfather clock chimed in the apartment above, disturbing him from his work. Midnight, it sang, and Ralph sat staring ahead as the peals rung into the quiet. A light rain speckled the window. The lamp flickered. He rubbed his eyes, stretched his back until the joints popped and cracked, and thought about his bed.

Suddenly, there was a knock at the door.

Ralph sat for a long moment, listening. His mind occasionally played tricks on him when he worked so late. He often thought he heard such things as little nails scratching, or tails slithering, or snatches of whispered conversation. Sometimes, he even thought he sensed movement behind him, but when he turned around all was still. The usual troubles of a tired man who sat up late into the night.

But there came the knock again. A quick, insistent knock, muffled as though the knocker were wearing gloves. Ralph got up slowly. He crossed the room, glancing out of the window as he went to unlatch the door. The glass was thick and warped, but he could see that there was someone out there in the rain, their silhouette framed by the glow of the street lamp. A tall figure, hunched, in a long raincoat.

Ralph opened the door.

His first impression was of a drowned weasel, so narrow-faced and sodden was the visitor. He was a pale man with long hands like claws which clutched his coat around his neck. The wet hair sticking to his face was so fair it was almost white. His light blue eyes stared at Ralph, unblinking, strangely reptilian. He did not speak and Ralph, baffled by the oddness of the man’s appearance and the irregular manner of his visit, found himself lost for words too. They faced each for a long few seconds until Ralph finally found his voice.

‘What is it?’ he said.

‘I have heard that you deal in beings of the supernatural kind,’ the visitor said. His lips barely moved when he spoke, so the words seemed to squeeze themselves out from between small pointed teeth. He had an accent, though Ralph could not place it.

‘Well,’ Ralph said, caught off-guard again. He usually had to cart his creations around for a while to flog them; he had never had a visiting customer before. ‘I do, yes,’ he said, before adding, for authenticity’s sake, ‘or, they seem to deal in me, anyway.’

The man glanced over his shoulder, down the darkened street.

‘I have something that may be of interest to you,’ he said. ‘Nearby.’

‘Ah,’ Ralph said. ‘I see.’

So this late caller wasn’t here to buy, but to sell. Ralph folded his arms, resisting the urge to scoff. As though anyone could cobble together a better freak than he could! He was the expert. It was like selling bacon to a butcher.

‘Look, it’s good of you to come by,’ he said, determined to get rid of the visitor and head home to bed, ‘but I only deal in real specialities, you know, truly occult creatures. For example,’ he added, unable to resist showing off, ‘I’ve just received an abnormality all the way from Paris. I’m working on preserving it right now. So…’

‘Sir, this is a true speciality,’ the man said. His eyes did not meet Ralph’s — rather, they seemed to drift, to float about the room. Ralph had to admit that it was impressive. The stranger was putting on a good show. But it was late, Ralph’s back ached, and he didn’t even want to see whatever soggy puppets might have been on offer. It would be humiliating, both of them standing there, pretending, knowing it was all fake — all just the work of needle and thread, of bindings and springs and painted scales.

‘Really,’ Ralph said, ‘I’m very busy. Goodnight-’ but as he went to close the door, the stranger’s hand shot out, quick as a striking snake, and he grasped the door frame. His coat fell away from his neck, revealing necklaces on which hung all kinds of charms and talismans. Some were feathers, some coloured stones, others looked carved from wood or bone. And as he moved, somehow seeming to fill the room, a gust of his scent billowed forward, and Ralph was struck by the smells of pine and leaf mould, of old coins, salt water and boughs heavy with rain.

‘You must listen to me. It is a true abnormality,’ the man said, and though he did not raise his voice, it boomed in the quiet of the workshop. ‘It is a thing like I have never seen or heard of before, sir, and I have travelled across this world too, further than France, to the earth’s darkest edges, and seen nothing, nothing, of its kind. It is not at all like that grotesque thing I see on your workbench there behind you, or any of the rags and sticks in the jars at the fairground. A beautiful creature it is, terrible too, but beautiful. I cannot put it into words, you must come and see, Ralph, see it with your own eyes. It is… it is a true wonder.’

Ralph stepped back, alarmed, afraid. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said, but his mind was already wondering. He tried to picture something that could be both beautiful and terrible, something that was unlike any other creature in the world. He couldn’t do it. What would that look like? It was ridiculous, absurd. ‘No. I don’t believe you.’

‘You do,’ said the stranger, meeting Ralph’s eyes now. They were like clear pools, those eyes, pools in which small goldfish circled pits blacker than night. ‘You must. Come with me, it is nearby. Come now or someone else may find it first.’

‘I-’ Ralph found himself already pulling on his jacket, fumbling with his bootstraps. ‘I don’t usually-’

‘Come,’ the pale man insisted, and he flung himself back out into the night. Ralph stood for a moment, reeling, left behind. This was nonsense. He was being played for a fool, or the man was mad, or mistaken. He had seen a dog with mange or the slithering remains of a dead cat in an alley, and his mind had run away with him. That was all — an addled mind, a misconception, a child’s imagining.

But the door stood open, and the night air blew in the smell of rain. Ralph could hear the click of the pale man’s shoes fading as he hurried away along the street, and the workshop was suddenly the last place in the world that he wanted to be. An excitement bubbled in him that he hadn’t felt since he was a boy — a boy with his nose pressed against the glass of the skeleton exhibits at the museum; a boy who dreamed and imagined and stayed up all night poring over encyclopaedias of strange beasts from jungles far away and times long past. He felt like a dog called by a silver whistle, a pin dragged by a magnet. He felt delirious, as though he were dreaming, hazy and clear and wide awake all at once.

Ralph slammed the door behind him. The lamp winked out.

A poem by Jim Stewart-Evans, taking a comical and violently literal approach to the notion of killing time. Illustration by Tavis Coburn.

His low blows once struck and left no trace,
but today I smashed grandfather’s face,
I smashed his face and cut my fists,
with shard-grained knuckles, scarlet wrists,
I held his hands in mine.

I opened up his antique chest,
snatched the heart out from his breast,
raised the ticker high aloft,
felt its leaden weight was hard not soft,
and marvelled at my crime.

I’ll crush all those that ring alarm,
break each and every waving arm,
smash faces in and sever hands,
bury deep in shifting sands:
today I’m killing time.

There are now less than four weeks left to submit your poems and short stories to our next issue on the theme of ‘Light’.

With July just around the corner, we’re less than four weeks away from the submissions deadline for our eighteenth issue, exploring the theme of ‘Light’. As ever, we’re keen to make this the best issue of Popshot yet, so if you have a piece of writing already penned, or half a piece forming in your head, make sure to send it in before July 25th at the very latest. A few things to note so far:

1) We’ve been receiving a lot of poems but not enough short fiction. So if you have a short story that sits within the 3,500 word count and connects with the theme, we would love to read it.

2) If the pieces of writing you want to submit have been published before, just make sure you have full rights to publish them again.

3) If you’ve been published in a recent issue, that doesn’t mean you can’t submit to this one. Previous contributors and new contributors are given equal consideration.

Finally, if you’ve already submitted your poetry or short fiction, rest assured, your writing is under consideration. If you haven’t yet, make sure you acquaint yourself with the submissions guidelines at popshotpopshot.com/submit/

Drew Tapley’s short story follows a castaway as he desperately searches for new forms of hope and distraction. Illustration by Mitt Roshin.

The silent chaw of fish seemed to encourage his thoughts, not that he needed any of that. They were all he had known for half a decade.

With few distractions on the island, he recorded the sun’s motion, its daily rise and fall — although the importance of this had been lost to the same time he was attempting to record. As he moved from island to island, he had decided to mark the passing months on his skin; his legs to be precise, which bore the scars of five years. The knife’s receding blade was perhaps a clearer indication of the passing of time. Its years of use had worn away most of its blade to a nub, and he knew that his recording of time since the demise of flight FG5646 was off by at least a week, maybe more.

At first, his policy was to stay on one island. They would eventually find him once they checked the land masses in the region. How many islands could there be? It was a numbers game, and sooner or later his number had to come up. Sooner or later they would find him, thanks to some control room set up by Melissa, manned by dedicated staff around the clock. It had walls of monitors and banks of computers, or so the fantasy went. It was a fantasy that progressed each day, always building on the extent of the one before. He had fattened this thought into a sacrificial lamb; one he had no intention of actually sacrificing.

Life was easy now, simple, settled, but lonely. A loneliness that clings to your body like wet cotton. After a while, the feeling faded. All of his feelings faded into one constant, continuous presence. He could no longer be at fault for not living in the present moment, a once commonplace accusation of his busy life in the city. When a particularly vivid memory dislodged itself and surfaced, he scrutinised its every curve and recess, etching it into the sand with as much detail as possible. He traced everything he could remember about the journey to his high school. Every road, every house and tree he passed; diving as deep as he could go before hitting a grey bedrock of mush. He would remember people in this way too, from decades past. Characteristics of their faces, a tick or trait long forgotten but now coming back with such clarity it was as if they stood before him on the sand. Then the rain washed it all away, but never from his mind. Memory by precious memory, he reviewed his life in this way.

It took a 500-ton Airbus A380 to hit the South Pacific Ocean at close to 500 knots for Jason Boyd to consider his own flight path, and eventually lose that eighty pounds. He thought about this while pulling out a loose thread from the frayed edge of his torn pants; rolling it into a ball and stowing it away. It occurred to him in that moment that he could barely remember the sensation of cloth over his knees.

He knelt in the sand, washing cloth in the lapping tide and wringing it tightly to dry in the sun by strips of fish on spiked twigs. He checked the contents of suspended coconut shells, drinking rainwater from two of them. Knee-deep in the ocean, he pressed binoculars into his face, ignoring the crack in the right lens. There it was, the other island. At least half a day’s swim, but definitely bigger. More trees, more shelter, more foliage. There would be more insects to forage, more materials to build. More of everything, he thought. He could see the top of the tallest tree on the island, where a flag blew in the wind with the word ‘THERE’ stamped across it.

If he rested up for a whole day, he could make the swim. He secured the decision by slamming a coconut down on a rock, cracking it open and lifting it to his mouth. This was an action he had repeated thousands of times to the point of perfection. Just the right force and height to crack it apart without spilling the nectar inside. Specks of white juice glistened on his long brown beard.

As the sun rose on a new day, Jason climbed to the top of the tallest tree with a bag across his bare chest made from palm leaves. He balanced in the nape of two branches to untie a flag with the word ‘HERE’ stamped across it, replacing it with a large piece of folded cloth from his bag. It unfurled in the wind, displaying the word ‘THERE’.

Jason didn’t own much. Most of the things he used to stay alive or entertain himself had been taken from the island. His world was made up of transient objects that came and went as extensions of himself. He owned the island no more than the island owned him. With every minute that passed during the last four years, eight months, three weeks and two days, this understanding deepened within him. He thought about it again as he made plans to leave this island, etching circles in the sand with ‘HERE’ and ‘THERE’ clearly marked. His index finger mapped out the swim, including sand illustrations of sharks and the direction of wind currents.

After a night of driving rain, the following day brought a radiant sun and azure sky. Jason poured rainwater from brimming coconut shells into two large plastic bottles. He cooked a fish on an open fire, spearing the flesh on a spiked twig and leaning it over the smoke. The same pointed rock that had opened hundreds of coconuts, opened one more.

With a sweeping farewell glance over the island, he entered the water and began to swim to the island of ‘THERE’. Arm over arm, head side to side, he kicked his legs gently and evenly, moving from home to home. Every thousand strokes he would stop, tread water for two minutes, survey the distance, drink rainwater from a bottle, and look for signs of approaching sharks. His policy on sharks, jellyfish or anything else that could potentially injure or kill him was to play dead and hope it left him alone. Such optimism was laden with hope and baked in ignorance, but he decided that having some contingency was better than none at all. In the absence of any previous research undertaken between lunch meetings and gallery openings, this was all he had.

The experience of the last three swims had taught him to focus his mind. The wandering mind of a long-distance swimmer is a torturous landscape to traverse. And so he gave a lecture to a packed auditorium about how he had survived a plane crash by remaining in the washroom throughout. How by luck or circumstance, or whatever philosophy you choose to apply, that portion of the plane containing the little box he was in, was thrown free of the sinking fuselage, and floated to the surface. He would say how the noises he heard inside that box were like listening to a radio being constantly retuned. The auditorium would, of course, be enraptured by his every word, waiting on each pregnant pause or sip of water. He bathed in the adoration of this celebrity; and after he had quenched his dry throat, he would tell them about the first time he saw sky through that tiny window, and knew he had survived. How the stillness was more haunting than anything you could imagine.

One thousand strokes into his lecture, he stopped to see the island ahead, maybe another two hours away. He had drifted a little. What always disturbed him about these swims, every year or so, was not what he saw in the water, but what he didn’t see. The great absence of anything at all in such an absolute abyss as this was lonelier than any island. A management seminar he had attended once, some fifteen years ago, was presented by a woman who had travelled the world on a lone boat voyage. She said that to gain perspective on your place in the world, go to the ocean. Well, here he was, lying on top of the largest ocean and single biggest entity on the planet, and the perspective threatened to drown him.

Slowly, very slowly, as the sun slid towards the horizon, he crawled onto a new beach and collapsed into the sand. A whole day and a whole night passed as he lay still. Shallow breaths rose and fell until he lifted his head, got to his knees, and drank two bottles of water. Through the binoculars, there in the distance, was his former home, no longer ‘HERE’ but ‘THERE’. He sat on the beach and ate strips of cured fish and coconut from his bag before climbing to the top of the highest tree. Balancing in the nape of two branches, he removed the ‘THERE’ flag and replaced it with the folded cloth from his bag. It unfurled and blew in the wind, displaying the word ‘HERE’. He smiled uncontrollably on his way back down.

That day, Jason fished and cooked his catch on an open fire. Smoke rose into his beard as he chewed. He cracked a coconut on a new rock and drained the milk. During the days that followed, he busied himself hanging coconut shells and dragging palm fronds around.

Days and nights passed. Weeks and months passed. He set about his days fishing, collecting rainwater, stockpiling coconuts, and exploring the island. He sang and wrote the lyrics in the sand, one after the other until whole albums were documented as they appeared on their track lists. Entire weeks were consumed by him writing long letters in the sand, collected and mailed by the wind. One day, he neglected to do anything other than etch a detailed portrait of a woman, enclosing it in a frame. When night came, he pressed his face into it and fell asleep.

Knee-deep in the ocean, he pressed binoculars into his face. That other island was definitely bigger than this one, he thought. More trees, more shelter, more foliage. More of everything. He looked to the top of the highest branch of the tallest tree on that island, where a flag gently fluttered the letters ‘THERE’.

As he etched plans into the sand to reach the island of ‘THERE’, he thought about Melissa’s tireless campaign to find him. A sleeping bag lay off to one corner of the control room, where she occasionally rested for a few hours. A large photo of Jason was pinned to a board, with every detail about him noted on surrounding whiteboards. Dozens of staff answered phones or peered at satellite images.

As the sun rose on a new day, Jason climbed to the top of the tallest tree, balancing in the nape of two branches. He switched the flags ‘HERE’ for ‘THERE’. The same jagged rock that had opened a hundred coconuts, opened another. With a quick glance over the island, Jason entered the water and began to swim to the other island.

Slowly, very slowly, as the sun slid towards the horizon, he crawled onto a new beach and collapsed into the sand. A whole day and a whole night passed as he lay still. Shallow breaths rose and fell until the sun came up. He lifted his head off the sand, got to his knees, and drank two bottles of water. Through the binoculars, there in the distance, was his former home with the flag of ‘THERE’ blowing in the wind. He sat on the beach and ate strips of cured fish before climbing to the top of the tallest tree.

That day, Jason fished and cooked his catch on an open fire. Smoke rose into his beard as he chewed. He cracked a coconut on a new rock and drained the milk. During the days that followed, he busied himself hanging coconut shells and dragging palm fronds around.

Days and nights passed. Weeks and months passed. He set about his days fishing, collecting rainwater, stockpiling coconuts, and exploring the island.

He looked down at his right thigh, now covered in old scars. The infection had spread, and his skin was black from hip to knee. It no longer hurt him, at least that was good, but he could not feel anything there. Every time he looked, the skin was darker and had spread towards his knee. It was becoming harder and harder to get around the island and do his daily tasks. He would sleep longer, and some days wouldn’t wake up until the early afternoon. When he could no longer hold up his pants with a belt he had made from frayed threads, he went about naked.

On the days that he couldn’t get up, he thought about Melissa in her control room, which had now expanded to the whole top floor of a large building, with hundreds of dedicated staff. He chewed slowly to move the food around his mouth and position the bite between the only teeth he had left.

One morning, he awoke to find himself floating several feet above the indent where he usually lay. Then he was able to see the top of the tree under which he had been sleeping, with the flag of ‘HERE’ blowing in the wind. Soon he could see the whole of the island, end to end, and then the other island he had lived on, and the one before that: all of the islands of ‘THERE’. As he floated even higher into the sky, he could see lots of other islands in a ring, and the whole ocean in every direction. Each ring of islands was an island in an even larger ring; a chain of chains of islands within itself, as far as he could see.

As he disappeared behind the clouds, he thought of Melissa.

Our seventeenth issue, featuring a captivating collection of illustrated short stories and poems that cast into the future to imagine how life might be different. Inside, we’ll find a couple living out their desires in a digital world, a woman on the hunt for a code that could save the planet, a robot who starts to experience human emotions, a father who finds himself slowly melting, and a place where no future exists at all.

Words by Alexander Weinstein, Katie Byford, Matthew Landrum, Eli Haven, Kendra Cardin, Rhys Owain Williams, Georgia Oman, Rachel Clements, Marc Woodward, Jack Wells, Bryony Littlefair, Helen Laycock, Jane Campion Hoye, Brian Fanelli, Nick Toczek, Damien Lutz, Ruth Bennett and Jenna Heller.

Illustrations by Jörn Kaspuhl, Sibel Ekemen, Nicole Rifkin, Aiste Stancikaite, Daria Skrybchenko, Matt Chinn, Zach Meyer, Guillermo Ortego, Tim Laing, Pete Reynolds, Patrik Svensson, Renzo Razzetto, Mitt Roshin, Shreya Gupta, Vector That Fox, Giuseppe Di Lernia, Roland Hildel and Yaimel Lopez.

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A poem by Zelda Chappel on how the arrival, and departure, of a newborn changes one’s understanding of time and its value. Illustration by Ashley Floréal.

You showed us how to measure time properly, how it falls
in the rise of your ribcage, makes space between your breaths.

Forget the years. This is about days, your age in minutes
countable on tiny digits and eyelashes in continuous tallies

a winter bird with a lonely first song. You show us how
to grab the light with your fist and hold it, your grasp of day

so much better than ours. But you weren’t made to keep count
in the ways we were. When time fell short we wanted more.

At night your hair was a thousand earth-winged moths
twitching for the sun. That should have been my first clue.

Set in a Britain on lockdown, Eleanor Matthews’ short story sees the protagonist make a bid for freedom against all odds. Illustration by Tim Laing.

If I hadn’t heard the low purr of engines, the floodlights might have seen me before I saw them, but years of cycling in London had tuned my ears to the varying frequency of engines. This one was lying in wait, I could tell. It had the same low hum as a car in a sideroad waiting to pull out. The same discreet indifference. So I swerved off the road before I reached that corner. Now, in the rough terrain of the forest, I’m forced to swing off the saddle and push my bike through a mulch of pine needles and dirt. The trees here are planted in grid formation, grown for timber, so you’re always at the centre of a crosshair, only able to see down four narrow avenues.

Walking five rows back from the road, I keep an eye on the blockade as I move past. It’s too dark to look for danger in any other direction, so I don’t try. I can hear now why the engine was on. They’re listening to the radio – they’ve got sloppy. Ostensibly, the police will just be checking for stolen cars, but everyone knows they’re also hunting for foot-traffickers, pedallers, and anyone else sidestepping the freedom from trespass laws. Luckily, these particular officers are more focussed on smooth hits of the noughties than on detaining boundary migrants.

Continuing through sand, leaf-litter, and the odd ditch, I reach the north-eastern edge of Thetford Forest at dawn. Before me, a light flares on the rust-tipped grasses and poppies. After years confined to the city’s greyer areas, it’s a beautiful sight. But I need to find cover before the wide sky lets too much sun onto the flat planes of this landscape. The forest is rumoured to be home to some less-than-scrupulous exiles, so I don’t fancy napping here in daylight. I keep low behind boundary hedges, stooping behind stunted Scots pines. About half a mile away, some shabby farm buildings huddle against the fields. No guarantee they’ll be deserted, but I fancy my chances. When I make it to the barn, I fall quickly asleep on the rough straw.

When I wake, it’s to the sound of pissing. A man sporting a tattered Barbour and a ruff of white beard is unsteadily urinating just metres away. Turning round, he staggers and almost falls onto the dampened bales behind him. I should be running, but I’m not. He should be reaching for a scythe or pitchfork, but he’s not doing that either. Instead he recovers himself, smiles gently and introduces himself.

‘Bill. And you are…?’

All the good lies have deserted me.

‘Mel. From London.’

Bill sucks in his ruddy cheeks a little.

‘Interesting. I thought the transport system was all locked down these days. Not that an old fellow like me knows much beyond what he hears on TV. “New ID-specific travel liberties have drastically reduced inter-borough crime with smart-access programming.” Or so they say.’ He looks at me appraisingly, then adds ‘I imagine there are localised bloodbaths that never make the nine o’clock news, of course. If you coop people up like chickens, they’re bound to peck the feathers from each other’s backs. So, how did you manage to exit our fine capital?’

‘I guess there’s no harm in telling you I took the canal path. It’ll be gone soon anyway.’

New riverfront flats will shut off the last foot access to Walthamstow. Planning permission went through just before I left, and the path is set to go the way of the pavements. I got out while I still could, heading for Scotland. My house backed onto the railway line, so I’d hitched a lift on the night freight running east, jumped off near the reservoir and cycled north from there, skirting the major cities to avoid trouble. I was due to make the border crossing north of Peterborough by Saturday, but the roadblock ruined that plan.

‘OK, the canal path. Very good. But the bicycle?’ Bill gestures to where I’ve concealed it, badly, behind a hay bale. ‘I was under the impression they had all been confiscated.’

He’s right. Almost all were impounded about three years ago. The government used a spate of HGV deaths as an excuse to conduct door-to-door raids in the name of road safety. They knew exactly who was holding, because the bike park keys brought in a few years back were linked to your debit card – same as everything else.

‘I used to be a courier, so I had a stash of spare parts under the floorboards.’

‘Hmm. Think I’d have made a move sooner if I were you.’

‘My father was ill. I could hardly leave him.’

‘Ah.’ Bill is quiet for a moment, his curiosity finally satisfied. ‘Well, do you want a bite to eat? You must be burning through calories at a rate of knots. I’m afraid I can only offer you porridge though. No milk either. I’ve had to adopt my father’s wartime trick of adding a tea bag for flavour.’

I stand up, almost buckling on my aching thighs. Food is a welcome offer, given that I’ve been on iron rations of syrup-soaked bread since I left. Walking as though his pelvis has calcified to his thighbones, Bill leads me over to what must have been the farmhouse, before the roof fell in. He probably keeps it in a state of disrepair on purpose, to deter visitors.

Ducking under a broken beam, we come into the kitchen. Many of the large flagstones have been cracked by falling timber and debris. We go through to what was once the larder, presumably chosen for its lack of windows. An old rag rug covers the floor, and a tatty photo of a girl wearing a daisy chain is pinned to the wall. Bill stoops over painfully to straighten a corner of the rug, then lowers himself onto an overturned milk crate. Picking up a tin can with rough holes knifed in the sides, he pours some liquid into the bottom.

‘My Benghazi burner,’ he explains. ‘Another wartime trick.’

Sparking a match on the wall, he drops it into the can which flares into flame. Bill balances a pan on top, and measures in oats and water. Then he slings in the teabag, already dyed dark from previous use.

‘So I assume you’re headed for the border?’ Bill drags the wire wool of his right eyebrow further up his face. There’s no point denying it, so I nod. He stares at me a little longer, like an artist measuring the horizon with a pencil before marking his paper.

‘It’s closed now. All the land routes have been shut down.’

The bluster and uncertainty is gone from his voice.

‘Who are you to know that?’

His beard bulges with the upward pressure of his cheeks as he smiles. ‘It doesn’t matter who I am. What matters is you won’t get 40 miles, not if you go north-west from here. A few months back it was still possible, but not now. I can help you though, if you want me to?’

Bill shrugs, a movement that comes more easily to him than walking.

‘Well, if what you’re saying is true, I’ve not got much choice. But how could you help me?’

‘You get yourself to the coast, to Horsey Gap, and I can get you on a boat. Always used to be a favoured spot for smugglers, only now they pick up rather than drop off. How long do you need?’

‘The coast is about a night’s cycle away. But how would you get word there so quickly?’

‘Carrier pigeon. I’ve trained some collared doves up to be my own personal postal service.’

‘Really?’

Bill winks and lets out a bass laugh. ‘No, not really. Never you mind how. All you need to worry about is being on Horsey Gap beach for 5am tomorrow morning. Just turn up and say Old Bill sent you. No ticket required.’

Bill hands me the pan of porridge and busies himself with wire while I eat. He’s making what look to be snares, or perhaps some more complex kind of trap. The warm meal is a powerful sedative, and my lids are starting to droop downwards when tires crunch on the gravel outside. Suddenly alert and sensing a set-up, I look over at Bill. He seems equally alarmed, and is hurriedly stuffing his wire constructions into a compartment in the wall.

‘You need to go. Now,’ he says, grinding the loose brick back into place. ‘That’s my son. He likes to check up on me. Stops just short of reporting me himself, but I suspect that’s out of embarrassment rather than kindness.’

I obviously look puzzled, so Bill clarifies: ‘He’s a hotshot in local government. Revealing you have an eccentric, under-the-radar father isn’t good for a political career.’

He ushers me out of the larder, but not towards the front door. Instead, we duck past cracked wood and swelling mounds of bricks towards the kitchen hearth. There, behind the wood burner, is a man-sized hole. Half pushing, half grasping my hand to shake it, Bill says: ‘Remember. The boat will be there at 5am tomorrow. Don’t miss it.’

I slip through the narrow gap like a deer through a hedgerow and move carefully round the side of the house. A smart black 4×4 is parked up outside, and its owner is walking towards the front door. He sports a sharp suit, a shaved head and a stern face.

‘Dad,’ he shouts, with a tone more suited to a dog that’s soiled the carpet. ‘Dad. Come out of that dump. We need to have words.’

I can hear Bill making low muffled excuses inside. When the son relents and stoops into the house, I make a low dash for the barn to retrieve my bike. In this scalped landscape there’s nowhere to hide, so speed is my only option. I sprint off over the clods of earth and fossilised tractor ruts, onto the road. As I’m about to round the corner out of sight, I flick a look back over my left shoulder. The two men are outside now, the son curved in accusation and Bill unflinching. I cannot tell for sure whether the younger man has seen me, but on this flat track of landscape any movement is like a hare to the greyhound. I’m not about to wait for the jaws, so I bow my neck to the shoving wind and power on.

I had memorised the way to the border, but with this new route I rely heavily on my black-market maps. Eventually, I reach some low trees. Under their close-knit canopy, nothing grows for lack of light. Dead twigs carpet the earth and the trees stand apart like stakes. Rather than sleep exposed, I choose to bed down by the field’s edge, in the snowy drifts of cow parsley. My eyes focus in on an overloaded ant struggling skywards. A money spider trails a fine thread of itself stalk to stalk. A small beetle rootles across dark ravines in the soil. Submerged in the greenery, I watch the flowers and grasses wave above me.

I have been sleeping. My mouth feels claggy and earth is indented on my cheek. The sun has set over this lower world, if not over the field above. About now, the last Londoners will be heading home from work, swiping their debit cards over the tube gates and proceeding to their designated boroughs. Perhaps a few braver employees will be strolling a little first, not that they’ll get far. Since the mayor stopped restricting building on pavements, cafes have expanded right to the road. Apartment blocks rise directly from the double yellows, accessible only from underground parking. Cars are king, and petrol an extravagance few can afford. In areas where council estates and new-build flats once commingled, luxury apartments have flanked together to shut out undesirables. Once rich and poor lived side by side – now they live back to back.

That’s why I need to get to the Scottish border. Dad wanted me to go years back, but I couldn’t leave him. Instead, I waxed on about London’s cosmopolitan charms and pretended that I didn’t want to go. Better that he was disappointed in me for wanting to stay, than disappointed in himself for preventing me from leaving. I’d wait until he had slipped into a codeine coma – or, more rarely, sleep – in that dank bedroom with walls grey from mould, then go down to the basement.

I spent my nights in the company of mice, fixing up a bicycle for when the time came. Restoring old parts and noting what I needed to acquire. I had improvised brake blocks from car tyres and bent some handlebars out of old piping. The project progressed faster than his illness, so I was left fine-tuning the gears and spokes, over and over: skills my Dad had once taught me. Only by then it was my hands that were black with grease, and his that seemed small and delicate.

Night has fallen around me in the field now, but it seems translucent in comparison to the pitch of the city. We’d lived in the dark periphery, like dirty thoughts pushed to the back of the mind. Those streets transformed fathers and daughters into thieves and murderers. Here, the wind blows freely through the thin hedgerows. It lulls heavy heads of barley, which bob in the moonlight. I had hoped for cloud cover, but least I can see the map.

Back on the road, the hedges slip by in black ranks. No foxes tearing the flesh of a dead pug here. No rats making daylight raids on the Turkish bakery, only to be beaten back with loaves. I hope that a barn owl will swoop across my path in a clean flash and I can count it as a good omen, but this mute landscape promises nothing. Avoiding the yellow stains where towns leach into the night, I speed unnoticed through back lanes, trusting that fear will have tucked good citizens up in bed. The few cars that do pass are preceded by twin lights traversing the hedgerows, giving me time to dive into a nearby ditch.

Curving wide of Norwich, I reach Cawston and rattle down the old railway path for some straight miles east. The sharp flints jab at my tires, but I can’t slow down – it’s 3am already and I’ve still more than 20 miles to go. The railway spits me out in the shadowy suburbs of Aylesham town. To get east from here, I have to cross an A road. My best bet is to simply pelt over a crossroads, and hope that nobody’s coming.

Cycling along the twist of tarmac leading to my chosen crossing, I stand up on my pedals and lean down over the handlebars. My rucksack slips awkwardly onto my neck. I’ve built up a good speed, but the lane is blocked off before the main road. Trees shadow the fence and I see it too late. Slamming sideways into the rough wood, I feel it splinter under impact. I sling myself and my bike over the barrier, and try to regain momentum in the ten remaining metres to the junction. I’m still pushing down hard, trying to accelerate over the rough ground, when the motion-activated floodlights of a roadblock blaze to my left. Blinded by adrenaline and LED bulbs, I make for the dark burrow of a lane directly in front of me. The sound of shouting, engines, and scraping metal chafes my ears. They have to extricate themselves from behind the barrier, but then they’ll be after me. The breath is already tight in my chest, but I have to push on into the warren of country lanes.

The road splits and splits again like a probability tree, each time increasing my chances of escape. My leg feels sore and my hand comes off black when I test it. Slowing to glance down, I see my knee leaking dark, thick liquid like oil. I must have ripped my skin on the fence, on some rusty nail. My socks are already soaked, but I can’t cycle with a tourniquet. Every pump of my leg, I feel it spewing blood. There’s no choice but to carry on. Left, right, left, left, right. Hope I don’t choose a dead end. Hope the police don’t catch me. Hope Bill kept his word and his tongue.

There’s a faint line on the horizon where the sun will appear at dawn. I head just left, to where I hope the smuggler’s cove will be. The sky is lightening, but the hedges and fields are blurring. The map swims as I trace the turns I’ve taken, to tally up where I am. A final push out to the sea, bloody from sunrise. The road is gritty, wheels slip slide beneath me, and I slump over the handlebar, let the back wheel skid, pedal until it’s too sandy, then flop off. I heave the bike into a ditch, then go it on foot as fast as I can. Steps slow through the dunes, two forward, one back. It’s 5:05 on the watch. Sand sticks to my leg and dark crusts crumble off.

A boat is still here, silhouetted. I strip off into the North Sea and swim. Open ocean. Tug of the tide. I hope it’s help and not betrayal.

Carmina Masoliver’s poem addresses society’s view of pole dancing by drawing parallels with playing on monkey bars. Illustration by Paul Garland.

I swing on monkey bars
and hang off primary coloured climbing frames,
where bare legs endure
no more than grazed knees.

They try to tie me into a skirt-suit,
paint on glossy black tights,
tell me to keep court heels tucked into my bag,
and wear trainers for the commute,

but I press my foot down,
push myself up to vertical,
hook my leg around a pole
and hang.

My body turned like an hourglass,
blood rushes to my head.
To let go as I hold on
comes as easily as breathing in and out.

My legs may be bare, may be bruised,
but they are strong, with this metal are one,
so don’t watch waiting for me to fall,
petal, move along.

I may be grown up now,
but I’m still up-side-down
and holding on.

We are now accepting short fiction and poetry submissions for our eighteenth issue on the theme of ‘Light’. Send in your writing before July 25th.

With seventeen beautiful issues under our belt (you can see them all here), we’re hoping to make our eighteenth edition the brightest and most brilliant one yet.

Light has a multitude of meanings and (nearly) all of them are positive. They cover illumination, enlightenment, weightlessness, discovery and delicateness. This is what we would love to fill this issue with: fiction and poetry that gifts our readers with a more vibrant view of the world. In our most recent issue, a prose poem called Giraffe by Bryony Littlefair quietly embodied this feeling of tiptoeing towards the light. The positive reaction from readers all over the world was a joy to observe, and for the Light issue, we would love to see more of it.

If you’re interested in seeing your writing published and illustrated in Popshot’s eighteenth issue, head to our submit page for the full submissions guidelines. As always, we’re open to contributions from anyone, anywhere in the world. Whether you’ve been published in Popshot before or never been published anywhere, every submission is welcomed and given the time it deserves.

Finally, if you’ve never actually read an issue of Popshot before, we would encourage you to pick one up. In the last four issues of the magazine, two-thirds of our contributors have either been print subscribers, digital subscribers or have read a copy of the magazine before. So, if you would like to increase your understanding of the work we publish — whilst supporting Popshot at the same time — pick up a copy or subscribe.

Bryony Littlefair’s prose poem brings a tangibility to the complex emotions associated with recovering from mental illness. Illustration by Patrik Svensson.

When you feel better from this — and you will — it will be quiet and unremarkable, like walking into the next room. It might sting a little, like warmth leaking into cold-numbed hands. When you feel better, it will be the slow clearing of static from the radio. It will be a film set when the director yells cut! When you feel better, you will take: a plastic spoon for your coffee foam, free chocolates from the gleaming oak reception desk, the bus on sunny days, your own sweet time. When you feel better, it will be like walking barefoot on cool, smooth planks of wood, still damp from last night’s rain. It will be the holy silence when the tap stops dripping. The moment a map finally starts to make sense. When you feel better, you will still suffer, but your sadness will be graspable, roadworthy, have handlebars. When you feel better, you will not always be happy, but when happiness does come, it will be long-legged, sun-dappled: a giraffe.

Nature claims back the land with rapid and devastating effect in Patrick Griffiths’ speculative short story. Illustration by Guy Shield.

It was the sight of Apricot’s lifeless body that finally convinced Jay’s mother they should leave their home.

Just a few months before that day, there was no sign of the impending crisis. Jay would frequently play on the low, wide sill of his home’s bay window, rolling a collection of metal and plastic toy cars back and forth. He often stopped to stare out of the window where he would invariably see Apricot, sitting on a bench at the far end of the small triangular green on the other side of a quiet road in front of the building. Apricot lived in a neighbouring flat, although she seemed to spend most of her time sitting contentedly on the green, by herself, a gentle smile rarely far from her face, usually staring into space, apparently either deep in thought or devoid of any thought whatsoever. On occasion, when the sun began to set, Jay would watch as Mrs Crawford stormed across the green, grabbed Apricot by the arm, and guided her into their building, sometimes apparently grumbling, sometimes quite loudly protesting about how thoughtless Apricot was, or how stupid she must be, or what a burden she was to the elderly woman. Apricot would always remain calm, however, and would even look up to Jay and wave as she walked by. Jay had never talked to her before but he always timidly waved back.

The first time Jay noticed the knotweed was on a warm day in April. Apricot was transfixed by a single stem rising from a small thicket of sickly nettles underneath the false acacia tree. The almost luminous lime green plant stood out from the browns and deeper greens surrounding it, although there was nothing to suggest it was anything other than an innocuous weed.

A group of four boys – the Fisher brothers and two of their friends, older kids who went to the high school – slowly cycled on the road around the edge of the green that day, laughing amongst themselves and shouting out taunts in Apricot’s direction, calling the girl ‘retard’ and ‘bitch’ and other words Jay didn’t understand. It wasn’t the first time. Apricot just continued to stare at the new plant, ignoring the teenagers until they grew bored and pedalled away from the green, down the road, around the corner, and disappeared out of sight.

When Jay left with his mother for school the next morning he noticed that the light green plant had grown quite substantially and there were several smaller shoots wrapped around the legs of the bench. He waved to Apricot but she didn’t see him as she continued to stare at the plant, as if waiting for something extraordinary to happen.

Over the following days, the nettles withered and the lime green weeds began to spread all around the green, in the shadow of the trees at first, then radiating outwards into the grass. One evening, on her usual trip to retrieve Apricot, Mrs Crawford stopped to pull some of the plants out of the ground, which were now several feet high. It appeared to be quite a struggle, with roots staying firmly in the soil, stalks snapping, and tendrils clinging on to surrounding plants, trees, and the bench.

Jay’s mother had noticed the rapid spread of the weed as well and made a comment that the council should do something about the unkempt green. Soon afterwards, a bored-looking bald man drove a lawnmower in circles around the green, and around Apricot, chopping up the weeds and throwing their clippings all over the grass in the process. Apricot’s only reaction was to watch, her happy, quiet demeanour never faltering. Jay’s reaction was one of joy, at the sight of the shiny red vehicle buzzing about.

The whole of the green was a lighter shade the very next morning. Even from the bay window, Jay could see that there were thousands of tiny sprouts completely covering the area. When he left for school he also spotted one of the weeds poking through the paving slabs in front of his building. He quickly bent down and plucked it, looking at it as his mother pulled him along. It was quite ordinary – several small soft leaves of that lime green colour protruding from a smooth, speckled, hollow, tube-like stem.

Jay noticed that awareness of the weed’s presence was increasing. He overheard his mother talking to a friend on the phone – she said she had seen the plant all around town and reiterated that the council should do something about it – at which point Jay hoped to see the impressive lawnmower again. A local newspaper also printed a story that gave little in-depth information, only stating that the plant was spreading, it was apparently harmless, and suggested its sudden great numbers were simply down to climactic conditions.

The bald lawnmower man did not return and the green became overgrown, with several patches of the weed reaching the height of most passers-by. The larger stems were now more rigid, like bamboo, doggedly standing fast in the wind, only their leaves and cream-coloured blossom gently wafting.

Jay’s mother had put weed killer down on the pavement where Jay had picked the shoot, but the plant soon returned, tiny sprouts lined up like soldiers along the perimeter of the paving slab, pushing up the slab slightly as they forced their way through.

The local radio station interviewed a botanist who claimed the plant was a type of knotweed, probably an invasive species that had been introduced to the country and taken hold at an alarming rate due to favourable conditions and being able to take over niches previously exploited by native species. He reiterated that it was harmless, would likely eventually be self-regulating, and could even be eaten, just like other species of knotweed.

Concern soon grew, however. The majority of paving slabs outside Jay’s building cracked as the weeds pushed through. They were soon everywhere and it seemed that no amount of pruning or spreading of weed killer was doing any good. A television news discussion programme included another confident declaration that the weed wasn’t in fact an invasive species, but a hybrid – essentially a new species – that must have come about from the cross-pollination of two closely related knotweed species that were invasive. As such, it was an unknown quantity. While this confused Jay and, to a large extent, his mother, such articles, reports, and discussions had fast become a source of great interest for the many who wondered what was happening to their neighbourhoods.

The government announced an emergency deployment of industrial herbicide, applied by converted gritters. It was the only time Jay had seen Mrs Crawford usher Apricot inside in the middle of the day, as residents were told to stay indoors as the chemicals were liberally sprayed over every outside surface. The action appeared to be successful at first, the leaves and stems wilting and browning, appearing to have died. The government claimed victory and congratulated themselves for their rapid response but, as the weeds steadily came back, some experts claimed they weren’t rapid enough. Repeated efforts were even less effective and a desperate attempt at biological control with the introduction of an imported aphid-like insect also proved unsuccessful. It was ‘a clear demonstration of adaptation’, yet another ‘expert’ stated, ‘building up a resistance to poisons and predators like a rat’s resistance to warfarin or the ticking time bomb of bacterial resistance to antibiotics’.

The knotweed became a staple ingredient of the population’s food, including that of Jay’s household, as the plant overpowered crops and the availability of traditional foods became limited and costly. News programmes shifted from debates and discussions to reports of panic as many fled their homes to travel to areas less affected, which itself caused chaos on the roads, at ports and at airports.

Travel was impeded further by the state of the roads, with the weeds pushing through tarmac, making some completely impassable. The media was filled with spectacular images but Jay could see it with his own eyes; villages, towns and cities were beginning to look like nightmarish jungles with blanketed walls, green buildings, lampposts covered in tendrils, walkways carpeted in leaves, and even suffocating trees showing barely a sign of bark.

Only essential business continued as most workplaces and all schools were closed. While Jay’s mother worried, the young boy was excited by the drama, not fully comprehending the implications of food limitations, infrastructure difficulties, or the weakening structural integrity of buildings. Even when the electricity died, Jay’s mother resolutely stayed put, explaining to Jay that she knew best, they didn’t have anywhere else to go, and that she didn’t want to leave the place where she had lived since she was a child and, in turn, where she had raised her son.

To add to the excitement, the army travelled around in monstrous trucks to ensure order and safety, distributing canned fruit and other basic foodstuffs, candles, batteries, and wind-up radios. Not that there was enough for everyone. They encouraged those remaining to leave their homes and travel to shelters, to the north, and abroad. Jay’s mother wasn’t the only one to refuse. She also refused to share responsibilities, to look out for others, and be looked out for in return, by sharing homes with those who were just as unwilling to leave. She hesitated when she saw Jay staring at Apricot though, as two uniformed men tried and failed to communicate with her before walking away. Jay’s mother comforted him and said she was sure that Mrs Crawford would take good care of the girl.

Jay hadn’t seen or heard Mrs Crawford for several days, however, and he watched Apricot with greater concern that evening as she sat alone on her leafy bench as the light started to fade. The Fisher brothers were taunting her once more, prodding her with weed stems, spitting on her hair, joking and laughing, obviously knowing full well that she wouldn’t retaliate. They left her alone as a full moon started to rise in the sky.

The next morning, Jay quietly got up earlier than usual and crept through the hallway, where weeds now poked through the skirting boards. He poured brown water from the kitchen tap into a blue plastic cup and took out a fistful of dry knotweed cake from a tin before creeping back down the hallway, carefully opening the door and walking outside. He stepped over the cracks in the pavement, cartoon-print slippers protecting his feet from the hard stems of some of the older plants, crossed the destroyed road, and walked over to Apricot.

While her hair glistened with dew, and weeds had twisted around her feet and ankles as they climbed up her legs, a weak but definite smile could still be found on her pale face. She gently tilted her head upwards. Jay stood in front of her, nervously hesitating for a brief moment, before holding out the cup of water and cake. Apricot’s smile widened and she set free a tear from her eyelid with a blink. The boy gazed into her emerald eyes as she graciously took the gifts from his little hands and then he sharply turned and ran back to his home.

Later that day, when Jay rolled his cars around the harmless-looking plants growing through the window frame, he looked up at a four-by-four steadily making its way around bumps and holes in the road. Sat in the back, the Fisher brothers sullenly looked out across the green at Apricot, lying face down on the ground in front of the bench. A multitude of the lime green plants delicately reached across her body, weaving in and out of her clothes and running through her hair. Jay’s mother walked up behind him, looked out of the window, then knelt down, kissed his cheek, wrapped her arms around him, and held him tightly.

Nancy Charley draws parallels between knitting and the creation of a human life in her delicate poem. Illustration by Rupert Smissen.

You knit me together, Fair Isle in mind,
with pleasing colours in an intricate design
on a circular needle seamlessly
from a fit-for-any-purpose pattern.

But it seems you may have been distracted
by daydreams, the TV or difficult decisions
so purled instead of knit, wove in the wrong wool
and dropped the occasional stitch.

Nor it seems were you inclined to unravel, re-knit,
pick up the lost loops or correct the tension.
I guess you knew that once I was cast off
such faults would characterise me.

Harry Man’s exquisite poem captures the magic and anticipation that surrounds the birth of a child. Illustration by Raid71 — aka Chris Thornley.

The white artery of your spine
hovers beneath a butterfly’s ghost;

wings budding into flight
twice a second, heartbeat by heartbeat.

The isthmus of your foot kicks in the fluid;
the pressure of the sensor, ticklish.

With the end of his biro the doctor
circles your magnified hand gloved in light

and this shimmer, this afterthought of air
in the trees is the breath of your mother.

Night-blind you will fumble back
to its anthem through the clicks

of your hardening head.
This song, secret as a light switch,

is how your breathing will be.
The warmth of my wrist on your belly;

your pulse and mine in time–
the first of your strengths is to be loved.

A short story by Jack Wells, providing a pertinent metaphor for parents who have had to give their children up for adoption. Illustration by Fabio Delvo.

The melting man splashed into the sleeping cul-de-sac. He walked jerkily, the walk of a man who’d lived life in a hurry. Not a healthy man, but one who’d often had places to be, and more importantly, places not to be. A man who had often found himself on the wrong side of that line. Tonight he carried a shovel on his shoulder.

Already, his voice had left him. That was the first thing to go. He had felt it leave, trickling down his oesophagus, past colon and kidney and inner leg, and then seeping into the ground. He checked his watch. It was 3 a.m. and three days after the snowfall. Around him, ice was beginning to yield to slush, still piled high on the grassy banks of the suburbs but crystallising, crumbled and speckled with grit. The wrong day to build an igloo, he thought to himself bitterly. But then again, it was the only day he had.

Stopping to catch his breath, he took a crumpled piece of paper from his tracksuit pocket. He looked at a house with a big red door and nodded to himself, putting the paper away again. His daughter’s new bedroom window stood closed and cold in the starless night. This doesn’t count as contact, he told himself, for the umpteenth time that day. He scraped his shovel along the pavement, listening for a moment. The street echoed, indifferent. He wiped a trickle of fluid from his nose. It trickled all the faster.

The melting man wondered if she had grown since he last saw her, what she would remember of his face. He searched the back of the curtains for a clue. He sniffed and shook his head — there wasn’t time, and anyway, it didn’t matter now. His face could barely remember itself. So he set to work, bending over his shovel again, collecting what was left of the snow into one big pile, rushing from driveway to driveway, collecting and dumping, collecting and dumping. Droplets were condensing on his ribcage, rolling down to where his too-big trousers flapped around his waist. His arms were becoming wetter and wetter, too. He willed himself to stay cold for a little longer.

He’d had six months inside to plan this: an igloo with a perfect dome. A door just big enough for a five-year-old to crawl through. On the outside, it must be pristine: not a fleck of soil. On the inside, it should be like a secret. Somewhere to sit and be safe. Somewhere to remember another day, in another life, when she had seen snow for the very first time; how it turned the world to white, how it left nothing untouched. It had been like a day off from everything; a break from the bailiff’s letters, from the arguments, the pounding in his head, all of it. He had built her a perfect igloo in the gardens and they had huddled in it together. It was a new start for all of them, as if the whole world had been touched with magic overnight. As if it would always be like this. Lola had cried when it melted.

All of his memories of his daughter were in the winter. For some reason, he’d always managed to get himself kept indoors every summer. That was due to certain patterns of behaviour that he had found himself trying to explain in many offices since. It had been that way for as long as he could remember. So he looked over the pictures that he did have, summoned from the depths of his sloshing brain. Of early mornings on frosty days, when the flat was filled with silver light. Of the days she would wake him up, standing on his bed, shaking him out of his fug to play. There were moments he wished he could apologise for. Moments he wished he could repeat. He took them all together in his hands and made bricks of snow. As the walls of his igloo became bigger, he felt himself becoming smaller, shedding layers with every handful that he patted down. He felt his elbows and kneecaps loosening, separating themselves from his body, pouring themselves down his shins and arms.

The melting had started two months ago, in the painted breeze block walls of the visitors’ room, with its blue plastic chairs and hushed conversations. Opposite him, a lady with a name badge and dangling earrings. ‘I know this is hard for you to hear,’ she had said, lipstick framing sharp white teeth. ‘But it has been agreed, with the social services and the courts, that the best future for Lola is one that doesn’t involve you.’

He remembered the piece of paper, her edging it across the table like a cyanide pill. Permanency. Stability. Neglect. Circumstances. Safety. Solutions. No Contact. No Contact. No Contact. The room had started swimming, then, and he found himself standing, trying to shout, but just gaping, gasping, gargling. ‘I don’t doubt that you love her,’ the lady had said. ‘I’m sure you do. Very much.’ Later, back in his cell, he discovered a trickle of water coming from his ear, that poured into his jumper for an hour straight without slowing.

It was all so gradual, that was the thing. It was just supposed to be her going to his parents for a weekend, just while he was away and her mum got her head together. It had been a difficult time, everyone could do with a break, that’s all, that’s what they told him. And then a weekend turned to a week, and a month, and all the while, things going downwards, him hearing stories of drinking, of tempers being lost too easily, and then Lola found herself in a new family. A nice family, the lady with the earrings had explained to him.

Well, these are the houses where the future is kept, he supposed, looking around him. He would have got angry about this, once, but not now. He’d thawed out, mellowed. He had loved her, but he understood that it wasn’t enough. She had been a part of him that broke away with the changing of the seasons. He felt his skin and muscle and sinew giving way to the water now, becoming an icy skeleton, translucent, spectral.

He patted down the top of the igloo. The last gift he would ever give her. Onwards, he thought. As the last traces of his body seeped into the ground, she slept safe. That was enough.

When Lola woke up the next morning, she felt as though the world was a blank sheet of paper. The events of the last five days had taught her to expect magical things to happen in the night.

Today was going to be another good day. Perhaps Thomas and Emily would take her sledging again, or maybe they would make snow angels and come back home for hot chocolate by the stove. She jumped out of the bed, dancing on tiptoes to the window, wiping away the mist to greet the breaking light.

Outside, the world was warming up; remembering itself. Pavements emerged through grey mush. Flower beds and electrical boxes and double yellow lines were all waking up and shaking off their ice. Her lower lip curled.

But then she saw it; there, in the front garden below her window, a brand new miracle. Rising in a dome from the snow, like a clouded crystal ball, stood an igloo on the lawn. All around it were the footprints of a stranger. Each one exploding with shoots of new grass.

Jon Lemay’s restorative poem addresses the exact moment when one emerges from melancholy into a new frame of mind. Illustration by Jason Mowry.

Now is the time for mending,
the season I shed the dead

skin of old love,
so the heart can once again
become a living thing.

I have been made small in the wake
of winter; I feel feverish & weather-worn
by a particularly soggy spring.

But there is a wren that flutters
inside my chest, trilling
louder than the murmurs of love
that do not stay.

I feel the click of its beak
as it chips away at my sternum,
waiting

for the moment it breaks
through the bone
& hits the nerve that will send me

diving into the summer
with speed and delicacy

in search of new modes of destruction,
singing I have found a trajectory
that is my own.

Abigail Hodge’s post-apocalyptic short story follows a girl trying to find the one person left who means something to her. Illustration by Adams Carvalho.

Mom
Dad
Gran
Tommy
Isaac
Carol
June

The girl was still sitting in her Aunt Carol’s trailer. It had been three days since she crossed off her aunt and uncle’s names. Three days since she had tried to give them a decent burial, scrub their blood off the floor, get rid of the smell.

It wasn’t just the trailer. The whole town smelled like ash and decay. Almost everyone had the good sense to evacuate, but not Aunt Carol. She and Isaac stayed loyal to their hometown until the end. It looked like robbers had done it, maybe soldiers. It was hard to tell these days.

She got used to the smell. The days dragged on, suffocating her in painful humidity. Inescapable and oppressive. She awoke on the fourth morning thinking she might be dead, vaguely surprised when she realised she wasn’t. That’s how every morning came now, a rude reminder that her body hadn’t yet given out. Waking up in the summer down here was like waking up in a coffin six feet under, but worse. At least down in the dirt it would be cool.

Far off, she heard a sound. The distant, unmistakable rumble of a train. The girl’s skin stung as she startled, pulling it sharply away from the nylon couch. Sunlight was already pouring in, turning the place into an oven. She scrambled to the front stairs, using the railing as a boost to get on the roof. There, disappearing into the valley was a train, heading east.

Her heart pounded. If the freight trains were still running, people were alive out there. Maybe the mountains hadn’t been evacuated. Even if they had, why would the people there leave? It had to be safer up there than in any camp.

Maybe she wouldn’t have to cross out the last name on her list. Her stomach dropped with the horrible feeling that she had already wasted too much time in that trailer.

On unsteady feet, she climbed down from the roof. As soon as she put her weight on the rotting rail, she knew it would break, but it was too late to catch herself. She slammed to the porch, catching her leg on the broken rail. The splintered wood dug in, leaving a gash from ankle to knee. Blood poured down her leg, almost refreshing against her sun-damaged skin. She moved away from the trailer to sit on the dead grass near the mailbox and sort through her backpack. There was no water to waste washing it; better to bandage it and hope for the best. There was water in the mountains, plenty of it. She could last until then.

She ended up with one of Uncle Isaac’s old t-shirts, torn up and tied around the wound. It was dirty, but fairly effective. She tested her weight on it. Speckles of blood appeared on the fabric. It would have to do.

She limped down the road towards the railroad tracks, whispering a promise to June.

Before, they had spent every summer together for eighteen years. The last one was cut short when everything started to end. This time she could stay in the mountains.

By midday she was hiking along the forest ledge beside the train tracks. When a train came through, she would be at a good height to jump on top with ease. Hopefully. Her leg slowed the pace, but that wouldn’t matter when the train came by. A cool breeze turned her sweat into goose bumps for a moment, hurting worse than the heat.

The whole world was a nightmare, empty and brown. Every new day as hot and ugly as the one before it. Limping through the wasteland, her blood seemed the most colourful thing around. It dribbled down her leg from beneath the rusty brown t-shirt, mixing with sweat and pooling in her boot. She didn’t notice she was clenching her jaw until her teeth started to ache. She looked up at the sky, the sun hanging in the same place as when she had last checked. The train had to come soon. Trains would be on schedule even if the sun wasn’t.

The dying trees offered little protection. Three days inside had started her sunburn peeling, but being back on the road had turned her hands into raw blisters and her neck into flaming skin.

Tears stung at her eyes, but her body had no water to spare for such frivolity. She couldn’t even tell if she was sweating anymore. She wasn’t cold, but she shivered. Afraid to stop moving, she pulled a warped water bottle from her backpack and took a sip. The tears still would not come. How could she see June like this? Touch her with festering hands? Kiss her with bleeding lips? Hold her with arms that held death?

Mom
Dad
Gran
Tommy
Isaac
Carol

Each name on the list weighted her steps, opening the wound on her leg further.

Mom. She was in the hospital when the power went off. Even if it had come back, it would have been too late.

Dad was out west when the bombing started.

Gran was just gone. They found her last words on a piece of butterfly stationery on the table. She had said she would rather die by the lake than in a stuffy living room.

The worst was Tommy. He was still breathing when she had made it back home, too stubborn to leave the only town he had known. He died three days later, too weak for last words.

Carol and Isaac. Just a few miles away, already bled out by someone else’s hand.

She couldn’t sleep next to June knowing she would wake up gasping for air. She couldn’t ask June to save her from the death inside her. But there was nowhere else to go.

The low churning of the train broke her thoughts. It was mostly rusty cargo containers, but there were a few grainers near the back. That was her best bet. They were only a few feet below her, she could reach out and touch one if she wanted. She leapt before her courage failed her and smacked onto the grainer with a heavy thud. The whole world shook, flyaways stinging her eyes. Get to the ladder, get to the back, she thought. She crawled, slowly, afraid to slip in her own blood. Her left hand was swelling, broken or sprained from the landing. The thrashing wheels and the threat of being thrown beneath them was enough to drown out the pain.

Step by step, she made her way down the ladder. The warped paint pressed into her hands with each new rung, and little patches of the rusted flakes stuck to her palms like thorns. She stopped for a moment, threading her arms through the metal and clinging on until she had enough strength to make it the last few feet down and collapse on the porch.

Her makeshift bandage was soaked through. She sacrificed her bandana to rebind it, tied the bloody cloth to a rung on the ladder. When it dried, it would protect her head as well as the bandana had. Her swollen hand throbbed, but what could she do? She lay down as best she could and watched the dying land thunder by.

The train horn jolted her awake. She had no memory of falling asleep. Her left hand was stiff, unusable. Her shoe, which she had taken off to bandage her leg, was gone. But the mountains were close.

They rumbled through an out of use station, barely recognisable, but with a sign that had yet to fade completely. She was getting closer. The train took a curve, heading around the mountains. When the land either side of the tracks dropped into gravelly slopes, she knew she could take the train no further. Taking only the water, she slipped the backpack from her shoulders. She wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

Breath in, breath out, jump.

The air was knocked from her lungs as she skidded down into the ravine. Still deaf from the train and seeing spots from the burning sun, she lay completely still for some time. But this was not where she would die. Gasping for air, she forced herself to her feet and when she straightened up, she saw the mountain. It was beautiful, a green she hadn’t thought existed anymore.

Her body forgot to hurt, if only for a moment, as she began walking. She found the water bottle a few yards away and drank what was left. Her stomach turned, sharp and sickening, with the sudden intake but she didn’t stop moving.

As the train faded into silence, an eerie calm took over the landscape. There were no animals left to make noise in the valley. No people either, it seemed. She made her way through the abandoned outskirts of a tourist town — a place of mini golf and decaying statues — leaving a trail of sticky red footprints. At the foot of the mountain a dying church loomed and a wooden board propped outside listed the ten commandments in uneven black paint. That was not a god she could believe in anymore. Instead, she whispered June’s name like a prayer for each thorn she stepped on, each murky river she had to cross, each uphill step.

The sky faded red, then yellow, then blue, then black. After what felt like an age, she was at the top of the mountain. The gravel drive had three forks. Muscle memory took her down the middle one. The walk had never seemed so long, but there at the end was June’s cabin.

There were no lights on and the quiet from the valley hung over the surrounding forest. None of that meant anything to her, all she could see was the door. She stumbled up the stairs and knocked, leaning her head against the doorframe, staring down. Her blood was staining the doormat. She knocked again, then stepped back. There was no response.

It wasn’t odd. June often spent her evenings on the back porch with her grandmother, having a late dinner or reading.

Her muscles painfully stretched out as she reached above the door for the spare key.

It was muggy inside. No one had opened that door in a long time. The dust, the emptiness, the stillness. She tried to call out for June, but it came out as barely a whisper. She didn’t try again. The hollowness was apparent. No one was home.

She collapsed in the entrance hall, her body shaking with sobs of pain and loneliness.

Mom
Dad
Gran
Tommy
Isaac
Carol
June

It was still dark when she made it to the kitchen, survival instinct kicking in. There was a pitcher of water on the counter which she drank too quickly, spilling out of her mouth before she could swallow it all. There was no point in rationing. She limped to the living room and collapsed on the couch. The gash was raw and smelled like a corpse. It seemed a blessing now. Better to let the leg take her than wait for starvation.

Three mornings later, she couldn’t put weight on it. Her left hand was useless, her skin blistered and peeling as the sunburn healed. All she wanted was a drink of water and to die. She dragged herself to the kitchen, searching for anything to drink. A small river ran out the back, but she had neither the will nor energy to make it that far into the woods. She choked on her own rasping breath as she opened the cabinets. Something taped to the fridge caught her eye. A folded up piece of notebook paper. It had her name on it. A name no one had said in so long. With shaking hands she unfolded it, so delicate and foreign. It was June’s handwriting. A promise. Everyone had fled and June had no choice. She had packed up and left, but she was heading west. To find her. I have nothing in this world but I have you, it said.

She read it again, then folded it back. With no other choice, she stood and made her way to the back door.

Mom
Dad
Gran
Tommy
Isaac
Carol
June

Megan Rowlands’ poem challenges the supposed ideals of a domesticated life and champions something much wilder. Illustration by Anne Bastian.

The world is ripe with Georgia peaches
plucked straight from the tree;
skins slick with lush creams, essential oils,
pruned perfectly.
Destinies polished and strung tight as pearls
plucked, one by one
into corsets and aprons and four-door sedans;
hands smearing flour against child bearing hips.

Yet another fruit grows,
delicious and dark as wet stone;
thorny limbs spreading into shadows at dusk,
thick skinned, small-boned.
Scotch and clove cigarettes marinating in her veins.
Abandoning the charade of filtered mouth
and rotted dreams and hybrids on a string;
uprooting tradition, smile throbbing
like a heartbeat against swollen lip.

Danielle Carey’s short story tells the tale of two mysterious aunts who raise their nieces whilst maintaining a fascinating secret. Illustrated by Matt Murphy.

After our parents’ funeral, after the wake, after the last mourners had said goodbye — leaving only biscuit crumbs and wrinkled tissues behind — after all that, came the most terrifying moment of my life.

The waning winter light only half-filled the little living room of our terrace house. Dina and I sat on the couch pushed under the window and did not say a word. Our legs hung still; we were too short to reach the ground, too solemn to wriggle or squirm. I felt for Dina’s hand and squeezed it bravely, but my heart was thudding an uneven rhythm: they have forgotten us. They have forgotten us.

A creak on the stairs leading down from the second storey made us look. There, halfway up and halfway down, stood our aunts.

‘Oh!’ said Aunt Geraldine, as though she had forgotten us. Her cheeks were wet and shiny.

‘Oh,’ said Aunt Margaret, her face white and her mouth a round, pink O. Geraldine bent and whispered something in Margaret’s ear, then pushed on down the stairs past her. Aunt Margaret followed.

‘You precious, precious things,’ Geraldine said, coming towards us with her arms outstretched. She enveloped me in them, and from within her embrace, I saw Aunt Margaret stoop and whisper to Dina, ‘Come here, darling. We know just how you feel.’

And there, suffocating in Geraldine’s warm and soft bosom, I felt safe for the first time since the accident.

Is it strange that my sister and I have no memory of our aunts prior to that day? We never really thought so. There were far more inexplicable things about our childhood — things like God deciding to take both our parents at once, like why anyone would ever willingly eat tinned sardines, and whether there is any actual purpose for long division. Our aunts being there for us at precisely the right time was not an unfinished equation. It was the solution.

We grieved for our parents, certainly. There were many nights I lay awake in bed, shivering because my pillow was wet with tears grown cold. Dina got a bloody nose because a stupid boy made an insensitive remark about how heaven isn’t real and therefore our parents ‘are actually nowhere’. She gave him a black eye before he punched her in the nose, so it was worth it.

But the aunts did their very best to make life’s cruel transition as seamless as possible for us. They never spoke about moving us away or trying something new. Whatever their lives had been before, they dismantled them and shifted them here until Geraldine and Margaret became our whole world and we became theirs. They did not spoil us, exactly, but it was certainly no dictatorship.

Perhaps that’s why it was so surprising when the aunts laid down just one firm rule.

‘We do not want you to go down to the basement,’ Aunt Geraldine said, her broad brown hands on her hips.

‘Not at all,’ added Aunt Margaret.

‘Not ever?’ Dina asked.

The aunts did not answer.

At first that was enough. A horrible teacher had once told me the story of Bluebeard, and I had told it to Dina, and we both had nightmares for weeks afterwards. So we stayed away from doors that were locked and basements that were verboten. But after a time, even the image of dead wives strung along a wall was not enough to stem our curiosity. The basement had never before provoked any interest in us but because we were forbidden from entering this room of apparent secrecy, it now held the allure of Atlantis.

Dina and I peppered the aunts with questions.

‘Why can’t we go down into the basement?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Dina beside me. ‘Why?’

Aunt Geraldine arched her eyebrows and looked at Aunt Margaret. Aunt Margaret pursed her lips and shrugged slightly.

‘It’s unstable down there,’ Aunt Geraldine said firmly.

‘But why is it unstable?’ Dina insisted.

Aunt Margaret sighed. ‘It’s not so much that it’s unstable,’ she said in her sweet, soft voice. ‘It just isn’t the right time.’ She opened her mouth as if to say more, but Aunt Geraldine rushed to interrupt.

‘That’s all you need to know for now,’ she said. And that was the end of it for that day.

Perhaps it was because they were also two sisters near in age that they understood us so well as we grew up. They were earthy, slightly overweight guardian angels and, though I hated myself for it, I sometimes wondered if we were not better off living with them than we would have been with our parents. The aunts knew what to say and how to comfort us, whether we were missing our parents or grieving because we no longer missed them, stewing about an exam, or arguing over the crimping iron. They were exactly what we needed.

One afternoon, roughly ten years after our parents’ deaths, Dina burst in, letting the front door slam behind her. We were both in high school; I was seventeen and Dina was sixteen.

Her face was blotchy and her eyes were red. ‘Andy has changed his mind about taking me to the Formal,’ she said, to no one in particular. Her voice rose to a wail. ‘He’s taking Alexandra Hemsworth instead!’

She threw herself full length on the couch and pressed her face into the cushions, her shoulders shuddering. Aunt Margaret put aside the tea towel she had in her hand and stepped over to perch on the remaining corner of the sofa. She pulled Dina into her lap, and began stroking her hair.

‘Shh,’ she crooned, ‘shh. Save your tears for better men.’

Dina’s frantic sniffling paused, a question mark.

‘Yes,’ Aunt Margaret said, answering it. ‘There will be better boys. There will be other Andys for you.’

It was childish of me, but in the quietness that followed, I sensed an opportunity. Aunt Margaret was distracted by Dina’s need for consolation, and Aunt Geraldine, the basement’s fiercest guardian, was out of the house.

‘Aunt Margaret?’ I said, hovering near.

She looked up. ‘Yes, sweetie?’

‘Um, why can’t we go into the basement? I mean, really why.’

She blinked at me, her eyes still shiny with sympathy. ‘You need to trust us, you know,’ she said. Then she bit her lip and leaned forward, staring straight into my eyes. ‘This house is built on a fault line,’ she whispered. ‘If you go down there at the wrong time, something will break.’

A shiver prickled along my spine.

Aunt Margaret was eerily right when she told Dina that there would be other Andys. Dina went on to date an Andrew Taylor at university, and an Anderson West when she was junior editor at Payton Publishing. But she was wrong about the fault line. Over the next few years, I spent hours at the library searching public records. I contacted the local council, talked to surveyors, and even tracked down a seismologist. The consensus? There was no fault line of any kind anywhere near our house — or even our region.

Secretly, I began to wonder if there really was a row of dead wives hanging on the wall, or perhaps, in the case of the aunts, dead paramours. I dropped hints and asked wheedling questions over the years. Except for that one unguarded moment from Aunt Margaret, they would not say a word.

The aunts stayed with us for always, living large into a ripe old age and never marrying.

Eventually, even Dina and I stopped talking about ‘when’ we’d marry and started saying ‘if.’

Aunt Geraldine — always the feisty one — outlived Aunt Margaret by three years. In the dim evening following her funeral, after everyone had said goodbye and given their love, Dina and I sat side by side on the couch under the window and clutched at each other’s hands.

‘It’s just the same,’ Dina whispered, ‘just the same as with Mum and Dad.’

‘Except our feet touch the floor now.’

I laughed, a hiccupy, semi-hysterical giggle.

Dina sighed, and leaned back against the sofa cushion. ‘Do you remember when the aunts came down those stairs after the funeral?’ she said. ‘They looked like heroines of Greek myth, descending from on high to rescue us.’

‘Fairly old, fashion-inept heroines.’

Dina laughed. ‘Yeah.’ She paused. ‘So you thought they were old, even back then?’

‘Definitely,’ I said, ‘though they were probably only about our age now.’

‘That’s what I was thinking,’ Dina said softly. ‘How ignorant little children can be.’

She pulled her right hand from mine and brought it to sit with her left in her lap. She looked down at her fingers for a moment, and then back to me. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled something out.

‘I found this next to Aunt Geraldine’s bed,’ she said.

It was a crumpled scrap of paper, torn from a notebook. In Aunt Geraldine’s wild, loopy script was the phrase ‘It is time’.

I felt the old goosebumps at the base of my neck, and shook my head.

Dina shifted next to me. ‘You know we’re going to have to clean out that basement sometime,’ she said. Then she grinned a swift, let’s-take-this-bull-by-the-horns kind of grin. ‘I just think it’s the right time.’

We stopped at the door to the basement, and Dina looked at me fiercely for a second. The grin was gone and her eyes were wet with tears.

‘I kind of feel like I’m betraying the aunts,’ she whispered.

I smiled, but there was a hard ache in the back of my throat. ‘Those aunts and their crazy fault line.’

Dina shook herself. ‘Come on.’

She twisted the key, pushed open the door, and I moved through onto the first step, shadowy and dim. I fumbled at the wall for a light switch, but there wasn’t one.

‘Move forward,’ Dina hissed.

‘All right, all right.’ I felt her behind me and took a tentative step down, then another. The fingers of my right hand trailed against the wall, still hoping for a light switch. Then I thought of dead lovers and twitched my hand away.

It got easier to see as we made our way further down. Perhaps there was a street-level skylight near the ceiling of the basement because the light began to reach up the stairs a little — soft, grey light.

Dina stumbled against me from behind and I jumped, the air leaving my lungs in a sharp hiss. Dina giggled, then quickly swallowed it away.

Two more steps, then one, and we were down the staircase enough to see the entire basement open out before us. It was shadowy and muzzy with late-afternoon light and there were no dead women — or men — hanging from bloodstained walls. Rather, there was a familiar wallpaper, familiar carpet, a familiar window looking out onto a familiar street — and two small girls sitting close together on a couch pushed under the window. They looked up at us, their faces white and their eyes huge and round.

‘Oh!’ Dina cried.

‘Oh,’ I said.

Dina pressed her mouth close to my ear. ‘Meg,’ she breathed, ‘the fault line.’ She pushed past me and rushed down the remaining stairs to the children, her arms stretched forward to meet them. ‘You precious, precious things,’ she said, as she folded the tallest girl against her heart.

The loneliness and emptiness in their pale, round faces hit me with a jolt, as though the loss was my own. And I suppose it was.

The littlest girl still sat on the couch, staring. I bent towards her.

‘Come here, darling,’ I said. ‘We know just how you feel.’

A poem by Sammy Hutton addressing sleep and the soft spaces of time between wakefulness and slumber. Illustration by Anna Horvath.

Keep still.
The morning lies shapelessly in the future.
Imagine that time has stretched itself in front of you.
Notice sleep is still heavy on your skin, in your lungs.
Close your eyes, this room holds no mystery for you;
enduring walls, enduring air.
Focus on your finger tips; rich with thick cotton stitches.
Smooth your hands over a crisp landscape that rests faintly
on your skin, white sheets like paper snow.

Do not stir.
Do not stir an inch, there is nothing out there, I swear.
You can indulge this dilated time a little longer.
Relax your face and imagine that your skin sits as lightly on it
as the sheets lay across your body, as autonomous too.
The pillow case creases are still there,
you can feel them if you try,
woven into the surface like a ghost from a cotton lullaby.

Now, let those hungry hands comb in fistfuls of heavy cotton,
bring them up toward your face,
let the map of creases reunite with your skin,
white paper doll, fragile thing.
Open your mouth and let the weight seep in,
swallowing down behind feathery teeth.
Allow veracious lungs to inhale starched sheets, white pleats.
Don’t move and very soon you’ll sleep.

The day can wait for you.

A mother who can predict the future finds her gift to be more of a curse than a blessing in John Vicary’s short story. Illustration by Romina Birzer.

My mother could predict the future. She saw a series of interlocking possibilities like I might watch a movie; the images came to her, and she knew which path to take.

‘Is it going to rain today?’ I’d ask her when we were younger. ‘Can we go to the park?’

‘Watch TV,’ she would say. ‘The weatherman knows better than I do.’

Later, when we were older, I wanted to know about boys. ‘Does Nick like me? Will he ask me to the dance?’

She would only shrug and tell me to wait and find out for myself.

‘Why won’t you tell me?’ I’d cry. ‘I know you know.’

‘All in good time,’ was her only answer.

At a stoplight, she might pause an extra second, her eyes glassed over. ‘Did you get a vision?’ I’d ask. ‘Why are we going this way?’

She would shake her head and complete the turn, oblivious to the cars behind her. ‘I just forgot to turn off the coffeepot, that’s all.’

At the store, she might hesitate over the cantaloupes, her hand stilling then reaching for one in the far back. I imagined her mind’s eye warning her of internal rot or salmonella, but she just smiled and moved to the apples without comment.

‘Why won’t you read our futures?’ I begged. ‘Please?’

‘You’re being silly,’ she would say. ‘I don’t know anything more than you do.’ But she never met my gaze when she said that.

On Lavender’s fifteenth birthday, she claimed to have inherited our mother’s gift. She began reading the cards that night. She carried a beat-up deck with her everywhere, even though it was missing the ace of swords and the four of pentacles.

‘How can you do a proper reading without all the cards?’ I asked.

She shuffled the cards through her fingers. ‘I can feel things. Like Mama does. Let me tell your future.’

‘All right.’ I sat across from her. ‘Should I ask a question, or…?’

‘No,’ Lavender said. ‘Let the cards speak for themselves.’ She laid three cards in front of me.

I frowned. ‘Aren’t I supposed to choose my own fortune?’

‘No.’ Lavender flipped over the battered rectangles. ‘Hm, this is a very interesting spread.’

I glanced at the cards. One was torn at the bottom, obscuring the label and leaving me to wonder at the meaning. ‘Is it good?’

‘The cards are neither good nor bad. They just tell you your fate.’ Lavender picked up the card on my left and waved it in the air. ‘This is the five of cups. It’s very significant.’

In the kitchen, our mother sighed.

‘How?’ I asked.

‘It just is. Especially along with these other cards. I see… uh… changes. Yes, a lot of big changes in your life. Coming soon,’ Lavender said. ‘And definitely heartbreak. Yes. I see that clearly right here. The Lovers, inverted. It’s a bad omen.’

Mother frowned.

‘Is that true, Mama?’ I asked.

‘Don’t ask her! I’m the one with the gift,’ Lavender said.

Mother let the sound of her knife on the chopping board answer for her.

‘Well,’ I stared at the cards, which just looked like colourful pieces of paper to me. ‘What should I do, then?’

Lavender reshuffled the deck and dealt them anew. ‘Ah, it says here that you need to travel very far. I see a journey in your immediate future. Or maybe you shouldn’t travel. It’s hard to say. Either way, you’re bound to be disappointed. I’m sure of that.’

‘I’ll keep that in mind, thanks.’

‘I’m glad I could warn you,’ Lavender said. ‘It’s my gift.’

The rainy season came and went, and Lavender forgot about her gift when a boy from school started calling. I saw the lines around Mama’s mouth tighten.

‘What do you know about him?’ I asked her. ‘Do you see something bad for Lavender?’

‘Help me with this sheet,’ she said.

We worked together folding the linen, and I thought she’d keep quiet like she always did. But as the white expanse tucked in on itself, Mama spoke. ‘It’s better not to know some things. It’s better not to ask.’

‘You can see what others can’t, though, isn’t that true?’ I asked. ‘I always knew it.’

She nodded once, the sheet clutched to her breast.

‘I wish I could,’ I said. I reached for a blanket in her basket.

‘Don’t ever wish that! It ain’t no gift.’ Mama yanked the basket away from me. ‘Go on, now. I got the rest. I don’t need your help.’

‘But—‘

‘I said go.’

I went, but it didn’t stop me from hating Mama when Lavender turned up pregnant the next summer.

‘You could have stopped this,’ I said. ‘You knew what was going to happen.’

Mama stroked Lavender’s hair as she cried. ‘You don’t need to have any gift to see what was coming. That’s true for most things.’

‘Then why didn’t you do something?’ I asked. ‘You’re our mother!’

Mama said nothing. I didn’t notice how tired she looked. I wouldn’t have cared. I left them that night and I didn’t come back.

The visions started when they handed me my own daughter. After hours of labour, I opened my arms to cradle the girl I’d pushed into the world with my own strength. Instead of love, I was flooded with an infinite variety of lifetimes that burst like fireworks behind my lashes. Each touch, every word, changed the kaleidoscope of prospects for her existence. I had been wrong; it was nothing like a movie. I could see my influence in her future and it terrified me.

As she grew, I would often pause as she made choices that changed the outcome of her future. Her path was rewritten in an instant, and I watched it spool in front of me.

‘…know what I mean, Mama?’

I blinked. ‘Mm-hm,’ I said. I came to understand why my own mother had been so careful with her words. Every assent rewrote my daughter’s life. Every denial inked a new path. I learned to live in the margins of silence.

‘Should I wear my hair up or down? Which looks better?’

The paths branched off from each choice, snaking out into invisible infinity. I saw her growing up, growing old. Pain. Heartbreak. Even the simplest decision came with a price. When I knew the outcome, how could I possibly decide? I shrugged, and saw my mother in my silhouette. My daughter turned away from me. I wished, not for the first time, to view my own future instead of hers. I wonder if my mother had wished the same.

‘Why won’t you tell me what you think?’ she asked. ‘I know you know.’

My own words echoed back at me from a different time, and I answered accordingly. ‘All in good time.’

‘The time is now,’ she countered.

I saw her leaving, as I had left before her. I saw her staying and marrying a man who beat her. I saw her with three children. I saw her with none. I saw her happy. I saw her alone. I saw her crying, laughing, sick, dying. I saw the world in her eyes, and I could not lead her in one direction, but neither could I explain it.

I turned my back and went to the kitchen to start dinner. The sound of my knife upon the butcher’s block was the voice I didn’t have for her. It rang out in the stillness, chop chop chop, all the words I wanted to say but could not. I love you, it said. Don’t hate me. I forgive you if you do.

When I turned back, she was gone.

It is the rainy season again. Soon it will be summer.

A poem by Melanie Whipman, inspired by a skipping rope that was handed down the maternal line of her family. Illustration by Constanze Moll.

My grandchild peels back
The frail layers
Of vein-blue tissue,
Slides her fingers down
The long twisting rope,
Takes the palm-worn handles,
Smoothed by my mother’s
Grip, then mine.

I wish I had time
Enough to watch her skip
To the schoolyard chant,
To smell the tarmac,
And see the soft smack
Of her plait on her back.
And the puff of dust
As the rope kisses
The ground.

To feel once more,
The rhythmic ease of skipping feet,
Watch the endless circles
Of the scything loop,
The flare and fall, flare and fall
Of her skirt,
Soft as a caress,
Against the sweet skin of her knees.

Neil Rathmell’s surreal short story follows a man as he desperately tries to understand where he is and how he got there. Illustration by Nadia So.

I have no idea where I am. Really. No idea.

Perhaps I should qualify that. I am sitting at a table in a hotel dining room. The other guests either sit in silence or exchange words quietly, discreetly. All I can hear is a vague murmur, a distant hum, like the sound of bees in midsummer: pleasant, soothing and not in the least distracting. But the fact remains that, although I know I am here, I still don’t know where I am.

The waiter is helpful and attentive, but offers no enlightenment. He bids me good morning, asks me whether I would like tea or coffee, draws my attention to the menu on the table, then withdraws. When I saw him coming, I was afraid he might challenge my right to be here and ask me to leave. But my rising panic subsided the moment he began to speak. His pleasant manner and soothing voice have a calming effect. While I may have no idea where I am or how I got here, he does and that means I must be in the right place and soon it will all come back to me.

I look at the menu. I make my choice and wait for him to return. I am in no hurry. Quite the opposite. The only thing I want is for my memory to come back. I want to be able to enjoy my breakfast which, if the surroundings are anything to go by, will be perfect, like everything else. The only thing that stands between me and the realisation of ultimate perfection, otherwise known as a hotel breakfast, is my temporary amnesia. Thinking that nothing like this has ever happened to me before, I ask myself the obvious question: how do you know?

Of course it has happened before. It happens to everyone. A memory lapse is not uncommon. You forget what you were going to do, you stop, think and it comes back to you. You forget someone’s name. Your mind goes blank. But it always comes back. The difference is that it doesn’t usually last this long.

The waiter returns and I am pleased to see him. He is a familiar face. He knows where we are and who I am, and that is the next best thing to knowing it myself.

I order my breakfast. He asks me how I like my eggs and I tell him, though I don’t really know. The fact that he seems to approve my choice gives me enormous pleasure. My heart goes out to him. When he walks away I have to suppress the impulse to call him back. Without his reassuring presence, I feel vulnerable again. If I could just sit with him for a few minutes and ask him some simple questions such as ‘Where am I?’ or ‘Who am I?’ everything would be alright.

But how can I ask him that without drawing attention to myself, without making him question my right to be here, perhaps asking me to leave? It’s better to wait. Soon it will all come back to me. Trying too hard to remember something that has slipped your mind only drives it further away. When you forget someone’s name, the best thing to do is to avoid using it until someone else does or something happens to remind you what it is. But I have to admit that it is rather more disturbing when the name you have forgotten is your own.

I have finished my breakfast which was, as I knew it would be, perfect. The waiter returns to ask, with his customary solicitude, whether I have finished. I tell him that I have and watch as he clears the table. I begin to be troubled by the realisation that, when he has finished, I won’t know what to do or where to go. I imagine myself wandering around the hotel like a lost soul.

Then I see the room key on the table. I must have put it there when I sat down. Not only do I not remember putting it there, I don’t even remember sitting down. It is as if I woke up here with no memory of anything that went before, like a new-born baby. There it is nevertheless and I grasp it like a talisman.

I am in the hotel lounge reading the newspaper the waiter gave me. He brought it to me after he had cleared the table. Would sir prefer to sit in the lounge? Should he bring coffee? The key safely in my pocket, I made my way to the lounge, unfolded the newspaper and started to read. The waiter brought me my coffee. I thanked him and went on reading. I must have been reading for a good hour, hoping to find something to jog my memory, when I came to the obituaries. It was the photograph that caught my attention. I recognised myself at once.

When you read your own obituary in the newspaper, there is only one explanation: you have been the victim of a practical joke. I keep reading, hoping that a word or a phrase will jog my memory, but nothing does.

…two by his first wife, one by his second… cognitive research… humanism… his many disciples… hill walking.

None of it rings a bell. If this is me, I don’t recognise myself. It makes me feel lonely. I would be happy to be him. Two marriages, three children, a successful career, admirers, the great outdoors.

Ascertaining whether this is or is not an accurate summary of my life so far is a pointless task. I am who I am, come what may. The more pressing matter is to find out who has played this trick on me.

I fold the newspaper and put it on one side. Instead of dwelling on the obituary, which might be a deliberate red herring anyway, I will apply myself now, like the scientist I am supposed to be. I will find a hypothesis that fits all the known facts and provides an explanation for the situation in which I find myself.

The waiter appears from nowhere and pours more coffee. I feel for him, as before, not just gratitude, but something approaching love. It is the feeling of loneliness, I suppose, that is responsible for this, rather than any latent homoerotic aspect of my personality. My obituary does not even hint at anything like that.

I have a hypothesis. The conspirators, whoever they are, disciples or detractors, brought me here for dinner last night on some pretext or other and during the course of the evening administered, most likely by spiking my drink, some sort of drug. Obviously, the hotel is in on it. The staff and perhaps the other guests have been persuaded to play along. Some of them might even be actors. My waiter, for example. If he is not an actor, he should be. I will tell him so when the conspirators make their appearance and he comes out of character.

Until then, I will do what they want me to do and play along. Why spoil their fun?

The waiter really is superb. When I showed him my obituary, he merely smiled and asked me if I would like to order lunch now or later. I said I would wait until later and smiled to let him know that I had guessed. He, of course, kept a straight face, said ‘Very good, sir’ and withdrew in the way that he has been doing all morning. Perhaps he is known for playing this kind of role. Perhaps, when I get my memory back, I will remember seeing him in films or on television. I might even ask for his autograph.

I begin to think the drug might be starting to wear off, like the first hint of sensation returning after a local anaesthetic. The fact that I have seen through this masquerade must, in itself, be a sign that things are returning to normal. I am becoming myself again and may, at any moment, remember who I am.

What I must do now is go to my room. There might be clues to be found, or the conspirators themselves. More hired actors. I have a feeling the masquerade is not over yet. If they are waiting for me to spring the next trap, I had better not keep them waiting.

The room is empty. Before I turned the key, I put my ear to the door, thinking I could hear voices inside. But when I opened it, there was nobody there. A search of the cupboards and drawers revealed nothing. Not even an empty suitcase.

What did I expect? Planting a room key on my table was just a way of giving me false hope so they could enjoy my disappointment. A red herring. A false lead. Stupidly, I fell for it and now they’re laughing at me. This hotel and everything in it is an elaborate hoax. It is like a ghost train, complete with mysterious noises, designed to mislead me at every step and frighten me into thinking that perhaps I really am dead. The man I am supposed to be, to have been, is a humanist. He doesn’t believe in life after death. What better joke to play on me than to convince me that I was wrong?

I refuse to add to their amusement by letting them think that either I have been taken in, or that I can’t take a joke. I am careful, since it is quite possible that I am being watched, that a secret camera has been installed somewhere in this room, not to give them anything to laugh at. I lie on the bed with my hands behind my head and, maintaining an air of perfect equanimity, close my eyes.

I am annoyed with myself for having fallen asleep. I have the feeling that I heard voices just moments before I woke. It is the same feeling that I had when I was standing outside the door. I can’t hide from myself the fact that all this is unsettling, that there are moments when I feel afraid. I can’t hide it from myself, but I can hide it from them.

I have no idea how long I slept for. I pull back my sleeve to look at my watch, but the watch I expect to see is not there. I stand up and walk to the window. All I can see is blue sky. What floor am I on? I remember stepping out of a lift but not getting into it. How many floors did I pass on the way up? I don’t know. All I remember is stepping out of the lift and walking down a corridor. It is as if moments of wakefulness have been interspersed with sleep. Could I be sleep-walking?

‘That newspaper, the one you gave me at breakfast…’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Where is it?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know, sir.’

‘I left it here when I went up to my room.’

‘It will have been picked up, sir, by a member of the hotel staff.’

‘Can you get it back for me? I’d like to read it again.’

‘I’m afraid not, sir.’

‘Oh? Why not?’

‘It is a rule of the house, sir.’

‘A rule of the house?’

‘Yes, sir. If there is an obituary, we never keep it after it has been read by the person to whom it refers.’

‘You speak of it as if it were a regular occurrence.’

‘It is a daily occurrence, sir.’

‘Daily?’

‘Yes, sir.’

It is strange how tears sometimes precede the emotion that causes them. I had not realised how upset I was. I thought I was demonstrating control of the situation by speaking as I did, but suddenly I found myself its helpless victim. I would have cried like a baby if he had not rescued me. All I could do — and I can hear my voice now, as if it belonged to somebody else — was let him lead me away while I demanded, in the pathetic voice of a broken man, to see the manager.

I want him to come back so that I can thank him and apologise for making a scene. He promised to bring the manager and went to look for him. I don’t know how long ago that was. I think I must have had another of my sleeps. Emotion is very tiring. There is something hypnotic about my waiter too. His mere presence is enough to make me long for sleep.

‘The manager will see you now, sir.’

I follow him to a door behind the reception desk.

‘This way, sir.’

He stands back for me to go through and follows me into a corridor lit only by the shaft of light that falls through the open door.

‘There is a light switch to your left, sir.’

A naked bulb, hanging from the ceiling, illuminates bare walls. He closes the door behind us.

‘Follow me, sir.’

The narrow corridor seems endless, one turning after another. Concrete passageways broken only by unmarked doors and entrances to lift shafts.

‘Are we going round in circles?’

He does not reply. Perhaps I did not ask the question, only thought it. If he were not my waiter, in whom I have complete trust, he could be my jailer leading me from my cell to the gallows.

We have been walking for a long time. I start to lag behind. He waits at the next turning for me to catch up.

‘I will leave you now, sir. Just knock on the door and go in.’

I had not seen the door. This passageway is not like the others. There is a door at the end of it. I stop and look back, but my waiter has gone. I feel a momentary sadness at his going. He might have been complicit in the joke that has been played on me, but his part was only to help me and now he’s gone.

I turn back and put my ear to the door. This time there are no voices, real or imagined. But when I knock I hear a voice asking me to come in. Or I think I do. The voice is barely audible, more like someone calling from a long way off than someone sitting on the other side of a door. It is the kind of sound which could be taken to mean anything: as if air could hold for a moment the impression left by a passing thought.

I look back over my shoulder but, as I do, the light goes out and I am left in darkness. Did I catch a glimpse of him first? I can’t be sure.

In the darkness, I reach for the door handle. My hand closes round it. I think I hear a voice behind me, very faint and far away.

‘Goodbye, sir.’

I probably imagined that too. I turn the handle and open the door. All I see is blue sky. I walk through.

Published in our brand new Future issue, Katie Byford’s delicate little poem looks at love in the present moment. Illustration by Aiste Stancikaite.

Your lashes kissed
the lip of my ear
— a very small thing,
molecular — and you asked
where I would like to be in
five years’ time, as if this were
an eyelash on a thumb.

I said that time hardly ever does
what I tell it to. It has a history
of arguing with my feet,
bends them backwards too often
to trace out plans like these.

But were it not listening in
so jealously, my love,
you must already know
that to be just as we are
with lash on lip of ear
and lashed together

would be the loveliest little plan
my lips could muster up
for five years on from now.

Our brand new issue is out today, featuring a captivating collection of illustrated short stories and poems that cast us into a divergent future.

We’re delighted to announce that our seventeenth issue, The Future Issue, is fresh off the press and out now. Inside, we’ll find a couple living out their desires in a digital world, a woman on the hunt for a code that could save the planet, a robot who starts to experience human emotions, a father who finds himself slowly melting, and a place where no future exists at all. For a more detailed introduction, read this issue’s editorial (interlaced with spreads from the Future issue) directly below.

“If you’re a regular consumer of news, the future is not bright and (aside from Donald Trump’s Wotsit-esque colouring) it’s not orange. No, it’s probably a darker, muddier colour than that. The future is frightening and divisive. It’s evil and full of stupidity. It’s a few steps away from an apocalypse. Even if you don’t read the news often, you might, through osmosis, subscribe to this view.”

“Many outlets on the internet will probably support it because that’s what the internet does. It allows people to express extreme views or aspects of their characters fairly anonymously. So they do. Then these views are shared or responded to with similarly extreme views layered on top. Then it becomes interesting (because everyone is fascinated by drama) and shortly after it becomes upsetting because we start to believe that this is a true representation of humanity and its future.”

“What we tend to forget is that the media and the internet isn’t representative of the real future, because the real future is nowhere near as dramatic. The real future won’t sell newspapers. It won’t generate impressive page views. It won’t cause a reaction. The real future is far closer to what you see when you walk out of your house today than it is to the media’s portrayal. But, for some reason, we start to believe the media and social media reality more than we believe our own.”

“What we’ve come to realise through the creation of this issue is that the unsettling predictions and depictions of the future do serve a purpose. A number of the pieces published in the pages of this issue represent a world, or a situation, less satisfactory than the one we’re currently in. This is especially true of the short stories. We’ve published them here because we think they make for interesting narratives; but they also serve to question, challenge and inspire thought. They are warning signs, pointing to dark corners to make sure we don’t stray into them. However, they’re not here to encourage the abandonment of optimism. Quite the opposite. Sometimes it’s important to point to the darkness to remind ourselves to stay in the light.”

Pre-orders and subscribers’ copies will begin landing on British doormats from tomorrow, with readers further afield receiving them in the next week or two. The new issue will hit British newsstands next week, arriving in bookshops in Europe and the rest of the world by mid-April.

To get your hands on a copy, buy a single issue for £6 + p&p or subscribe from £10 to get The Future Issue as your initial copy, followed by our next two issues over the coming year, plus free access to our digital edition which contains every issue we’ve ever published. We’re off for a sit down.

A poem by Zelda Chappel on the transitory nature of life, exploring what it means to find acceptance in loss. Illustration by Simon Prades.

Before I knew it you were pulling clay from beds
and pushing it through fluid to their meetings
making tiny collisions, subtle shiftings of earth.

Anxious, I gave you my bones for scaffold, placed
them neatly in careful constructs and hoped they would
contain you, keep you nested, whole. Growing,

you broke your clay cocoon to reveal bare skins,
made eyes then took up your search for air. First
stretchings almost fail, the boundaries barely flex.

Nightly, I made you feathers from milky moons, slim
crescents of passing months hanging over us and watching
as I sewed them into flesh so they would not be lost.

I used the days to knit patchworks of leaves with songs
in their pockets and wedged them safe between ribs.
I’d wait ‘til autumn for you to show them breath.

As you emerged you could not be held, but needed air
so I took your tethers and cut them, opening my hands
to watch you take flight through my fingers.

Finally. Wings grow small in winter sky.

Published in our forthcoming seventeenth issue, enjoy an exclusive read of Ruth Bennett’s cautionary tale with a twist — The Leaving Party.

Written in the wake of conversations about the world’s ageing population, The Leaving Party dips into the life of Alfie Mellor — a government employee who approves a scheme that eventually comes back to bite him.

The short story, written by Ruth Bennett and illustrated by Roland Hildel, is just one of the absorbing poems and short stories that make up our seventeenth issue — and with just over a week until its publication on April 1st, it provides a brief snippet of what you can expect from our newest edition.

Read the story here and if you’d like to pre-order a copy of The Future Issue, you can do so at our single issues page. Alternatively, subscribe to Popshot and receive Issue 16, Issue 17 and Issue 18 over the coming year (plus free access to the digital edition of Popshot) from just £10.

Ruth Bennett’s short story dips into the life of a government employee who approves a scheme that eventually comes back to bite him. Illustration by Roland Hildel.

Alfie Mellor had spent most of his life thinking about time. About how it expanded and contracted, like a muscle. How it bent to your will or resisted. How time stretched ahead, the horizon always shifting further away. At least that was how it used to be. Before.

He took a sip of water. It should have been a simple action, but these days everything needed breaking down into several steps. First he lifted the glass. His hand shook slightly, but the glass was almost empty, so it didn’t spill. Then he brought it to his mouth and licked his lips to stop it sticking. The water trickled over his tongue and down his throat.

The creak of a plastic chair brought him back to the present. He set the glass down and looked around. Most people were familiar and he supposed that those who weren’t probably should be. They were looking at him expectantly. He dropped his eyes to the armrest of his chair. His chair, in his house. The chair hadn’t always been covered in this fabric, but he couldn’t quite picture the original. It hovered just out of reach, like so many things. Finally, his mind settled on what he’d been planning to say.

‘You might think things were different back then…and make no mistake, they were. But people are people and that never changes. All of you, you’re the future. I’ve made my choices and I’ve lived with them, but I’ve never actually told anyone about what happened on that day. The day when everything changed for me.’ As he spoke, Alfie stopped seeing the faces before him.

When I get to the café, the light’s already fading. It’s one of those days where it never feels like the sun fully rises, but the café lighting pushes away the blunt-steel grey of the outside. I spot Oliver, the party planner, sitting at a table, tapping his order into the service pad. He’s taken off his coat, so I can see he’s in a smart navy suit and white shirt. I think I’ve made good choices; my shirt is white, like his, and my suit is an inoffensive grey. Don’t wear black, whatever you do, he’d said. It doesn’t fit with our message.

‘Hello, Oliver,’ I say. ‘Thank you for agreeing to let me –’

He cuts me off with a wave of his hand. ‘Right, Alfie, when we’re at the house, we should be as inconspicuous as possible. This is someone’s leaving party and it’s all about them. And the nearest and dearest, of course. Don’t engage in conversation with any of the guests.’ At this point he fixes me with a stare. ‘Robert Cripps is the name of the birthday boy. You’ve read through the profile, the running order and the protocol documents?’

I nod. ‘Yes, although I do have a couple of questions.’

I’d spent last night writing a whole list of things I wanted to ask. This report was my chance to really impress my manager. I’d been dropping hints for months about how much I wanted to work on the advisory team and he’d finally given me a break.

‘Go ahead,’ Oliver replies, looking at the time on the wall and pressing the service button.

I skip over my first two questions. ‘What if, in the end…I mean, when it’s time…what if he doesn’t want to, well, leave?’

Oliver leans back. ‘Don’t worry about that. They never do, not when it comes to it.’

‘The official guidelines state that briefing the subject and the family in advance will avoid resistance during the –’

‘I know what the official guidelines state,’ he says. ‘But you don’t know anything until you’ve seen it for yourself…’

‘And that’s why I’m here.’ I won’t let myself be intimidated. I’d been told to expect this. Apparently it’s common for front-line staff to inflate their own importance.

Go take a look, my manager had said. But observing the event is just one part of the process for compiling your report on the trial scheme. You know how much work it’s taken to get us this close to national approval. I can count on you, Alfie, can’t I?

I realise that Oliver is speaking and I shift my focus.

‘…Anyway, just follow my lead.’

In my mind, I run through my research. The statistics are compelling. Overpopulation, misdirection of stretched healthcare resources, improper distribution of wealth.

A waitress appears carrying two coffees.

‘Drink it, and let’s go,’ Oliver says. I swig it down, even though I don’t drink coffee.

Oliver scans us into the house using guest passes, and the door slides shut behind us, cutting off the drone of the wind. We squeeze past a group of people clustered in the hallway, chatting about their jobs and home-improvement projects. An attendant takes our coats and I get a chance to look around. Technology is noticeable by its absence. Beyond the wall screens and the home-management pads at the doorways, the house wouldn’t look out of place in a film set 20 or 30 years ago. The shelves are filled with books, and vases of flowers vie for space with ornaments and trinkets.

We enter a large room where more people are gathered. Most are standing, apart from a couple of elderly ladies who are sitting on a sofa that’s been pushed up against the wall. They’re dwarfed by the sagging cushions as they stare up at the family photos on display. Their blinks when the image changes are the only sign they’re actually conscious. In the centre of the room are a couple of trestle tables covered in a buffet spread and decked out with colourful balloons. A waitress is carrying a tray filled with glasses of wine. She nearly drops it when a gentleman steps backwards, accidentally bopping a bright ‘100!’ balloon into her path. I don’t realise I’m staring until Oliver clears his throat and cocks his head to one side, drawing me over to the corner of the room.

‘This is good,’ he says. ‘A nice, relaxed feel – very authentic, which is good. Good,’ he repeats. ‘I need to locate the family and authorise the wording for the speech.’ His eyes flick to the time on the nearest screen. ‘We’ll have the goodbye ceremony at 4 p.m. We’ve only got the birthday boy speaking today. There isn’t a surviving spouse, which makes it easier. And the children tend to be pretty relaxed, if you know what I mean…’ He raises his eyebrows, which makes me shiver involuntarily. ‘We should be done and dusted by seven. Any questions?’ I shake my head. ‘Help yourself to some food, soak up the atmosphere. I’ll need you up front with me during the speech, ready for the final departure.’

I walk over to the buffet and transfer some food on to a small plate. I know I won’t actually eat, so it doesn’t matter that the mayonnaise in the pasta salad has already begun to congeal. I pick at the food with a disposable fork and focus on the conversations around me.

‘It’ll be my mother’s leaving party in a few weeks.’ A woman who I guess to be in her seventies is speaking. Her hair is carefully arranged and there are signs of Botox around her eyes. ‘She doesn’t have much idea what’s going on from one day to the next, thank goodness. Not like Robert. I mean, he was lecturing up until recently. Such a shame…’

‘You’ve got to think of the young ones, though, don’t you?’ another woman adds. ‘I know my Kacey is grateful. She’s been on the housing list for 16 years! Things have finally started moving since the scheme was opened up to our area. Surely that’s a good thing?’

To my right, two teenage girls are speaking.

‘What are you doing?’ one hisses.

‘Shh!’ the other replies. ‘What’s your problem! Gramps knew how much I liked this.’

‘Gramps knows, you mean. I can’t believe you’re talking like that already!’

I risk a sideways glance and notice one of the girls tucking an ornament into her handbag.

‘He always said he’d give it me.’

‘Then he’ll have promised it you, won’t he? I can’t believe you’re not even gonna wait until they give the stuff out.’ The girl sighs and shifts her weight, seeming to remember they’re in public. I turn away quickly. ‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘have you even been to see him yet?’

I look around, searching for the event I’m so familiar with on paper. If you’d have asked me a week earlier, I would have called myself a policy specialist but now I’m here, it’s clear I don’t know half as much as I thought. A migraine is building in the centre of my forehead and my mouth is dry. My brain feels like it’s been shrivelled by the coffee. I think about going outside, then I realise I haven’t got a pass. In any case, I can see the sky welling up with clouds, threatening to spill. I edge my way through the guests and into the hallway without making eye contact. It’s quieter there and I feel the panic subside, but I’m still far from calm and I desperately need water.

The kitchen is the first door I try — across the hallway, past the people who have moved on from redecoration projects to holidays. I head straight to the sink and take a mug that has been left upturned on the draining board. I wave my hand under the sensor and catch the stream of chilled water that jets out. As I gulp it down, I can feel the water expanding the cells of my brain but the migraine doesn’t shift. I screw up my eyes and press my temples.

‘I thought it was just me who was finding this whole thing completely fucked up.’

I turn sharply to see a woman about my age sitting at the kitchen table. Despite the tough edge to her voice, she looks fragile. Her eyes are red-rimmed and she’s rubbing at her knuckles.

I have no idea how to respond, but then she speaks again. ‘I don’t think we’ve met. How do you know my grandfather?’

Before I even think, the lies are spilling out. I’m remembering details from the profile that I didn’t realise I knew. I tell her how much I admire her grandfather’s art. How I studied under him at university. How I think his use of accelerated biodegradable materials has far-reaching implications for the future of the contemporary art scene. I don’t know where this stuff is coming from, but I even start to believe what I’m saying.

‘You’re so right,’ she says. ‘He’s the most alive person I know. I guess that won’t be lost if people like you remember him. Not like all of them.’ She nods her head at the closed kitchen door. ‘I don’t know how they can just end something like this,’ she says. ‘For them it’s just a numbers game. Surely this isn’t the answer? And what about when it’s our turn? What if they change it to 65 for us, or 50? What if they decide tomorrow that I don’t fit their vision of the future?’

I don’t know what to say. I want to share in her disgust. I want to forget who I am.

‘What’s your name?’ I ask. The mundanity of the question seems absurd, but I want to know. As I speak, the kitchen door slides open and Oliver walks in.

‘There you are, Alfie. I’ve been looking for you. We’re going to be behind schedule at this…’ He trails off. It’s almost comical the way he looks from me to her and back to me.

All I can think is that I don’t care about Oliver, I don’t care that I’ve been caught acting against the guidelines. I care about the fact I’ve been outed as one of ‘them’ in front of this woman I’ve only just met. If I really thought we were doing the right thing, why hadn’t I told her so? But I know why. I’d been kidding myself this whole time. Kidding myself that we’d created a civilised solution. Kidding myself that this wasn’t yet another case of the government manipulating facts to fit their agenda.

Somehow, I manage to coordinate my feet so they follow Oliver out of the kitchen. I know she must be watching me, but I don’t look back.

It’s almost completely dark outside now and the windows have become like mirrors, reflecting endless versions of us all, wrapped up in artificial light. The trestle tables have been cleared away and in their place is a single armchair with a microphone on a stand just in front. The rest of the room is taken up with rows of plastic chairs facing the armchair, split into two sections by an aisle. Every chair is taken. I stand at the front. Next to me, in the armchair, is Robert Cripps, the birthday boy. On his other side, Oliver.

The old man begins to speak. He doesn’t even glance at the paper in his lap and his voice is clear and strong. There’s no real need for the microphone. As he thanks everyone for coming, I search the crowd, but I can’t see her. The ceremony is the part I thought I’d appreciate most, but I can’t take in anything Robert’s saying. His granddaughter’s words circle round my mind. They don’t care about who he is.

Then Oliver begins speaking. ‘Thank you, Robert. And now, everybody, it’s time to sing.’

People are stirring in their chairs, looking at one another and whispering. Robert is still speaking, but Oliver has taken the microphone and is singing the opening lines of ‘Happy Birthday’. The catering staff are singing too and gradually the guests join in. Oliver is trying to catch my eye as he sings and eventually I understand what his look means. It’s time. Together, we hook our hands under Robert’s arms, lifting him up to standing. He resists, planting his hands firmly on the armrests, but there are two of us. Once he’s upright, we begin to walk down the aisle, the old man between us. Once we get him out of the room, we start the clumsy journey upstairs.

I’ve been concentrating so hard on not tripping that I haven’t heard what Robert is saying. But now we’re away from the crowd, I listen.

‘The future will judge you,’ he says, over and over. ‘The future will judge you.’

When we reach the bedroom, he wriggles his arms and strains against my grip.

‘Have you got him?’ Oliver checks, then releases his hold and retrieves a small black case from his jacket pocket.

He withdraws a small jet-injector, presses it against Robert’s arm and pushes down. I gasp instinctively, thinking that’s the final shot, then remember it’s just a sedative. It works instantly. We dump him on the bed, then set about arranging him for the family. Oliver looks around at the balloons, the photos, the flowers. ‘All this effort to make it nice,’ he says, shaking his head, ‘and most of the time it’s a waste. He’s not even conscious.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘I’m not going to ask you what that little scene in the kitchen was about.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I say, busying my hands by smoothing the wrinkles from the bedspread. ‘She did most of the talking.’

The woman from the kitchen is the last in a stream of grandchildren. As she enters and sits by her grandfather, she looks only at him. She strokes his hand and murmurs words none of us can hear, then stands abruptly and makes for the door. As she steps out on to the landing, she turns and stares right at me. I see the judgment in her eyes.

Alfie Mellor finished speaking and blinked, taking a second or two to process where he was. So many years had passed, but he could remember every detail of that day. And now it was his house, his family.

‘But you approved the leaving party scheme? You must have done…’ It was Joseph, his grandson. The one who looked too much like the person he used to see in the mirror.

‘That’s right. My report was part of the bill.’ He hesitated. ‘It wasn’t what I wanted. The first version of my report advised against the scheme, but it was rejected. I was given the opportunity to revise it and keep my job, so I did. I wanted to get on, you see. And I did.’

‘It’s time,’ said a quiet voice behind him.

Alfie didn’t turn to see who spoke. He simply closed his eyes as everyone began to sing.

‘Happy birthday to you…’

A poem by Karen Jane Cannon, inspired by her father’s voyage across the English Channel as a novice sailor. Illustration by Oli Winward.

The summer our father sailed the English Channel,
we rolled packets of Polos into smooth white paper tubes.
My sister used her felt tip pens to write EMERGENCY

MINTS down each bony spine.
You were our polar explorer,
arctic adventurer.

We charted your route, coloured
the curved waves of land, solid
blue slab of sea.

And when you came back — all
St Tropez tan and French laugh,
Cognac and St Christopher,

we listened to your stories of basking sharks
and places orcas go to die, or you lashed
to the mast in a great wild storm, sucking

mints like tiny lifebelts. How you
were blown weightless
across the harbour, just missing the light

ship in the fog, the three of us
clinging to your legs as if your very voice
could stop us from drowning.

Take a sneaky peek at the cover of our impending issue, The Future Issue, now available to pre-order and launching on April 1st.

After sending our seventeenth issue off to print this morning, we’re delighted to unveil its cover artwork, illustrated by long-time Popshot collaborator, Jörn Kaspuhl. In the lead up to its release in just over two weeks’ time, we’ll be revealing snippets from the new issue over on our Facebook and Instagram.

The Future Issue can be pre-ordered at our single issues page for £6 + p&p, or you can subscribe from £10 and receive Issue 16, Issue 17 and Issue 18 over the coming year, plus complete access to our digital edition, containing every issue we’ve ever published. That’s £30 worth of Popshot for just £10 with all postage included in the price. Crazy? Crazy. Find out more at our subscribe page.

Peter Mortimer’s short story sees a salesman receive a shocking revelation when he visits his elderly mother in a care home. Illustration by Burcin Pervin.

Malcolm looked at his watch. 2:33pm. He had one hour before his sales appointment, just time enough visit his mother’s care home for 25 minutes. His mood dropped as he walked towards the main entrance.

He hated this place, the overheated lounge with the circle of easy chairs spread round the perimeter, the television set blaring loudly and watched by no one. He hated the residents, shrunken husks mumbling or dribbling, their flakey hands trembling and shaking. All of them, just waiting to die. The thought of their impassive acceptance irritated him.

He hated these weekly visits, but he did his duty. Part of being a son. He mistrusted the carers, who he saw as lazy, inexperienced scivers, nipping out into the yard for a crafty fag at every opportunity. Only the week previous, he’d arrived just after lunch to find his mother’s cardigan stained with gravy. What kind of care was that?

His mother, Rene, now in her eighties, suffered from Alzheimer’s. The two of them could no longer have a proper conversation. This both annoyed Malcolm and came as a relief. Annoyed, because he had little time for anyone spouting nonsense, relief because it meant he no longer needed to discuss his life with her, nor meet with her disapproval.

She would chunter on, sometimes mistaking him for her husband Donald – dead these last three years – asking him if he had any shirts for the wash. She would believe she was in the Irish farmhouse of her youth, pointing to the chickens she claimed were running in and out of the kitchen door, enquiring if anyone had checked the barn for eggs. She would hold a conversation about Bisto or lard or deliveries from the bread man with her erstwhile neighbour Marge Poulson, never seen since she moved to Dorset 12 years previously. She would point at and converse with people on television, often admonishing them for their behaviour, or for wearing the wrong hat.

The policy in the care home was to go along with such delusions, to agree with whatever was said by the residents. This way, it was claimed, the residents were spared distress. Malcolm considered such philosophy to be patronising rubbish. ‘I tell my mother the truth, even if it hurts’, he commented to the chief carer, ‘and I would appreciate it if you would do the same.’ As he turned away following this remark, the chief carer stuck her middle finger up in the air.

When his mother indulged these same delusions, Malcolm would inform her, with all the patience he could muster, that her husband was dead, she was not in the farmhouse of her childhood, Marge Poulson has not been seen for more than a decade, and the people on television could neither hear her, talk back to her, nor change their headgear at her bidding. His mother would stare at him. Sometimes she would be silent, other times she would enquire, ‘Where is Sheba?’, referring to her one-time Jack Russell.

‘Sheba was run over and killed by a number 38 bus five years ago,’ Malcolm would reply, ‘how many times have I told you that?’

Again a silence. And then perhaps, ‘Are you my father?’

‘Pull yourself together, mother,’ Malcolm would say.

Other times she grew agitated with short shallow breathing, repeating many times over, ‘Not here, not here, not here, not here.’ At such times Malcolm would call for a cup of tea to calm his mother down.

Every few moments during his visits, Malcolm would glance at the clock on the wall. Time seemed to stand still in this place, as if the inertia and lifelessness of the care home dragged time itself into some motionless state. He could not bear to stay on these weekly visits for more than 30 minutes. Today it would be 25 minutes. Each time he emerged from The Laurels, each time he left behind the nauseous half-suffocating stilled air of the care home, he breathed deeply the cool clean air outside, as if he was re-energising himself and reconnecting with the real world.

As he approached the care home this day, he checked his watch once more. It would take him 30 minutes to drive to meet his next client: a large retailer. He was confident of landing a mixed order for at least £2,000. Careful planning had allowed him to squeeze these visits to his mother into work hours, so as not to eat into his social calendar.

He rang the front entrance bell and was let in by a young carer he had not seen before. She murmured something and pushed the visitors’ book towards him to sign. She then led him into the lounge and disappeared. He felt conspicuous in this room of shabbily dressed old people. His own charcoal grey suit was neatly tailored, his white shirt clean and pressed, his black shoes well shined. He took a pride in his appearance, not only because he had to compete with the younger salesmen at his company, but because such smartness impressed the clients. After all, who would want to place an order for novelty corkscrews with a dishevelled tramp?

His mother was not sitting in her normal chair. Malcolm looked round in irritation. Where was she? He had rung the care home to announce his visit. Everything should have been arranged. And she always sat in that same chair. All day. Every day. There was nowhere else for her to go once she was out of bed. Sometimes, when he was out and about on business or pleasure, he gave his mother a quick thought. No matter where he might be, no matter what he might be doing, he knew his mother would be sitting in that chair. He tried not to think of this fact too often.

He went out to the ante-room where three carers were sat smoking. ‘Where is my mother?’ Malcolm asked. Two of the carers looked blank, but the third, elder one said; ‘They’re just getting her ready.’

‘Ready?’

‘We had to give her a bath.’

Malcolm wrinkled his nose in disgust. His mother had probably soiled herself. It had happened once before while he’d been visiting, and he’d almost retched from the putrid smell.

‘Will she be long? I have an appointment soon.’

‘We’ll have her down just as quick as we can,’ said the woman. ‘We’re a bit short staffed.’

Malcolm turned and walked back into the lounge. They didn’t look short-staffed. He gazed around the room. Ten residents were seated in a wide circle, chairs pushed against the walls. Each resident stared into the room’s empty centre. There seemed to be no way that one resident could communicate with another. On the loudly blaring television, which no one was watching, a fat woman in a studio was pointing at a scruffy looking man, and shouting that he was a deceitful pig, and that Tracey was a slut. The audience clapped and cheered. Malcolm stood next to his mother’s chair, and felt a feeble grasp of his hand.

It was an old lady. She was staring up at him, her lips moving slightly, her eyes moist and wide.

His hand was slightly tugged, and he heard, in the faintest whisper, the words, ‘Can you?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Can you? Sir.’

He snatched his hand away in irritation. Who on earth was she? And what was she babbling about? Standing like this, he felt exposed, a target. Not that any of them were looking at him. Or at anything. He found the TV remote and turned down the volume, before sitting down in his mother’s chair where, for the moment, he could be safely anonymous.

As he sat down, Malcolm felt more at ease. It had been a frantic few days attempting to reach the monthly sales targets. He knew those young bucks in the company would be looking out for any slip-up, knew they were keen to step into his shoes and take over some of his territory. Well, not yet. He still had the gift of the gab, he could still charm the buyers into ordering his kind of novelty rubbish against the novelty rubbish offered by other firms. Let those young bucks wait.

His next appointment was with one of his best customers. Come 4pm he confidently expected his monthly targets would be met. If he got his monthly bonus, he could relax, and take Barbara out to that new Greek place. He had not introduced Barbara to his mother. It was too complicated.

Strangely enough, he was relaxing now. A tiredness came over him as he sank into his mother’s chair, and he felt his eyelids flutter. He had never sat in this chair. Normally he carried in a wooden chair from the next-door dining room, and perched on the edge for the duration of his visit. Sometimes he would stand and stride about for a few moments as if to break up the tedium of his visit. Or not knowing what to say to his mother, he would walk over and stare through the bay window at the outside garden, with its lawn, its trees and various shrubs, a garden few of the residents ever seemed to frequent. Beyond this, on the skyline, he could see the town hall clock.

He shook himself awake, but again the weariness crept up on him. The sensation was not unpleasant, as if he were sinking into something warm and soothing. Well, why not? The staff would wake him in a few minutes when they wheeled in his mother, he would chat to her in the normal inconsequential manner, and leave at 3:10pm, well in time for his appointment.

Meanwhile, this chair was affording him the rare luxury of a short daytime nap, an almost guilty sense of drifting away. Small sounds came into his ears, the soft rumble of traffic from the main road, the distant chimes of an ice-cream van, the sound of a car horn, again distant. How strange his body should seem to fit so well into this, his mother’s chair, to mould itself into a position of total relaxation.

‘Malcolm? Malcolm?’

Someone was lightly tugging his sleeve. He opened his eyes to see a carer he did not recognise. Yet another new staff member. For a second he panicked that he had slept too long and may have missed his appointment. But he knew he had only closed his eyes for an instant.

‘Time for your tea, Malcolm.’ The carer, aged about 30, was holding in her hand a plastic mug with a lid and small aperture for drinking. She was addressing him by his first name, an informality he had neither invited nor welcomed in this place. And she was speaking more loudly than seemed natural.

‘What?’

‘Tea Malcolm, nice and sweet the way you like it.’ There was a monotone sound to the carer’s voice, not friendly, not hostile, simply neutral.

He looked around. The lounge was somehow different. He could not put his finger on it immediately, but then realised the circle of people was not the same circle of people as when he had drifted off a few minutes previously.

‘Come on Malcolm, it will do you good.’ The carer was pushing the plastic tea mug into his hand, and closing his fingers around it.

Where was his mother? Surely they should have cleaned her up by now?

‘Where is my mother?’ he asked, and the smallness of his voice surprised him.

‘She’ll be here soon Malcolm,’ said the carer, ‘Drink your tea meantime.’

‘Tea?’ He had never been offered tea here before. And why was it in the kind of spill-proof cup they gave old people?

‘What is the time?’ he asked and the carer replied, ‘Four o’clock, tea time.’

‘Four o’clock?’ said Malcolm, ‘But my appointment. I have an important customer to see!’

‘That’s right Malcolm. Now drink your tea.’

He tried to push himself up from the chair, but found it impossible. His arms had little strength, and a pain shot through his legs.

‘Do you want the toilet Malcolm? Say if you want the toilet.’

‘No, no. Where is my mother? I have to go. Important sales meeting.’

‘That’s right Malcolm.’

He looked down at his clothing. Gone was his sharp charcoal grey suit. He was wearing a pair of shapeless elasticated tracksuit bottoms, a tired looking checked shirt on top of which was an old cardigan, with a gravy stain down one side.

‘But you don’t understand. I have to go. Have to go. Mother?’

The carer turned away, and shouted into the next room.

‘It’s Malcolm matron, he’s getting distressed again.’

The matron came in, a solid looking woman aged about fifty, with a brisk no-nonsense air. She knelt down by Malcolm and took his hand. He had never seen her before.

‘Everything’s alright Malcolm, nothing to worry about, you’ve just got a bit overexcited again.’

The matron looked up at the other carer, and said, ‘Talking about his mother again?’

‘Yes, and that bloody sales meeting of his.’

‘Drink your tea, Malcolm,’ said the matron. ‘There’s a good boy.’

‘But you don’t understand, I –’ Malcolm waved an arm in the air. The arm was thin, the flesh old and wrinkled. Veins stood out on the back of his hand. He looked around him. None of the residents were paying any attention. The television set was blaring. But it was not like the set he knew. This set, much larger, was inset halfway up the lounge wall, and the pictures were all in three dimension.

He looked out of the bay window. The garden had gone and the view was of a long brick wall a short distance away. He could just make out a garish orange sign, and the last letters of the word ‘Hypermarket’.

Malcolm let out an anguished cry. The cry was weak, and none of the other residents showed any reaction.

The Matron looked at him critically.

‘Double dose, as from today,’ she said to the carer, turned on her heel, and left the room.

With our forthcoming ‘Future’ issue launching on April 1st, we’re offering up all available issues of Popshot for just £3 plus postage.

The half price sale will run for the next three days. While most issues of Popshot have now sold out, our Liberate, Adventure and Hope issues are available for as long as stocks last.

UK readers will be able to pick up all three issues for £12 with postage included — a price that almost rivals the value of our subscriptions. Our readers in Europe and the rest of the world can acquire all three for £16.50 and £18 respectively. Head to our single issues page to pick up yours.

The cover for our forthcoming ‘Future’ issue will be released next week, so if you’re interested to find out what the future looks like, keep your eyelids on your inbox.

Matthew Stoppard’s ghostly poem brings the emotional act of accepting a partner’s past into a physical reality. Illustration by Sam Pash.

Love shoved me in
and a gallery of shadows circled
to play pontoon knowing my game is five card brag.
I shook hands with one of the men,
feeling her skin across his palm;
he mocked my decade of childhood flab,
I crawled to the corner and cried myself thin.

The boy who goosed a drunken version of herself,
faint and vomit-laden in a large garden shed,
said his father knew Nostradamus,
threatening to tell her all about my dud sperm
and when I will soil my paisley pyjamas.

Queensbury pose, dressed in my sister’s boyfriend’s clothes,
I boxed each shadow, including three teenagers
and a one-night stand, then propped open the door
of her wiredrawn history
as she walked past the gates of mine
on her way to calm my fists.

A curiously reclusive co-worker maintains a secret of undefined proportions in Lillian Sciberras’ short story. Illustration by Aurélie Garnier.

Gerald is, by all accounts, a dull and dreary wimp. Things you’ll notice on a first encounter are that he’s had decent breeding, sticks to conventional values, is pathologically shy and won’t utter a word if he can help it.

His dress sense is inspired by charity shops flogging stuff that was trendy a couple of generations ago. It is as though a dead uncle from those years had left him a full wardrobe so that Gerald need never again visit the shops for something to wear.

Shoes are usually brown, occasionally grey, forever unpolished, strictly 1970s, and worn with cosy woollen socks that are predominantly white. It never occurs to the man that money can, even if seldom, be frittered on looking good. With some attention, his round and rosy face might even recover a bit of whatever original shine there was to it but, overall, the look is one of plainness, of a sixty-five year old living the reality of preordained drabness, when the man is barely forty-five.

His shape eases into a globe from the neck downwards, all the way to his knees. He carries his weight in the manner of a penitential cross to which he mystifyingly adds more — namely, a bulky plastic bag crafted in his own image which he hauls with him everywhere. In silhouette, you see two bags of different sizes, the larger one on legs.

His house, at the edge of town, is a privileged refuge and as far as anyone knows, is visited by no one. No dog, cat, parrot or songbird shares the seclusion of his days; no woman or man his nights. Diffident and withdrawn, he clearly wants it that way. Gerald, though silently, is a keen and intelligent observer who, even if he cares to note how others live their lives, how they mix and mingle with little or no effort, remains indifferent to, or perhaps incapable of, knowing how to channel his own life in such directions. He did have a handful of friends — albeit co-workers — and for a time, I had been one of them.

When he had first joined the company, he was shown round by the sectional head who used the wrong name for him each time he introduced him to the staff. Gerald would whisper a correction, but at the next encounter it would again be Ronald or Donald. After the initial settling down, he was given the task of preparing the staff payroll and related accounts in my office, just a couple of desks away.

By common consent, as a way of showing friendliness to an awkward newcomer, Gerald — and his bag — was provided with a little extra space and a wider berth for his desk. We hoped he would in time overcome his shyness and the long pauses of silence. When he heaved himself out of his desk for a coffee, for lunch, or to visit the bathroom or another office, he never once left the bag behind. At first, in the cafeteria on the fourth floor, he stuck himself to a corner table, as far out of the way as possible. On being invited, however, he (probably reluctantly) joined a table closer to the centre; the same one the rest of us usually frequented. There, too, we made extra room for him and his burden.

Gerald grows on you. His ways become acceptable once you realise it’s the only way he knows how to be. It had also occurred to us that we would learn nothing about him if we didn’t ask direct questions, and there was a limit even to these. When asked about family, he tersely replied that they had all died. When asked if he was ever married, any children, any pets, a deadpan ‘no’ was all he uttered.

Yet, Gerald is an asset to the company, possessing a keen brain that belies his appearance. It’s clear he reads every page of the newspaper for he is always well-informed. He borrows copious amounts of books from the public library, reads them (and their indexes), and maintains a solid recall of everything. On the odd occasion, his default silence gives way to voicing witty remarks, revealing a peculiar sense of humour that is often funny and sometimes wicked. His wit lives somewhere between his most reclusive self and rare moments of daring, when he timidly struggles to morph into a social being. Some months after his arrival, we promptly realised he had become one of us.

A year or so had passed when Jennifer, Veronica, Ray and I began to think of him as not just a colleague, but also a friend. His oddities were, by then, routine. We would, very occasionally, ask him to join us at the weekend for a picnic, or a trip to the cinema, concert or theatre. On those occasions when he consented to come along, his plastic bag came too. When Ray once noticed him walking with a limp and offered to carry it for him, Gerald barked ‘no’ and shot a mean ‘don’t you dare ask that again’ look.

Time didn’t diminish our curiosity, and our prying increased. One day, when he was away on leave, we turned to probing his peculiarity. What might that bag contain? Why carry it everywhere? What can it mean to him to be forever attached to it? ‘Simple,’ Jennifer said. ‘He doesn’t trust leaving his valuables at home, so he carts them around.’ Veronica thought he was old fashioned and despite, or perhaps because of, working in accounts, he doesn’t trust the banks. ‘I’ve never seen him use cards. Always pays in cash. It’s obvious he keeps his money at home, in that bag, and he doesn’t dare leave it behind, or leave home without it.’ Ray, our horror film buff, wearing a studied Vincent Price expression, declared that ‘Gerald who silently shares his days with us has a deep and disturbing secret he wants no one to ever discover. Remember his look when I offered to carry it for him? I wouldn’t put it past the man to carry his mother’s ashes, or even her pickled head in a jar if you ask me.’ James from Reception, dropping in on the cabal, proffered an esoteric possibility: ‘I really think he must have, at some point in his life, made a pious vow and undertook to accept a permanent burden as recompense for an impossible favour granted from heaven. I remember Robert De Niro doing exactly that in the film The Mission.’ Not knowing much about his state of health, we then wondered if he might be fearful of needing emergency admission to hospital, so carried with him pyjamas and a change of underwear, in addition to whatever else bulked up that bag.

It was April and the days were getting longer, with the persistent nip in the air of a prolonged winter finally giving way to balmy comfort. We discovered it was also close to Gerald’s birthday, so I gave the occasion some thought and decided to invite my workmates to a dinner at home. Since my sister, Helena, was visiting from Brussels, I asked her too. Apart from Gerald, all had been to my flat before, and all had met Helena and liked her. Besides, it was time for a get-together, and I thought it would be a caring gesture towards him; he would be the guest of honour.

Helena came to help me immediately after visiting the shops, slipping into sisterly mode while I ascended into a flurry of anxiety about having Gerald over for the first time. As Helena laid the table, I chopped away at the onions, garlic, broccoli, carrots and cauliflower, the repetitive action steadying my nerves. The chicken had thawed nicely and was trimmed and cut up in turn. I sought out my arsenal of spices and prepared a tasty Garam Masala, mixing cumin, turmeric and chilli with bay leaves, ground mustard and coriander seeds, cinnamon, cardamom and black pepper. It was going to be a fine curry, done in my own time-honoured way.

Ray offered to pick up Gerald and Jennifer and drive them to my house. Veronica, who lived close by, made her own way. It was Saturday, my cheerful sister was here, and it was a mild spring evening. I was told that the aroma escaping the flat into the landing had already built up an appetite for my guests as they climbed the stairs.

I asked everyone to place coats and belongings in the bedroom, and to make themselves comfortable with a glass of wine out on the balcony while the sun began to set. Gerald, unaccustomed to being a guest, appeared cautious but cheerful. In his look, I spied a furtive enjoyment of that young evening easily unfolding.

The conversation flowed smoothly with Gerald butting in from time to time, carefully awaiting his moment during those all too brief pauses in-between torrents of banter. He was clearly not a drinker, but the evening proceeded so well that it must have seemed to him, wine glass in hand, that he should not pass up this chance to, for once, have a good time. Even if I say so myself, the curry turned out to be memorable, and there was an overall request for seconds. Veronica brought lemon sorbet for dessert, and Ray had acquired a bottle of Sicilian liquor. We remained in a jolly frame of mind throughout and, as we sang happy birthday to Gerald, it was apparent that he had reached his nirvana — and a very tipsy one. We had never known him to be more relaxed, talkative, or light-hearted, and I felt extravagantly good about it.

As the evening slipped into night and into the early hours, one by one the group began glancing at their watches, then reluctantly rising from their seats. As they prepared to leave, I hugged my sister first, agreeing to meet again the following day. At the door, exchanging thanks and banter, I reminded them to collect their belongings from the bedroom, and to please be as quiet as possible going down the stairs for the sake of the neighbours.

It was a terrific evening, well spent, and well turned out. I had insisted from the beginning that I would not be accepting any help with the dishes, so it was past three by the time I was ready to retire. I was exhausted in the best sense of the word and all set to plunge into bed, satisfied with the outcome, satiated with my own cooking, and with the ample enjoyment of the party. I ambled into the bedroom, seeking that exclusive comfort that only one’s own bed can provide when, at its far end, I noticed there were two large plastic bags.

One of them was certainly Helena’s, but not the other. An impossible reality suddenly lit a firebomb inside my head. Gerald, inebriated, had either forgotten about his bag, or had taken one of Helena’s by mistake. The contents were there for the prying and I was to be the only privileged witness. In the stillness, I could hear my heart thumping as my hands mechanically made for the top covering until conscience, predictably, irritatingly, kicked in and held my hand, forcing me to think out my motives and their consequences. I groped the bag from the outside. Its contents were clearly enveloped in layers, in obscurity, in a mystery I was now free to unravel. But I was overcome by misgivings, by an unwillingness to contaminate the bond that had painstakingly built up between us. I found myself suddenly, alarmingly sober and, vowing not to be swayed into temptation, locked the room and went to sleep on the sofa.

The following day, I received calls from the group thanking me for, what they claimed, was a superlative dinner, confirming what fun the evening had been, and what pleasure it was to see Gerald forget himself wholeheartedly. With fortitude I didn’t know I possessed, I managed to shut up about the bag in case I might be persuaded to do the unthinkable. Predictably, there was no call from Gerald; I never saw him use a cell phone and I doubt his house has a phone installed. In the afternoon, as agreed, I met up with Helena and gave her the bag she had left behind. ‘I left two actually’ she said, but I explained about the mix-up, and that I would return the proper one on Monday when I could exchange it with Gerald.

When Monday came it was one of those days when spring forgoes mellowness, and hangs heavily in the form of high cloud and a muggy air that makes everything arduous and demanding. Proudly carrying Gerald’s bag from the parking area to the office, I considered what a strain it must be for him, with all his bulk and without a car, to forever cart around all that extra weight. I thought about how relieved he was going to be to know his precious possession was safely back intact.

He sat irritably at his desk, rising as soon as he saw me come in. With a haunting scowl, he handed me Helena’s bag, which I then confirmed was practically identical and, without a word, grabbed his own. For the rest of the day, he didn’t look at me or utter a single word, reclaiming the silence with which he had started his days with us, refusing to look at any of us, his companions of mirth from two evenings before.

The following day, Gerald went on leave, never to return.

A poem by Ben Banyard, inspired by observations of homelessness in British towns and city centres. Illustration by Kevin Davis.

Workers and shoppers stream home
overlooking an inward eddy of those
who clutch blankets, cardboard and dog leads.

They are the night flotsam kept away
by daytime squads of walkie-talkies
brimming at the town’s edges to bob in
and bed their scraps down in doorways.

Later, they hope to be ignored
by leggy stragglers on work nights out,
or packs of high young mighty shouters.

Their unseen distress flares dampen
as a gentle drizzle grows to a tide
pulling them back each morning
to tread water just out of reach,

hoping for a constant star by which to steer
and break the moon’s steady pull.

Ridden with writer’s block, a novelist is shown a vast world of inspiration in Kirstie Smith’s magical short story. Illustration by Michael Hirshon.

For the four thousandth, seven hundred and fifty-ninth time, the writer sighs, and puts his head in his hands. Nobody in the café seems to care; the air is filled with chatter, like a stream against the rocks, bubbling over with trivial things. The writer comes here to watch, to wait for something to happen that will bring the spark back, but it remains dormant. He feels the block in his mind like a lead brick in his stomach. It is choking him.

‘May I interest you in something?’

The writer looks up, surprised. Someone has sat down across the table from him, so quietly he didn’t notice them arrive. A woman, smiling, dressed in a white cocktail dress with a satin sheen. She has wavy dark hair, slightly tanned skin, and the kind of wrinkles around the eyes that older women pass off as laugh-lines. Her voice has a slight musical edge to it, an accent that is not quite English.

The writer knows all this, instantly, as if he had long ago read a paragraph describing the woman in a book and has just been asked to recall it from memory. He blinks. ‘Do I know you?’

‘No, but I think you’ll listen to what I have to say.’ The woman quickly reaches out and grabs a leaf of paper from amongst the doodles and scribblings that litter the table – while the writer makes a quiet cry of protest – and starts reading. ‘Dear sir, unless you can provide me with proof that you have progressed on your manuscript by the end of July, I will be forced to withdraw your advance and cancel your…’

‘Give me that!’ the writer yelps angrily, snatching the letter. It was meant to motivate him, to get the creative juices flowing again, but listening to it just makes the block in his stomach feel heavier. ‘My financial status is of no business of yours!’ Suddenly he is outraged at this intrusion. Who does this woman think she is?

‘Oh but it is. Everything you do is my business, because you are my business. Your kind always are.’ The woman’s smile is now uncomfortably reminiscent of a satisfied cat.

‘Whatever it is that you’re selling, I don’t want it,’ the writer replies shortly.

The woman looks offended. ‘I’m not selling anything. The idea! No, I am what you might call a third party, a go-between. A psychopomp.’ With a dramatic flourish, and seemingly from nowhere, she brings forth a gold-edged business card. ‘I help struggling wordsmiths come into contact with…the right people. No fee, not from your end – my clients will take care of that for me. All you have to do is take my card, say my name, and go to sleep. I’ll do the rest.’ The writer feels his eyes drawn to the card, hypnotically. ‘What do you say?’

The writer hesitates for a second, before his desire to get rid of her overcomes his irritation. He snatches the card out of her hands. ‘Fine. What is your name?’ By this point, he is genuinely curious.

She tilts her head to one side. ‘It’s on the card.’

He looks down. For a moment, the weird gold filigree in the centre looks like a random pattern, twisting vines – but then it seems to subtly shift, until he can make out letters, and then a word. ‘Calliope. Isn’t that…’

He looks up. She’s gone.

That night, as he is getting undressed, the writer finds the card in his jacket pocket. He stares at it for a while, then puts it on his bedside table. There’s no harm, he thinks, as sleep begins to envelop him. As his eyes fall, he murmurs ‘Calliope.’

He is on a path, but nothing else is clear, as even the landscape around him has a hazy and indistinct quality. Everything has the look of an impressionist painter who can’t quite decide what he wants his canvas to look like. One minute there are green fields, then the next a mountain valley, and then a bustling city where blurred people rush past and fuzzy buildings tower over him. Before he can focus on any faces, a desert appears, covered in mist. There is no sound.

‘Ah, you made it!’

The writer turns at the voice, and sees Calliope standing on the path behind him, the only thing in focus.

‘I wasn’t sure if your mind was nimble enough to escape the walls of time. Now, if you will follow me?’ She turns abruptly and starts walking away, her high heels clicking against what has become a paved street.

‘Wait, what?’ Flustered, the writer steps forward, narrowly avoiding a penny-farthing bicycle that glides past silently. He stares, briefly, and then they are in a forest and the bicycle has morphed into a tree. The woman keeps walking, her dress untouched by the branches and foliage all around her. He runs to catch up, and walks beside her, panting. ‘What do you mean? And where are we going?’ he breathes.

‘My dear, we are going to market.’ Calliope smiles, and then waves her hand in front of her face as if brushing aside a curtain. Amazingly, the changing haze does part, space itself suddenly rippling and moving. In the gap she has created, there is light, sound and colour — slightly dizzying after the misty quiet. The writer does not have time to process this before he is pushed through into chaos.

‘Villains! Villains! Find the most feared villains here!’

‘Dramatic turnarounds! Get your hero out of that plot hole!’

‘Deus ex machina! Solves everything!’

People. People, everywhere, of all types and shapes and sizes, wearing the most random assortment of clothes the writer has ever seen. Everything from jeans to three-piece suits to ball gowns. Hawaiian shirts and shorts to clockwork waistcoats, and top hats to togas to dresses made out of silver foil. And other things, things that are not people, or at least not human. A tiny golem made out of rugged stone skittering under his feet. A sleek mechanical tripod striding above the crowds. Golden dust floating past in the shape of a man. A woman with three yellow eyes and skin as red as blood. He is being pushed and shoved from every direction, and almost nothing that flashes before his eyes is familiar.

It takes more than a minute of this assault on the senses before he is able to perceive that there is some order and structure to this place. He is in a market, surrounded on all sides by stalls in lines that seem to stretch away forever. Some of the people — or ‘beings’, he supposes would be a better word for some of them – are behind the stalls, under the rag-tag assortment of awnings, and it is they that are the source of the sales cries he can hear, piercing above the hubbub. He feels dizzy, and more than a little sick.

Thankfully, there is a cool hand on his shoulder, and Calliope is suddenly there by his side, a white beacon in this surging mass. The crowd automatically parts around her, and there is breathing space. ‘What…where are we?’ the writer manages to gasp. By now he is sure that this is not a dream.

‘This is the Market of Revelation, also known as the Ingenium. It is outside time, space, all universes; everything but the mind. Here you can find fear, glory, comedy and tragedy in equal measure. And anything in it can be bought…for a price.’ Her smile is unreadable.

The writer still feels dizzy, and stares about him in awe. To his left, a man in a red robe and a floppy velvet hat is arguing in Italian with what are unmistakably an angel and a demon behind a counter made out of marble. From his limited knowledge of the language, the writer can just make out ‘No, you can’t have everything…’ in exasperated tones from the demon, who looks rather put-upon. To his left, a woman with fifties-style hair is perusing a price list labelled ‘Political Philosophy’. A little further away, there is congestion in the crowd as it tries to move around a large congregation of people. In the middle of the blockage, a large, scaly dragon is gingerly and delicately handing out swords, which look like silver toothpicks in its claws. By a stall with a sign saying ‘Metafiction’, the writer can hear more haggling. ‘Can I put my book, inside a book, in another book?’ one man says. ‘Recursion? Well that’ll cost you, Mr Fforde…’

It is only when a very familiar figure walks past – thin moustache and goatee, balding, with an Elizabethan ruff around his neck and ink stains on his hands – that the writer’s brain finally kicks into gear, and he realises where he is.

‘They sell ideas?’ His voice catches, not daring to believe it.

‘Among other things.’

He looks at her shrewdly. ‘And when you say there’s a price, what exactly do you mean?’

Calliope raises her eyebrows, looking pleased, and they start to walk along an aisle of stalls, the crowd again parting like the sea around a rock. ‘The price depends on the quality of the idea. Little things, like an inconvenient blind alley, or common things, like an Evil Empire-’ she gestures to a stall as they pass it, where a bearded and bespectacled man is piling a trolley high with Stormtrooper helmets, ‘-are cheaper. The rarer, the more valuable the concept, the more you will be expected to part with. A truly original idea?’ She laughs like a bell, piercing. ‘That would be worth more than anything.’

The writer’s eye lingers on a pile of reddish rocks with a very depressed goblin sitting next to them, holding a sign reading ‘Philosopher’s Stones, buy one get one two three free!’ He isn’t finished just yet. ‘You still haven’t told me what I’m paying with’ he points out, sharply.

‘That’s because I don’t know.’

‘What?’ he says, once again confused.

She sighs. ‘What are you willing to pay? It can be anything – your time, your self-respect, your memory. Or more tangible things,’ she continues over his sharp intake of breath, ‘like your eyesight, your health, your relationships with your family, or your ability to make friends. As I said, it all depends on what you’re willing to give up for glory. For immortality. For the written word.’ She looks him in the eye, and the world seems to stop. ‘The greatest of all have offered me much. Their safety. Their blood. Their lives, and those of their family.’ The writer’s mind is suddenly suffused with images of jackboots, of fatwas and screaming faces calling for his death. In the middle of it all, he hears Calliope, as if from a distance: ‘What will you give for the sake of inspiration?’

There is a moment where not even the surrounding chaos can be heard. Then the writer takes a deep breath, and the world restarts; chattering customers, caterwauling sales pitches and all. A small smile creeps across his face. ‘How much would it be for all of this?’ He gestures around him, at every stall, all the way to infinity.

Calliope’s eyes widen briefly, before she, too, smiles. ‘I’ll find a way to make that happen.’ She takes him by the arm and leads him away, slowly shaking her head.

In the morning, the writer wakes up, his soul burning with fire, energy, raw and hot, and he knows that he needs to get it down on paper before it either consumes him or is lost. Scattering sheets everywhere, he dives for his desk, grabbing a pile of paper and a pen. Then, he begins to write.

‘For the four thousandth, seven hundred and fifty-ninth time, the writer sighs…’

Miki Byrne’s poem attempts to get inside the hearts and minds of those who are forced from their own countries. Illustration by Podessto.

Meet me at our crossroads, where the twisted oak
throws shadows, and leaves whisper old songs
of the people who made our past.
We shall travel to Calais, board a heaving ferry,
watch white cliffs ghost England into our eyes.
Tread hopeful beaches, push into our new land
like roots that ease away soil, gripping firm
within earth’s green breast, to fasten and fix us
deep into different ground, where we may step up
to promise, a future, new life and you will hold my hand.
Cradle me in your heart as you reside in mine.
With memories, language, past lives packed away,
used within our own space, private times,
when we shall weave memories,
offer each other comfort in homesickness,
the struggle to integrate, to work.
We will embrace our new country, make a home,
a retreat, a haven, leave behind cruelty,
the shackles we will shed.

A poem by Frankie Kennedy, suggesting that the exploration of fellow humankind is often the greatest form of travel. Illustration by Dave Hänggi.

Forget the trains, the trams,
the planes we would take to get there,
those miracles of rock, of stone, of glass.

Forget the bronze sand, the scent
of warm salt and spice, the music of foreign tongues,
that benevolent babble as dusk falls.

Forget the world’s cities and seas,
its forests and plains and mountains,
its buildings, its parks, its streets.

Forget all of this. The greatest adventure
does not live within continents, countries,
states or counties.

It lives in bone, in brain, in blood,
in the beat of the heart and the tip of the tongue,
the soles of the feet, waiting to run.

Kirsty Logan’s flash fiction piece celebrates oddity and individuality during those times we most try to hide it. Illustration by Tahel Maor.

First, walk through city streets congested with lightning-eyed boys and half-sleeping girls. Choose one if you like; take him home, make her coffee, talk all night.

Next, cut down the alley veiled with shredded billboard posters, dangling like torn silk. Choose your usual path if you like; the alley lit with fairy lights, crammed with teahouses.

Then, slip into the club, lights dyeing the fog of dry ice. Choose to stay here if you like; dance yourself into a bliss, sweat until you’ve washed away the city’s dirt.

Finally, sidle through the bodies on the dance-floor, slick with sweet spilled liquids, until you reach the back door. Peek around you – quick now! If no-one is looking, you can go through.

Now exhale. Push out the smells of the city: smoke, exhaust, strange flesh. Breathe in the smells of the bar: cinnamon, pepper, polished wood.

Although the door that leads you in appears to be pockmarked plywood, the bass-thump from the club will not penetrate. The only sounds here are the chink of glasses and the soft croon of the jukebox.

Before you look around the bar, you must prepare yourself. Outside – through that club, down those alleys, along those streets – people hide their deformities. They hack off their wings, file down their horns, saw off their tails. They think the scars are better.

Here, in this bar, they do things differently. Feathered wings unfurl, the twitching tips reaching to the ceiling as their owner ruminates over the jukebox. A unicorn horn – two feet long and gleaming white – knocks gently against the lights suspended over the pool table. Pointed teeth, as sharp as morning light, clink against the rims of glasses.

Not all the changes are ornamental. There are hooves ticking against the bar’s wooden floor; arms halfway to bird wings; a scaly tail, fat as a tree branch, curled around a table leg.

You may stay a while, but not too long. You do not belong here yet.

Later, at home, you will look in the bathroom mirror and notice a bump on your forehead, hard and white as bone. You do not need to file it down this time; you know where to go. It’s just a bar down an alley in the city, like a rainbow is just refracted light.

Sharon Black’s poem considers the humble stone and its ability to tell its story through shape and form. Illustration by Stu Loxley.

I throw a stone far across the river,
it plops and flits a lazy zigzag to its bed
where, tired from so much unexpected travelling,
I like to think it sinks its twinkling head.

I skim a stone across this glassy surface
it pirouettes across its watery stage
then at the rousing, crowd-pleasing finale
it bows below into its curtained cage.

I drop a stone into the rippling contours
of feet steeped deep in sands of shale and weeds
it casts aside its dull and grainy mantle
for a cloak of dragonflies and silvery reeds.

I take a stone and hold it in my palm
it presses smooth and cool across my veins,
like an eye it holds the secrets of the river
and the dying of the rock beneath the rains.

Two men find themselves in a slow race against time as they hang 80 floors above ground in Thomas Chadwick’s short story. Illustration by Joseph William.

At 6.34am the scaffolding platform, from which Simon McNiven was cleaning windows, collapsed. Somehow, in the same instant that the lightweight aluminium platform fell from beneath his feet – taking his rags, bucket, squeegee and lunchbox hurtling down the glass front of the 85 storey building – Simon managed to force his hands into the 4cm crack in the glass that marked the threshold between the 79th and 80th floors. Quite how he did this Simon did not know but at the same moment as the aluminium frame crunched into the pavement below, Simon found himself hanging from the 80th floor with his arms stretching out above his head in the early morning sun.

There appeared to be two possible outcomes: either someone was going to spot Simon up there and arrange for him to be brought down before his fingers grew tired and slipped on the glass lip, or, Simon was going to fall down to the pavement, presumably to be spotted there by someone, even if being spotted no longer mattered. Glancing at his wrist watch, sitting just below the fingers that were taut inside the crack, 6.34am struck Simon as a little early. Anything after 8am would offer a far better chance of being seen; even 7.30am would be OK, but at this time the number of people walking along the pavement below the building would be slim. For reasons that Simon did not want to think about right now, his phone was left sitting on the table at his home.

Simon’s arms were already beginning to feel the strain. He was a fit and healthy man — 29-years-old, no medical history to speak of and athletic in build. It often seemed to Simon that he was a good deal more athletic than his job demanded, yet, hanging from a small crack in-between two enormous panes of glass seemed to be causing his arms to tremble and his fingers to grow a little red towards the tips. The possibility of Simon manoeuvring himself to somewhere where he might be a little more comfortable did not look good. For a start, Simon’s fingers and arms were straining so much that he did not dare release the pressure from one to shuffle across, lest it place so much pressure on the other that he would be forced to let go entirely. On top of that, Simon knew from cleaning the windows up there, that the crack in the glass simply wrapped around the building like a belt, only meeting another crack that ran down the building’s spine at the corners.

Simon swore out loud, loudly.

‘Isn’t it,’ a voice replied.

Very slowly, mindful not to disturb the pressure equilibrium between his arms and fingers, and noting that his watch now said 6.35am, Simon turned his head to look along the width of the building.

‘Hi,’ said the voice.

There, perhaps ten or fifteen metres across from Simon, hanging from the same crack in the glass, was another man.

‘How lucky are we?’ said the man.

Given that until a minute ago Simon had been separated from the 80-floor drop by a scaffolding platform which had somehow unbuckled or fractured to leave him hanging from his fingertips, Simon didn’t really see how luck came into it.

‘Would you call this lucky?’ he said.

‘Think about it, what are the chances of us both being up here today, and us both managing to grab onto this crack when the scaffold fell?’

It struck Simon that had this man not been so, as he put it, ‘lucky’ and fallen down with the scaffolding, the chances of Simon being spotted up here would have been significantly greater. It was, of course, possible that someone would still come across the buckled aluminium platform and look up and figure out what was going on, but there were huge amounts of building work going on in the area, and the pavements were regularly obstructed. Simon could only picture pedestrians stepping politely around the platform in a way that seemed a good deal less likely if that platform contained a crushed human being on it.

‘How long do you reckon we’ve got?’ asked the man.

Simon tried very hard to ignore the question. He couldn’t help but notice that his watch still said 6.35am, meaning that only a minute had elapsed since the platform fell. In all likelihood, dust was still settling on the pavement, but there were still 20-25 minutes to go before the chances of being spotted began to improve even slightly.

‘There’s no avoiding the fact that we’d be a lot better off had this happened at, say, 8am,’ said the voice. ‘Rush hour is our greatest hope. What do you say, a thousand people working in this building, many more working nearby? I can’t help thinking that it’s inevitable that someone will spot us at around eight.’

‘I suppose,’ said Simon, really regretting leaving his phone on the kitchen table.

‘Which means that all we can really do is wait until then.’

‘What else could we do?’ said Simon.

‘We might fall,’ said the man.

Those were the exact options Simon had established himself, but there was now, he realised, a third one. Were one of them to fall before the other, then the chances of that other one being spotted increased, just as they would have done had one of them not managed to cling on to the crack in the glass and fallen with the platform. Simon decided not to mention this. He pinched still tighter with his fingers and congratulated himself on having maintained that athletic physique into his late twenties. The other man was, from what Simon could see, older and perhaps a little more rotund. It was hard to be sure, but it looked like he had a little goatee beard pressing up against the glass: that had to be irritating to some degree.

‘Do you have a wife or girlfriend waiting down there?’ asked the man.

‘No!’ said Simon, ‘If I had someone waiting down there I’d like to think they’d be arranging our rescue right away.’

‘No, not down there on the ground, down there in general, out there in the city?’

Simon was unsure if he did or did not have a girlfriend right now. One of the other decisions he had made that morning was to prefer not to know, to not consider that for a day. Right now it felt like he could really use one – a girlfriend that is – but it seemed best not to lie.

‘No, not really.’

‘You know, my wife says I snore too much. Every morning I wake up and get told, Julius, you snored like an effing train last night, if you keep this up you’ll have to start sleeping in the spare room.’

Simon noticed that the time had finally ticked on to 6.36am. He worried that the increased strength of his grip that he squeezed for when he realised that it was less a case of hanging on until he was spotted and more a case of hanging on longer than this man – who might be called Julius – was in fact a mistake. There was a delicate balance of pressure and strain running through his fingers that was not in Simon’s best interests to disturb. It was also highly annoying listening to this man talk about his wife, but hopefully the more he talked, the less he would be thinking about the balance of stress in his fingers.

‘If I was to fall though, don’t you think that just a tiny bit of my wife might be glad? Every night, when she did get to sleep, she would sleep that little bit deeper.’

‘Yes, maybe,’ said Simon, determined to keep the man talking without really paying any attention to what he was saying.

Of course, as soon as Simon decided this, the man went strangely silent. It seemed that every decision Simon took up on the 80th floor, this man was determined to mess up. Suddenly Simon was worried that the man had decided to stop talking and devote his full and undivided attention to the balance of pressure that held his fingers and arms to the crack in the glass. Simon, meanwhile, was thinking only about the silence and worrying that the whole conversation about his wife was just a ploy to distract Simon from his own fingers. Simon realised that his watch now read 6.38am. This meant that the man had been silent for twice as long as he had spoken. Desperately, Simon focussed on his own grip. There were occasional gusts of wind that caused his arms and fingers to brace. Simon took the decision to keep his fingers tight but let his legs and torso sway slightly with the breeze. By swaying with the wind, not against it, energy and grip might be conserved. The other man was surely not going to think of that.

The silence, however, remained troubling. Simon began to wonder whether the man might silently have fallen off, whether he might in fact already be pressed against the pavement, his blood snaking down into the gutter, pedestrians screaming and dropping their takeaway coffee, before looking up at where the man had fallen from to see Simon hanging on still, delicately matching his body to the shape of the wind and the glass cold against his face.

Slowly, Simon turned his head to the right once more. It took perhaps thirty seconds to do it without disturbing his grip and each time a gust of wind picked up, he stopped turning his head and concentrated on swaying gently with it. When he finally got his head round, his watch read 6.38am and the man was still there.

‘Hello again,’ he said.

‘Hello,’ said Simon.

Simon’s fingers were going slightly blue.

‘Have you ever wondered how birds are able to sleep on their perches without falling off?’ the man asked.

‘Yes, I have,’ said Simon, ‘Isn’t it to do with their leg muscles?’

The other man ignored Simon and carried on.

‘Their leg muscles are at rest when their claws are –’

‘I know,’ shouted Simon. ‘I said I know this!’

Simon was now desperate for this man to be quiet. All he could think about was shutting this guy up.

‘All I was trying to suggest,’ said the man, sounding hurt, ‘was that if we were birds we would probably find it easier to relax up here.’

‘If we were birds,’ screamed Simon, ‘we would just fly away!’

The man began to laugh. ‘Yes! Yes, we would. How dumb of me, obviously we would just fly away.’

The man continued to laugh, long after he had finished speaking. Simon found he was able to focus on his grip despite the laughter. He hoped that the laughter might dislodge the man, and wondered if he might be able to get him to laugh again. His watch now read 6.39am.

‘Hey,’ said Simon. ‘I’ve just remembered a joke. Do you want to hear it?’

‘Sure,’ said the man. ‘Fire away.’

‘There are these two guys out in the jungle who come across a tiger and one of the men starts frantically strapping on running shoes. “What are you doing?” says his friend. “You can’t out run a tiger.” “I don’t have to,”” replies the first man, “all I’ve got to do is out run you.”’

There was total silence on the 80th floor. A small gust of wind caught Simon by surprise and he tensed. The fingers on his left hand squeezed hard with it and Simon felt them slide towards the lip of the crack only millimetres away from coming free entirely. Simon breathed in and out heavily. The joke did not appear to have gone down well. On reflection it was not necessarily the best joke to have told. Perhaps, given the context, it might not even have come across as much of a joke at all.

‘What I don’t get is why he would even have running shoes with him, if he was in the jungle?’

‘Sorry, why are you up here?’ Simon asked.

‘The same reason as you. The platform fell.’

‘No, why were you on the platform?’

‘I was looking for the window cleaner. I was sent to tell him to stop cleaning the windows as the wind was due to pick up and it was considered dangerous. We tried ringing him but couldn’t get through so I was sent up to find him.’

Simon closed his eyes and let his face press into the cold glass.

‘Why are you up here?’ asked the man.

‘I was cleaning windows.’

It was still 6.39am.

‘I’m sorry we weren’t able to get the message to you in time.’

‘No,’ said Simon. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t able to pick it up.’

Roddy Williams’ poem provides a surreal metaphor for the effects of the working week and its division from the weekend. Illustration by Nader Sharaf.

Fridays are heavy
I have to drag them home to die on the carpet
and afterwards I find
my pants are too big.
I need to keep hoisting them
like a denim flag of surrender
to the weekend.

By the time Sunday leaves
with his coat on, smiling,
into humid night
I have resorted to braces
to hold up my roomy pyjamas
ballooning around me.

I can rise for a while now
into the sky diary
and sketch the jigsaw fields of days
that lie before me
indistinct
shimmering at the edges.

They’ll spin their boundings
tight around my legs tonight
and haul me down,
down to the place where the Mondays wait
to be picked up,
plump and smiling like wise babies.

Inspired by his resurgence from a tough period, Kieran Cottrell’s poem articulates the transformative effects of love. Illustration by Leib Chigrin.

I had a heart like an upturned ashtray.

I spoke smoke. People held their breath.
When I found you, ash was all
I had to pile at your feet.

I did not know what you would do
with my dire, dirtying heart
crumbled there, burning.

Would you brush it off, blow it out,
heap it, beating, in your palm
offend the wind with it?

No, you found soil, seeded it.
You poured my heart in, stirred
what I had wasted. And we waited.

Now here’s a sapling. Soon, an ash tree.

A work colleague who withdraws into his imagination causes a destructive effect in Michael Hitchins’ short story. Illustration by Adam Batchelor.

Gregory wasn’t there. He was supposed to be on the corner of the street at 5am but I had to park and knock on his front door. I sat in his living room while he dressed, staring at a baby gym with dangling tigers and parrots. A black and white scan image fell off the wall and flapped onto my shoe. I picked it up and traced the outline of the embryo with my finger and then fixed it back amongst a mass of happy photographs of the new arrival. I heard the baby starting to cry as we left the house and I paused, but Gregory pushed me out into the chill morning air, pulling on his jacket.

As we rolled through the village and banked up onto the motorway, Gregory shaved and tapped the flecks of stubble into the foot well, which, though it wasn’t my car, disturbed me. I was shocked by his state of dishevelment. His hair had thinned alarmingly, his skin grey and dry. He pulled at his cracked lips continuously and scratched his leg. It wasn’t just because he’d woken up recently – he was now careworn and haggard, and had lost the air of calm confidence that he possessed before. The effects of the baby, I presumed.

Our boss had lent us his majestic, emerald-green Saab to drive down for a trade show. I’d looked forward to travelling in style but now my companion was casting a shadow over proceedings. I felt relieved when he rested his head on the window and fell asleep, but a rasping snore soon erupted and Gregory’s spectacles, reflecting the strobing white lines and cats-eyes at the edge of the carriageway, lent him a fearful, manic appearance.

Almost a year before, Gregory and I were in a pub in Wetherby, and I found myself uncontrollably pouring out my troubles to him. My poor brother was dying of cancer. Sciatica was causing me daily agony. I had been moved to a new team at work and despised my new manager. I was miserable, suffering from headaches and insomnia, unable to accomplish ordinary tasks without supreme effort.

Gregory listened patiently, took a mouthful of Black Sheep and then smiled. ‘I have a room I go to,’ he said. ‘When I’m down. Or when I’m stressed or need some peace and quiet. It’s a beautiful room. Beautiful because it’s so simple.’

‘That’s nice,’ I said, wondering what this had to do with my woes.

‘I suppose it’s really a flat,’ he continued, ‘because there’s a small kitchen down one end with a few cupboards and a fridge. But mainly it’s a room with no furniture. Just bare floorboards and white walls. “The White Room”, I call it. On one side there are three large windows overlooking the Stray. You know the Stray in Harrogate?’

He was talking about the large grassy area that surrounds the town. Not exactly a park because it’s too wide and un-primped, but at the same time not wild enough to be a common.

‘I go there to calm down,’ he went on. ‘I love the floorboards. There’s something so perfect and straight about them. Simple, with no adornment, no clutter; like a ploughed field stretching into the distance. And in the room no one can touch me. There’s no expectation of me doing anything I don’t want to do. I just sit there. And breathe.’

‘There’s a chair?’

‘A little old wooden one. I sit there and look at the trees outside or people walking past. And there’s a bed to one side of the room. It’s just a roll-out mattress on the floor. I can lie in it when I want. And I can stay there – it’s nice and warm – and stay calm and be on my own and not really think about anything.’

We smiled at each other. Gregory had tears in his eyes and I was on the verge of welling up too. He had opened the curtain onto an exquisite, private world and for a few seconds, in front of the fire in The Green Dragon in Wetherby, this attainment of calmness felt deeply profound. Just then, some of our colleagues burst in and the moment was gone. The next day I plunged back into work and the entire evening was a dim memory, but gradually Gregory’s white room started coming back to me. I remembered that when he began to describe it I instinctively assumed he was talking about an imaginary room but, as he continued, I dismissed the notion and, because he said nothing to the contrary, I assumed it was real. But now I wasn’t sure.

Unfortunately, over the course of that whole year, I never had the opportunity to discuss it with Gregory. He was frequently out seeing clients and when he was back at the office there was never a chance to broach something so personal. I certainly didn’t want to question him about it in front of our colleagues. In any case, I suspected Gregory had regretted telling me once he’d sobered up so I thought it best not to mention it.

It was raining heavily when we arrived at Leicester Forest East and, after I had roused Gregory, we dashed inside. He attempted to get his hair in some sort of order by sticking his head under a tap and then stooping under a dryer. It looked no better. After a silent breakfast of coffee and croissants we returned to the car and Gregory took over the driving. As we pulled onto the motorway, he muttered, ‘Right, let’s see what this baby can do.’ I thought he was joking but he immediately started bombing down the fast lane at 90 miles per hour.

‘Slow down,’ I said. ‘Keep it at 70.’

‘Sorry, Lawrence. Force of habit. We’re all right though, I’m an advanced driver.’

A few minutes passed uneventfully until Gregory said, quietly, ‘I’ve been having trouble. With the white room.’

I was struck by the assumption that I knew what he was talking about or even remembered that beery conversation from the previous year.

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘Everything’s bad.’

‘The white room,’ I said, ‘is it imaginary?’

‘Of course it’s fucking imaginary,’ he snapped, ‘but it’s taking me over.’

He was now in the middle lane, flashing anyone who was too slow to move out of the way.

‘I started going there more and more. Lucia went mental after Alfie was born and when her mother died it was a nightmare. I’m inept at the best of times, you know, with emotions. You try and say the right thing but ultimately what can you do about it? And work, I detest it.’

‘You don’t give that impression.’

‘It’s not PLD as such, it’s just any job. I can’t stand working. So I kept going there, to the room – retreating. But what happened was I’d be there relaxing and the fridge would start up this annoying hum and I had to struggle really hard to make it stop. Can you believe it? The fridge in my own brain was driving me round the bend. But I could cope with that – it was just irritating. Then I saw this girl outside an auction house – in real life. She slipped and I grabbed her before she fell to the ground. And she winked at me. She had such sweet smile, and dimples. After that, whenever I went to the white room, Natalie would show up. That’s her name.’

We were back in the fast lane touching a hundred.

‘What about Lucia?’ I asked. ‘Does she ever come to the white room?’

‘No, never, thank God. But, Lawrence, this Natalie, she fucks like a train, I’m telling you. The most amazing, wild sex…’

‘Sure. Imaginary, wild sex.’

‘Yeah, imaginary, imaginary. But, like, up against the windows and doing it on the ceiling, up the walls. It was all purple carpets and zigzags and crazy movement, you know, like a camera zooming in and out.’

‘Sounds like a bad trip. Or a migraine.’

Gregory grinned, and then swore as the car swerved.

‘That’s the trouble. I was supposed to go there to calm things down but now I was going there all the time and it was pulling me apart. It wasn’t restful anymore, it was mayhem. But, man, she did everything.’

‘Everything, except nothing,’ I replied. ‘Have you been to a doctor?’

‘I don’t believe in pills. Those medics dope you up and turn you into a different person. They take control of you and I wanted to be in control of myself.’

‘But you were out of control.’

‘I know. And now there’s a problem with the floorboards. Little bits of torn-up paper, tiny triangles twisting out of the crevices and swarming up onto me. I try to bat them away but I fall and crack my head open. It happens over and over again. These weird, mottled patterns appear on the window panes and the light shade – all sharp and conical – becomes more and more prominent and I’m always looking up at it or it’s swooping down on me. And Natalie’s there lying on the bed with a sheet draped over her and I pull back the sheet and her eyes are missing. There’s just these bloody holes in her head where her eyes should be and she’s screaming, screaming, screaming. Oh man, it’s crazy, isn’t it? Am I crazy?’

I awoke in a hospital bed with those last few words repeating in my mind. I had no recollection of the crash but the Saab was a write off and Gregory had vanished off the face of the earth. After six months’ rehabilitation I decided I no longer had the stomach for PLD and spent three years in South America. I had an extraordinary, wonderfully exciting time but I could never quite put out of my mind the shock of that day with Gregory.

When I returned a month ago to visit my father in Harrogate, we strode out along the Stray one afternoon and I looked up at the distinctive, Georgian terrace across the road, and remembered Gregory. The building seemed to comprise several apartments – each with three large windows overlooking the Stray and I wondered whether Gregory had based his imaginary room on one of these. As we drew nearer, a figure appeared at one of the windows and I could make out that it was sitting down. Could it be him? I was struck by the idea that Gregory had made his fantasy a reality and was now ensconced in his eyrie overlooking the Stray. But I walked on. Did I really want to meet this person again after what had happened on that January morning three and a half years before?

After dinner that evening, I left Dad at home and walked across town. When I arrived at the building I found a communal entrance and half a dozen doorbells with nameplates. Each nameplate was blank so I pressed one at random. A buzz and a click and I was inside. I made my way up the dark staircase and, on the second floor, found a door ajar. I pushed it open and walked into an empty room. The walls were white and bare. Three windows looked over the Stray and by the middle one was an old, wooden chair. I turned slowly to the right. A rolled out mattress lay on the floor and a sheet was drawn up over what I took to be a body. It moved.

An explosive poem by Sophie Clarke about waking up one morning and feeling completely and utterly alive. Illustration by Tanja Székessy.

This morning I want you to soak me
in rain that chisels my skin, signals a storm’s sudden
attack. For you to stand with me in a white, clapping field,
lightning striking centimetres
from our toes, mouths open as we’re filled like bottles.
I want you to point out the red organs flowering through my skin.
I want you to hurl me onto a rock face and say
climb. Yes. I want even the bin bags at the front gate
to split and the ordered china in the dining room cabinet to explode.
I want you to take a spray can to the city,
words glittering on billboards and bridges and my letterbox.
I want you to take me up on the hill,
point out my old house and the cherry tree we planted,
fierce as ever. God, I want to feel
the very breath burn
through my throat and lungs, my toe nails
to dig into the thick soil, and now
in a language I do not know but which tinkles
in silver and gold, verb conjugations
to bloom again and again in tiny, shivering violets
exploding from my mouth.

Ben Whitfield’s short story follows the life and deaths of Michael Finch, a normal individual with a remarkable gift. Illustration by Zach Meyer.

The first time that I died was on my sixth birthday. I drowned in the pond at the back of my aunt’s home. It was the summer of 1979 and I had decided that I could jump far enough to make it to the other side. Everybody else had gone back inside for wine and small triangular sandwiches. I remember seeing the net over the top of the pond (which I later learned was to stop birds preying on the goldfish) and feeling confident that if I didn’t make the jump I would be perfectly safe.

I leapt as far as my pudgy little legs would carry me. It was nearly far enough. My left foot made it to the other side, my right foot, however, lingered behind me, pushed down against the netting and dipped into the water. I remember registering the wetness in my shoe before noticing the searing pain in my shin that I had cracked off the edge of the pond. I lost my balance and fell backwards.

The rest is broken memories of panic, struggling to get free of the netting and gasping for air any time I found the surface with never enough time to both breathe and scream for help. I remember not knowing whether I was facing up or down, I remember waiting to feel my dad’s strong hands dragging me to safety, and then I remember nothing at all for what might have been an eternity, or maybe just a heartbeat, and then I woke up in my bed with my Spiderman blanket wrapped around me, in a cold sweat. I cried and by the time my dad had staggered to my bedroom I knew it had been a dream.

I managed to get back to sleep that night after my dad’s whiskey-drenched breath had told me there were ‘no monsters’ even though I wasn’t scared of monsters.

I was woken up the next morning by the radio proclaiming that it was a glorious Friday and summer was just around the corner. I switched it off wondering why it had been on at all and went downstairs. Dad was asleep on the couch, the ashtrays were full, and between his fingers was an entire cigarette burned into a perfect cylinder that would crumble like a sunlit vampire if he stirred, though he didn’t. I wasn’t moved by this picture, I had seen it before. I went to the kitchen to see if there was anything to eat.

After a bowl of dry cornflakes I went outside to play and that’s where I was at midday when my dad yelled from the open living room window.

‘What the hell are you still doing here, Michael?’

I let go of my yellow truck and looked at him.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘You’re meant to be in school!’ he said, his eyes narrowed with anger.

‘But it’s summer,’ I replied.

‘You cheeky little shit, get up those stairs and get changed right now!’ he yelled and slammed the window.

I was annoyed because I knew he was wrong but I did what he said.

As he drove me to school in his sun-faded Granada, right hand out of the window with the usual smouldering Richmond glowing in the wind, I began to feel strange. I began to feel as though I recognised this day; the weather, the smell, the advertising billboards outside the newsagents and then when my school came into sight with the gates wide open and kids playing freeze-tag and football, I felt as though I would faint.

‘Get out, tell your teacher you’re sorry you’re late and get the bus back, alright?’ Dad said.

I didn’t answer immediately, I was staring at Colin Burness who had a bandage over his left eye. The same bandage he’d been wearing all year up until about three weeks ago.

‘Alright?’ he repeated, losing his patience.

‘Alright,’ I replied and stepped out of the car.

By the end of that day I had figured out that it was still about five weeks until I turned six. I probably would have come to the conclusion that I had dreamt up the entire build-up to my birthday because I had been so excited but for one thing: I hadn’t been very excited about it. Since my mother had died two years previously, things like Christmas and birthdays had become just ordinary days. For another thing, I had lived those five weeks before, every detail of them. I knew what people were going to say before they said them, I knew who was ringing the doorbell before the door was opened, I could answer questions off game-shows that I couldn’t possibly have known the answer to and then, on my sixth birthday my aunt Meagan arrived at my house to take me and my dad over to her place for cake and cartoons. After I had eaten cake and watched cartoons I found myself once again staring at that pond, except this time I didn’t try to jump over it.

It was only a few months before I’d forgotten all about the incident. Life carried on, my dad managed to keep me alive during his brief bouts of sobriety and we got by.

It was the spring of 1991 when I died again. I was seventeen and I was driving from a party to my one bedroom place eleven miles away. Claire Finnegan was in the passenger seat swaying like a ragdoll and telling me that she loved me although it sounded more like ‘ah fuckin’ luff oo.’ I had my right hand out of the window tapping embers into the blackness. I was watching them dart like fireflies in my side mirror, mesmerised in my drunk and stoned state by the patterns like machine-gun tracers – and then I was upside down feeling the cool night air blowing against my face.

I wasn’t aware that I had been in an accident. I hadn’t heard the truck, I hadn’t felt my body being crushed almost in half just below the sternum. All I knew was that I was now looking out of my destroyed driver’s side window at the road illuminated by the one remaining light that shone on millions of pieces of glass, and Rockin’ in the Free World was playing from somewhere. I turned my head to ask Claire if she was alright but her wide, dead eyes glared at me accusingly as the last pumps of blood spurted from the yellow and white hole where her arm used to be. I tried to breathe but found that I couldn’t get more than a quarter breath in and that’s when I saw the steering wheel, and most of the dashboard, embedded in my midriff. I began to convulse as I felt the last drops of life crawl out of me and then there was nothingness again.

When I woke up this time it was about seven weeks earlier. The Sonic Youth poster that I had torn down and ripped up a month ago was back up on my bedroom wall, and I had two new messages on my answering machine that I had heard before and had deleted before. I paced my room, terrified of the scene that I found myself in. In a daze I drove in my undamaged car to The Vinyl Stop and there was Claire, alive and stocking the Country A-K rack, all limbs intact. Here, on the verge of a panic attack, is when I remembered what had happened when I was six.

I went through a few different states of mind. Shock, disbelief, the sincere conviction that I had lost my mind, but as the days wore on I found that the more things that I could predict were going to happen, the more I knew it was true. I even used my advanced knowledge of the future to get a job I had previously been declined for. I did this by firstly preparing answers to all the questions I knew I’d be asked and then by slashing the tyres of the guy who – in another life – actually got the position. It was a rubbish job working in a late night coffee shop but it meant a steady pay check and an excuse not to go to the party that had been the precursor to my death about seven weeks previously.

That night when I finished my shift, I drove to the back-road between West Midway and Road End and parked my car on the grass at the side of the road. I leaned against the passenger door and waited. At about 2.45am a familiar looking truck rounded the corner. The driver was singing along to Rockin’ in the Free World and seemed surprised to see me.

That night in my bedroom I held a knife to my wrists telling myself it’s not suicide if I don’t die, but ultimately I wasn’t convinced enough that I would be successful. What if I really was crazy? What if it was only those two times and if I tried again I’d die for real?

It wasn’t until twenty years later that I found the courage to kill myself. By then I was 36 and I was an English teacher at Road End High. I was married and had one child, Robert, who was eleven and who, along with his mother, was the reason I had dug myself out of a pit of debt and despair to make something of myself. My wife, Ellie, worked for a health insurance company and was in London that weekend for a conference. Robert was in bed and the phone rang at 9.43pm.

I put down the phone and tried to pour myself a whiskey, but my hands were shaking so much that most of it ended up on the carpet. Now, I said that I found the courage to kill myself but the truth is, when faced with the task of having to look my son in the eye and tell him that his mother was dead, I chose to take a risk and hope that the overactive imagination of the six-year-old version of me and the drug-fuelled memory of the seventeen year old version of me were correct, and that if I died I would awake sometime in the relatively close past and I could convince my wife not to go to London that week. In truth, the decision was motivated more by cowardice than by courage.

Two bottles of pills and the rest of the bottle of whiskey later, I sat on the beach watching the waves thunder against the shore. I had decided that one way or another tomorrow was not going to come. I felt the drowsiness begin to rush over me and took a walk along the beach, heading into the darkness where people don’t go at this time of night. I was staggering now – one of the bottles had been just paracetamol, which on its own probably wouldn’t have done the trick but the sleeping pills with the alcohol would. As I stumbled further and further into the darkness I began to hear voices. I knew there was no one there but I could hear them riding in on the wind, laughing at me as I became disorientated and struggled to breathe. My hands grasped at my throat and I realised I had walked into the surf, my feet were wet and I fell onto my knees, then onto my face, dislocating my jaw on the wet sand. I was vaguely aware of the cold, salty water lapping at my cheek and then I was gone.

And there she was, beautiful and alive and breathing deep, sleeping breaths. My heart was racing. I was some kind of god, indestructible and with the ability to change the past and therefore change the future. I got up, careful not to wake her and snuck downstairs. I turned on the TV and the news channel informed me that it was the 9th of October 2011. Only three weeks earlier this time but that was fine. That was three weeks I had to stop Ellie getting on that plane so that she wouldn’t be on that street, with that man, at that time, and she wouldn’t suffer for an hour before finally letting go.

I couldn’t stop her from going that first time, I couldn’t come up with a good enough reason. I told her I was ill and couldn’t look after Robert so she convinced her mother to look after him. I told her I really didn’t want her to go and that I had a bad feeling and she laughed it off. I told her that I had lived through it all before, that I knew she’d be stabbed for her purse on the second night and that she would die. She got worried about me, told me that I needed to speak to a doctor and that I’d been working too hard, and off she went to London. I hoped that I had done enough to change her pattern of behaviour, that maybe this time she’d be more careful or not go out at all that Sunday. I even called her that night and she answered and we spoke and I felt relieved that it was all going to be OK, but at exactly 9.43pm the phone rang. I answered it and it was the police. I hung up, walked out of my house, drove to Ellie’s parent’s farm and blew my brains out with a shotgun.

I finally managed to stop her from going to London by winning the lottery. I knew what numbers were coming up so I won, quit my job, and we went to New Zealand for two weeks. I imagine someone else was stabbed on the streets of London that night, I didn’t care though, I had my Ellie back and we were happy.

By now you’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all of this. Well, the thing is, I’m now 40 and have died about two hundred times, and every time is exactly the same. You see, I had a massive heart attack very suddenly on the 6th of June 2014 and ever since then it has killed me over and over again on the 6th of June 2014, and each time I wake up between three and ten weeks earlier knowing exactly when I am going to die and I don’t think it will ever end.

I’ve written this document countless times because I’ve had time to think, and I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps every time I die and wake up in the past, I am creating a brand new universe in which I am alive again. Perhaps somewhere there’s a universe where I drowned in a pond on my sixth birthday, and somewhere there’s one where Claire Finnegan and I drove into an oncoming truck as I gazed at burning embers, and somewhere else I overdosed on a beach, and somewhere else I blew my brains out with a shotgun, and there could be hundreds where I died of a heart attack and you, reading this, you are part of only one of those universes – a universe that I will never again experience, one with a beautiful, beautiful future.

With a new year just days away, there are now only four weeks left to submit your poems and short stories to our next issue on the theme of ‘Future’.

Until January 26th, we’ll be accepting poems of up to 25 lines and short stories of up to 3,000 words that relate to the theme of ‘Future’. So if you want to kick off the new year by getting your writing published, illustrated and read by thousands of people across the globe, make sure it’s polished up and in with us before the deadline passes.

A little tip for submitting. We’ve been receiving a lot of morbid and depressing depictions of the future over the last few weeks. And while we’re certainly not averse to dystopian work (we’ve published quite a bit of it during our time), we don’t want our readers to finish this issue with a heavy heart. If you have a poem or short story up your sleeve that’s pretty gloomy, see if you can turn it into something that won’t make us want to reach for the nearest noose.

If you’ve already sent in your submission for this issue, fear not, your writing is already under consideration. If not, make sure you acquaint yourself with the submissions guidelines at popshotpopshot.com/submit.

We’re looking forward to reading your literary masterpieces.

Louise Green’s poem depicts hope as a magical coat, acting as a metaphor for anyone who survives hostile times. Illustration by Slava Nesterov.

In past times, when we held wakes
for the death of society
as black boots trampled bean fields
and men on horseback smashed
down gates, rode through city squares,
I wore hope like a conjurer’s coat —
collar turned up against the blizzard
sleeves crammed with conceits
keepsakes sewn into hems.
Wide skirts sheltered my brood as
I magicked smiles and sweets
rabbits and flags, fake-silver spoons.
We travelled in groups, at night
pockets stuffed with false papers
skeleton keys, riddles
for the gatekeepers, passports
to kinder countries.

Nowadays my hope weighs less
no more than a lightweight cloak
for numbered winters.
I bequeath hope’s strongest fabric
to a new generation.
May it hold them up.

Our sixteenth issue, featuring a timeless collection of poems and short stories that explore hope in all its weird and wonderful ways. Nestled within its pages, we’ll find a daughter extracting memories from her mother’s mind, a couple feasting on slices of rainbow, refugees spreading roots in friendlier lands, a woman who begins to disappear from sight and someone with a small, bright bird inhabiting their chest.

Words by Jacob Newell Armitage, Katherine Venn, Mike Fox, Rowan Dent, Tracy Fells, Lucy Winrow, Lynsey Morandin, Denni Turp, Louise Green, Craig Wallwork, Mab Jones, Elizabeth Lovatt, Miki Byrne, L P Lee, Kieran Cottrell, Ugo Okoronkwo, Geoff Bennett, Ledlowe Guthrie, James Hatton, Katie Overstall, Donna Laemmlen, Peter Grandbois and Cristina Haraba.

Illustrations by Ivan Canu, Joanna Gniady, Luis Pinto, Pedro Semeano, Mike Lees, Mitt Roshin, Slava Nesterov, Gabriella Barouch, Pete Reynolds, Lovely Creatures, Isabel Albertos, Leib Chigrin, Natalie Barahona, Oliver McAinsh, Lauren Crow, Yu-Ming Huang and Daria Skrybchenko.

Orders will be dispatched within two working days.

UK / £6 + p&p
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J.S.Watts’ poem attempts to capture the emotion engendered by a moment of perceived perfection and possibility. Illustration by Karolina Burdon.

There are some days,
like this one,
I could hold forever,
in the palm of my open hand,
like a pale blue hen’s egg,
bathed in sky and nestled
on the pink of my bare skin,
smooth, delicate, perfected,
filled with life
and curious possibility.

But for life to live,
the egg must crack,
the chick must know the world,
or there will be no further
blue egg days.
And yet,
I miss the frail grace of that abandoned egg:
believing there will be others,
knowing they will never
be quite the same.

A remote service station and its friendly proprietor are not all that they seem in Georgia Oman’s peculiar short story. Illustration by Paul Lacolley.

Nathan’s hands on the steering wheel were tanned an unfamiliar shade of brown from days of driving in the harsh February sun. His watch, when he took it off at night before going to sleep at yet another roadside motel, left a strip of white skin around his wrist the shape of a hospital ID band. At first they had tried sharing the load, carving up the journey into manageable chunks and marking their switchover points at convenient locations on the map in red pen. But on the morning of their second day, as they navigated truck traffic on the outskirts of a large mining town ringed with roundabouts and flyovers, a small kangaroo bounded out of the roadside scrub. Laura, who was driving, didn’t see it in time through the early morning lowlight. It disappeared beneath the roo bar and passed under the rear tyres with two twin thumps, Laura wincing with each one. Knuckles white on the steering wheel, the grey mound of fur in the centre of the road growing smaller and smaller in the rear vision mirror, she had continued on to the next rest stop, at which point she announced her refusal to drive any further. Leaving the car running, she removed her crumpled plastic water bottle from the driver’s side cup holder and her packet of gum from the door pocket, barely waiting for Nathan to awkwardly manoeuvre himself over the central console before sliding into his vacant seat.

Nathan now drove for hours at a time, punctuated by brief stops at roadhouses of varying decrepitude where they used echoing cement toilet blocks and paid for overpriced petrol. He watched for the names of these tiny settlements as they first appeared on the giant green signs that lined the highway, moving higher up the order each time another town flashed past the window. The length of their names seemed to grow even as their size diminished, an ever-expanding array of consonants and syllables picked out in bright white letters. The column of corresponding distances would grow incrementally smaller until a welcome sign reared up unexpectedly, followed swiftly by another thanking you for visiting.

Laura, feeling guilty in the passenger seat, overcompensated in her role as navigator. She had brought a large map that had belonged to her dad back when people still used them, one that draped over her legs like a blanket when unfurled to its full extent. The distance guide was in miles, not kilometres, and there were tears along the creases where it had been folded and refolded. At least the roads and topography were the same, she said, as she traced her finger along the bold marking of the highway snaking across the faded ochre that demarcated the desert.

‘We should make it to Moolalling by tonight,’ she said on the afternoon of the third day. ‘It looks big enough to have accommodation.’

Nathan shifted his weight to alleviate the numbness of sitting in the same position for too long. His left ankle was stiff from hovering over the clutch.

‘Is there somewhere to stop for a bit before then?’

Laura peered closer at the map.

‘There’s a service station at a place called Cunderrin, according to this.’ She leaned over his shoulder to glance at the fuel gauge. The arrow bobbed somewhere between half full and empty. ‘We might as well fill up, while we’re at it.’

Having decided on a plan, they settled back into a comfortable silence broken only by the single CD they had bought for the journey. It was playing through the sound system for the eighth time, radio reception having been lost days ago. Three more road signs flashed past before Nathan spoke again.

‘I haven’t seen any distances to Cunderrin.’

‘It’s probably too small,’ said Laura, absorbed in picking out the raisins from her fruit and nut mix. ‘We shouldn’t be far away now.’

As she spoke, the rough outline of a low-slung building became visible on the horizon.

‘That must be it,’ said Laura, craning in her seat. Nathan relaxed his foot slightly on the accelerator. A gnarled and stunted desert tree grew by the side of the road, its branches blackened by fire. Nailed to the trunk was a small sign: Welcome to Cunderrin.

There was little to be welcomed to. The sparse, scrub-covered plain stretched out indefinitely on both sides. The highway bisected the red dirt like a ribbon of black treacle, worked into the landscape by the cross-country trucks that thundered through at all hours of the day and night. Only the service station provided any evidence of human habitation, with not even a few dilapidated houses or a pub in sight to make some sort of claim to a township. A hand-painted sign, promising them friendly, courteous service and clean toilet facilities, directed them down a small turnoff away from the main highway. Nathan slowed down further as they approached.

The service station was a low-lying yellow brick building, its pitched tin roof topped by a giant Coca-Cola sign faded pastel pink with age. The windows, shaded by striped awnings, were covered in brightly coloured lettering that had begun to peel, advertising Party Ice and Car & Truck Batteries & Oils Available. A handful of petrol bowsers were shaded beneath a corrugated iron canopy. The dirt car park was empty, save for a sleek, maroon Holden straight out of the seventies. Nathan pulled up at a petrol bowser and cut the engine, relieved to get out and stretch his legs. Laura reclined in the passenger seat with her feet up on the dash, flicking through the liner notes of the CD booklet as he flipped the lever of the fuel cap and went to fill up.

‘Jesus, how old is this thing…’ he muttered, regarding the bowser.

‘What was that?’

Nathan stuck his head through the open window.

‘This thing’s only got two grades, super and standard. No premium, unleaded, whatever.’

Laura spoke without looking up from her booklet.

‘Well how much does it cost?’

Nathan’s head disappeared from sight as he checked. Laura heard him swear loudly before he reappeared again.

‘It’s under 10 cents per litre!’

Now Laura looked up.

‘That can’t be right.’

‘I’d better go inside and check,’ murmured Nathan to himself, replacing the pump.

‘I’ll come too,’ said Laura, unfolding herself from the passenger seat with the squelching sound of bare skin peeling off leather. ‘I’m burning up in this car. It’s like someone switched on the heat.’

A small bell rang overhead as Nathan pushed open the heavy screen door, momentarily blinded by the transition to darkness from the harsh midday glare. Laura’s eyes were the first to adjust to the gloom. The interior was smaller than it appeared from outside, just a single room. The counter stood along one wall, topped with a stack of newspapers and cardboard boxes filled with cheap lollies and chocolates. Another wall housed a row of fridges, stocked exclusively with what looked like ice and various brands of chocolate milk, while a lone plastic-wrapped sausage roll basted in a tepid pie-warmer.

‘This place is like something out of a movie’, Laura whispered, instinctively feeling the need to lower her voice, despite the emptiness of the room. ‘The service station that time forgot.’

‘The service station that air conditioning forgot, too,’ muttered Nathan, fanning himself with his wallet. His forehead was beaded with sweat and dark patches had begun to spread across his shirt. ‘It’s even hotter in here than it was outside.’

Laura took a step towards the counter.

‘Look at these names,’ she said, rummaging through one of the lolly cartons. She gave a small gasp and seized one blue-wrapped chocolate bar, holding it up triumphantly like a prize fisherman’s catch. ‘I haven’t seen one of these for years.’

‘I thought they discontinued them,’ said Nathan. ‘It’s melting, by the way.’

A steady stream of brown liquid had begun to drip down Laura’s wrist. She replaced the chocolate quickly, rubbing her arm against her denim shorts. She heard, rather than saw, the door behind the counter open.

‘Can I help you?’

A man stood behind the counter. His face, weathered and wrinkled from the sun, was of an indeterminate age that could have been anywhere between forty and sixty. Speckles of grey flecked his dark hair, but the eyes that surveyed Nathan and Laura were clear and blue.

‘Oh, hi,’ said Laura, holding her chocolate stained arm behind her back. ‘Are you the owner? We just wanted to ask about the petrol price outside. Is there some sort of mistake with the sign?’

‘Yes I am, Ken from Cunderrin,’ he replied in answer to her first question. He pointed through the bronze tinted windows to the pumps outside. ‘And there’s no mistake. Nine point seven cents per litre. It may not be the cheapest, but it’s as good as you’re going to find round here, and it’s a long way to Moolalling.’

Nathan and Laura glanced at each other.

‘That seems very cheap,’ said Nathan slowly. ‘Are you sure there’s no mistake?’

‘Quite sure,’ said the owner gruffly, rapping smartly on the counter for emphasis. ‘We’re not running an extortion racket out here.’

He paused, looking over their t-shirts and thongs as if noticing them for the first time.

‘Where are you two headed, anyway?’

‘Across the bight,’ replied Laura.

He let out a low whistle.

‘Hot time of year to be doing it. Haven’t seen a summer like this in a long time.’

‘You can say that again,’ said Nathan. A brown puddle had begun to pool on the counter beneath the carton of chocolates and was dripping down the front of the counter.

‘Yep,’ continued the owner, resting a forearm on the till, an ancient model, with large square buttons and no computer screen. ‘I haven’t seen a summer like it since ’54.’

He was clearly much older than he looked. Over his shoulder, Laura noticed a rotary dial telephone hanging on the back wall. She was trying to lean forward as unobtrusively as possible to get a closer look when she caught the unmistakable scent of something burning. Nathan nudged her gently.

‘Look, the pie warmer,’ he whispered.

The sausage roll in its flimsy plastic wrap was charcoal black, completely burned to a crisp. The acrid smell of burning grew stronger but the owner seemed completely oblivious. He also seemed not to have noticed the torrent of melted chocolate seeping off his counter.

‘Excuse me, Ken,’ said Laura. ‘Your pie warmer seems to be broken…’

He continued on like he hadn’t heard her.

‘In a hot summer like this you need a thirst quencher for the drive. We have a fine selection of chocolate milk in the fridge behind you, if you have a mind.’

He gestured to the row of refrigerators lining the wall behind them. Nathan, feeling the expectation in his smile, nodded slightly and pulled open one of the doors, a rush of hot air escaping from within. The bags of party ice were completely liquid, and from the rows of chocolate milk came the sour odour of spoilt milk. He quickly shut the door.

‘I’m alright, thanks,’ he said. He re-joined Laura at the counter, who was engrossed in one of the newspapers. He felt an acute desire to get back on the road. The temperature inside seemed to be growing hotter with every moment, and the burning smell from the pie warmer was beginning to catch at the back of his throat.

‘We had better be going,’ he said. ‘Lots of ground to make up. I think we have enough in the tank to make it to Moolalling, but thanks for your help.’

He reached for Laura’s hand. She was flicking through the pile of newspapers now, scanning the front-page headlines. As Nathan watched, the edges of the pages began to blacken and curl slightly, as though singed.

‘No worries,’ said the owner. ‘It’s always a pleasure to meet passers by. It gets a little lonely out here some times.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Nathan, pulling discretely at Laura as he moved towards the door. When he reached for it, the door handle was scorching hot and he recoiled in pain, clutching his scalded hand. Laura wrapped her own in her t-shirt and pushed open the door, the owner calling out to them from inside.

‘Goodbye!’

The baking midday sun seemed a relief after the intense heat of the service station. Neither Nathan nor Laura spoke or stopped to turn around as they crossed the dirt parking lot to their car. They climbed inside wordlessly, reversing with the sharp crunch of wheels on gravel back to the small turnoff that led to the highway. They were several kilometres away when Laura broke the silence.

‘I was looking at the newspapers,’ she said, staring straight ahead through the windshield at the scrub flashing past on either side.

‘I noticed.’

‘It was all about some speech the Prime Minister gave on wage indexations.’

Nathan made a non-committal noise in response.

‘He was the Prime Minister before I was born,’ said Laura, turning to look at him. ‘The newspapers were from February 1976.’

Nathan was silent for a moment.

‘All of them?’

‘Every single one,’ said Laura, returning her gaze to the window. She noticed a small rest stop coming up on their left, with a few park benches and a toilet block. She sat up in her seat.

‘Pull in here.’

Without asking for an explanation, Nathan veered sharply to the left and into the rest stop, causing a large freight truck to sound its horn angrily as it thundered past.

‘There’s an information plaque,’ said Laura, directing him towards the toilet blocks. Nathan guided the car towards a small bronze engraving mounted on a stand beside a rusted drinking fountain. Laura had opened her door before he even cut the engine, and was standing over the plaque by the time Nathan removed his seatbelt and climbed out to join her.

‘History of Cunderrin, Moolalling shire,’ she read aloud. ‘Cunderrin was founded in 1873 to house workers on the cross-country telegraph line. At its peak, in the 1920s, Cunderrin was home to more than 100 residents. The population began to fall following the discontinuation of the telegraph line, and by the 1960s only a service station remained.’

Nathan began to read too, their words whipped away by the dry desert wind as they were voiced.

‘In 1976, this too was lost following a fire that claimed the life of its proprietor, long-time Cunderrin resident Ken Dowling.’

They stood silently over the plaque for a few moments. Then they returned to their car, Nathan rolling down the windows to catch the stiff breeze that rolled across the plains. It blew through the car, carrying with it only the faintest trace of smoke.

A poem by Ewan C. Forbes, written after learning our memories are not of actual events, but our recollection of events. Illustration by Aron Vellekoop León.

My favourite memories are under attack
As I’m moved from those moments one tick at a time
My mind replaces the memory with a memory of remembering

Blurred like a photocopy of a copy
The mental equivalent of well thumbed and worn
Distorted with each uncontrollable casting back of my mind

A pencil on tissue paper: thoughts push hard
In the tearing, time takes the details away from me
You are edited, exaggerated, influenced by a future you are not in

Life pulls us away from one another
And what we’re left with cannot be held or kissed
Imperfect cells replace cells as imperfect memories replace memories

Try to stop remembering while not forgetting
Attempt to slow the involuntary vandal’s rewritings
My memories are under attack and I have to save them from myself