A unique solution is arrived upon to rid the planet of conflict in Charlie Galbraith’s unsettling short story. Illustration by Matt Harrison Clough.

The decision was made at a global summit, attended by the leaders of every nation on the planet – those relatively few that were still left. Looking back, it might seem a little extreme, but at the time it made perfect sense. The general idea, as it was put to us, was: ‘If you can’t co-exist, then don’t’. It was a simple enough solution to an old problem and everyone, at least everyone I knew, agreed with it. The cities were mostly rubble, and the majority of the people that remained were country-folk used to having to walk a mile to their nearest neighbour, so it didn’t seem like all that drastic a change.

Not many remember the start of the conflict, but the gist of the disagreement was thus: one side felt that everything should be pooled and shared out equally, and the other felt that it was up to every man (and woman, some said) to stand on his own two feet and go out and get something if he felt he needed it. Blood was spilled over the matter – a lot of it, and for a long time. The fighting dragged on and on until it got to the point where there wasn’t much of anything left to go out and get, or pool and share out, whatever you felt should be done with it. And so, in desperation, the summit was called and a compromise was reached.

The story goes that at the summit someone on the one side shouted out, ‘No man is an island!’ and someone on the other side shouted back, ‘Well, maybe he should be!’ This got people on both sides thinking and, eventually, agreeing. The idea was to share everything out, as the one side wanted, but from that point on to let every man fend for himself, separate from all others. The world was to be broken up like a jigsaw, and everyone would get a solitary piece of the puzzle. It was called a ‘Time-Out for society’. Reset the clock, put everyone back on the blocks, and when you fire the starting pistol, ensure that people can’t but keep to their lanes.

The mathematicians all got together and calculated each person’s allocation of the planet’s combined raw materials and, most importantly, its land. 420 square metres (or 460 square yards, for those unfamiliar with the metric system). We received notification in the post, with a date some three months in the future scheduled for ‘The Break-Up’.

In the weeks following, reams of giant pneumatic hammers sprung up like weeds across the landscape, erected by teeming crews of workmen in white overalls. These, we were assured, were designed to be water-soluble, so that no man’s personal fiefdom would be spoiled by the unsightly metal structures. All we had to do was scrape off a surface-layer of paint on the day of dissemination and, as the land broke up, they would simply fall into the sea and dissolve in a pink fizz.

On the eve of the split there were huge parties, the last chance most of us would have for a simple get-together. There were hugs and tears and solemn goodbyes. There were also many drunken brawls and slurred oaths and bitter cries of ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish!’ as each stumbled towards the border of their personal patch ready for the big day.

At the specified time of 7:30am the following morning the hammers all came down simultaneously, like the flat of a teaspoon on the top of a soft-boiled egg. And, as the earth’s crust splintered and tore free of the mantle, they fell into the sea in a shower of component parts – as promised.

I’m sure most must have been counting down the seconds, but 7:30am proved a little too early for me after the celebrations the night before. I was rudely awoken by the almighty thud of the hammers, followed by a deafening compound crack that echoed out over the horizon. As seawater streamed in to fill the deep fissures that had appeared all around me, I just about had time to hold on for dear life to a nearby shrub as the ground pitched and rolled below me like a whale with an itchy fin.

Once things had settled down, I stood up and looked out as the landscape slowly floated away from itself and effervescent clouds of bright pink met and merged before gently dying down, leaving a dull brown lather on the surface of the sea.

From that point on there wasn’t much difference between one day and another, they all seem to run together in the memory. Right at the beginning, I made myself a hut from the timber I was allocated, so didn’t want for shelter. I spent most of my time in there, pawing through boxes of old keepsakes and mementos, lying back and reading, or listening to records (until I ran out of batteries) and eating tinned peaches. There was a beech tree that I used to sit under sometimes in the warm weather and a big flat rock that would heat up in the sun, on which I’d stretch out and bask like a lizard. I had been given seeds to plant, and did so fairly haphazardly. When they sprouted, I cultivated them just as haphazardly. I threw out most of my store of minerals. Gold, silver, copper, iron ore – all of it went overboard. Space was at a premium and metalwork wasn’t a skill I had ever acquired. I did, however, learn to fish, though I had never taken to it the few times I had tried it before the split. It had seemed like a lot of waiting around for nothing, but as I’d be doing that no matter what, I thought I might as well wait around with a line in the water and the slim prospect of a meal at the end of it. There wasn’t much else to do, other than to sit with my feet dangling over the sheer cliffs that surrounded my little isle and watch the lumpen silhouettes of others drift across the horizon.

Those first several years were spent in total isolation, as planned, but, for better or worse, it didn’t last.

I remember patching a hole in the roof of my shack one day when I looked up and saw what I took to be an injured gull floundering in the wind. I watched it for a bit as it dithered in the air, before flipping over and diving headlong into a thicket of bracken beside me. I went over to see if it was dead, prepared to stomp it out of its misery if it wasn’t, and found that it wasn’t a gull at all, but a paper aeroplane. I opened it up carefully and read the words ‘I’m bored’ that were scrawled across it in red pen. It was so strange to read someone else’s handwriting, someone else’s thoughts. I found a blue biro in the bottom of a mouldering cardboard box and wrote ‘Aren’t we all?’ on the line below, before folding it up and sending it on its way. As I watched it go, I felt like I’d made contact with an alien race, and I knew then for certain that I wasn’t alone in the universe. Of course, I’d known that anyway, but it was nice to be reminded of it.

That was the first time I encountered such a message, but they became increasingly common until they were pretty much a daily occurrence – just like the morning paper that used to appear on my doorstep, when I had one. I erected a net above my shack to catch these flying missives, but they soon began to arrive in other ways. I saw them taped to the legs of birds and, when fishing, it got to the point where I was pulling in more bottled messages than fish, and was glad for it. Most of them held little of any real interest – pornographic doodles, off-colour jokes, muddled ramblings – but it all helped disrupt the monotony. Sometimes, one would contain something genuinely useful – a recipe for nettle soup, a natural remedy for haemorrhoids, blueprints for long-distance paper planes. Very occasionally there was some real news of the outside world – a forthcoming eclipse, a recent seismic disturbance, etc. – and these were the real gems. Even though it was only ever on the level of gossip and hearsay, guesswork and speculation, this ramshackle network was the only conduit for information and I treasured it. Before, everything I knew, and could ever possibly know, had been restricted by how far I could see.

This is how I learned of the flotillas. I plucked a message from my net one morning, and written in a hurried hand was a warning: ‘Build a sail, if you can. If you can’t, pray.’ It was certainly unnerving, but very vague. Besides, I didn’t have the material for a sail so it was useless, to all intents and purposes, for I am not a religious man. But it aroused my curiosity and I resolved to keep my eye out for anything that might shed some light on it. More descriptive accounts weren’t a long time coming. They began to flood in and I was able to piece together the essence of what was going on fairly quickly.

At places where ocean currents crossed paths there had been collisions between one island and another. And sometimes, when these islands came together the people who lived there made sure that they stayed together. They lashed trees to one another across the divide with vines or hemp-rope. Some had mixed rudimentary cement to paste along the borders. Often, they would just sit and fish, and enjoy the benefits of conversation and companionship. Occasionally, however, the inhabitants of these joint islands, with their combined resources, would be able to erect a sail large enough to propel themselves through the water – albeit at glacial speeds. Together they outnumbered the inhabitants of any other single island and, as they could actually move, it made the others little more than sitting ducks. As a species, we aren’t shy of pressing home an advantage; consequently, many of them took to piracy, hoovering up every island in their vicinity, amassing land and resources and people. The most ravenously successful of these pirate armadas grew to humungous sizes in the space of only a few years.

I read of these aggressive flotillas operating at almost every point of the compass (though I hadn’t thought to bring one with me and so had no idea where I was in relation to them). They had names like ‘The Anschluss Boys’ and ‘утопия’ (whatever that means), or in some cases just crude symbols. Some of the accounts I read praised them, encouraging submission – ham-fisted propaganda describing island Shangri-Las circulating in tropical seas with promises of umbrella cocktails and suggestive drawings of concubines in hula-skirts. Others, apparently first-hand accounts, decried them as brutal and coercive. There were horror stories of women kept in chicken coops and pig pens, taken out periodically like library books and deposited back with torn clothes and dog-eared pages.

But for all the invitations and warnings, without the means for a sail all I could do was sit and read about what was to happen to me as I drifted inescapably towards it.

Some time passed – I can’t be exact or even approximate – and they came for me. I saw it from a long way off, a great hulking mass of land stretching across the horizon with scores of enormous painted sails billowing in the breeze. I felt a surprising upswell of emotion in my breast, like a sailor coming back to shore after a long voyage, only it was the shore that was coming back to me.

I had time to tie myself to the beech tree near my shack so I wouldn’t be thrown into the water by the impact. It loomed ever closer, throwing me and mine into shadow, eventually eclipsing everything else in sight, until finally it hit. There was a loud boom and the ground shuddered, throwing up a cloud of dirt. The island rocked violently, but it held together. My shack, however, collapsed in on itself pathetically. They boarded, men just like myself – unshaven and clad in rags. Most headed straight to the ruin of my old hut to rifle through my things, but one came straight over to cut me loose from the tree. He lead me gently by the arm over onto the mainland, whispering softly to me in a foreign tongue and pressing the sharp point of a kitchen knife into the small of my back.

They marched me to their camp, a mile or so inland. It felt very strange to walk in a straight line for so long. After 400 yards I had an almost irresistible urge to turn 90 degrees. They took my supplies, of course, and added them to a mountainous store. They did let me keep my little box of old photos and trinkets, which they needn’t have done. Some among them spoke English and they explained what would happen to me. Join them, they said, and I would enjoy the fruits of their conquests. They told me that this store was just one of many on the raft, and one of the smallest at that. They did not need to explain what would happen if I refused.

I was shown a rough map, which I didn’t recognise, drawn with chalk on a weather-beaten blackboard. It was full of blank spots and question marks, marred by countless rubbings out, lines drawn and redrawn a hundred times over. It was littered with tiny dots, and a handful of large, awkward shapes. They pointed to one of the shapes and this, I was told, was us. They then pointed to some of the other shapes and explained about rival continents, disputed territories, fragile allegiances. They asked if I had any knowledge of engineering or chemistry, or training with the police or military. They talked at me for hours about their cause, their beliefs, their struggle. I nodded and agreed with them and they were pleased. They gave me words to memorise and to repeat back to them with my hand on my chest and, once I had done that, they shared out cups of pineapple wine and we drank into the night.

With dawn threatening to break and the others asleep, I took a sheaf of paper and a biro from my box of keepsakes and tiptoed down to my old island, now the prow of the great raft. I folded my words up into one of the glider shapes I had learnt, and on the next strong gust of wind I cast them up and out towards a faint spot on the horizon, then turned and trudged back through the gloom towards camp.

Literary submissions are now open for our 17th issue on the theme of ‘Future’. Send in your short fiction or poetry before the January 26th deadline.

The future has always been a fascinating concept. It’s the more mysterious, inspiring sibling of the past and present. While the past has been concluded and the present is predictable, the future (especially the distant future) lives only in our heads. It can be whatever we choose it to be. It is the pinnacle of imagination; the ultimate blank canvas to project our dreams, aspirations and fears upon.

The word has been scribbled down on our list of themes for five or six years. Each time we considered it in the lead up to a new issue, there was always another theme that felt more timely. However, global events of the last few months have turned that on its head. Following the recent publication of The Hope Issue, we now can’t think of a theme more timely than this one.

Thus, it is with great excitement and eagerness that we open the doors to literary submissions for our 17th issue on the theme of ‘Future’. For the full submissions guidelines, head to our submit page and make sure that you send in your short fiction or poetry long before the deadline of January 26th.

To familiarise yourself with the kind of work we publish, buy a copy or subscribe from just £10 a year.

Thomas Willshire’s poem captures that frustrated, deep longing for warmer weather that ascends once winter arrives. Illustration by Katey Harvey.

It’s winter now,
guitars, gardens and sandals,
seem so far away,
almost lost,
amidst drips on noses,
sticky feet,
and skin conditions.

Itch itch itch,
rue gas bills and such,
remembering what a small world it is,
how close the sunshine,
how close the warmth,
the good skin.

But for now it’s winter,
very, very winter.

With Christmas around the corner, what do you get for that person with a penchant for literature, short fiction or poetry? We might have the answer…

Try not to panic but with November nearing its end, Christmas is officially around the corner. Or if you choose to measure it by Harrods’ Christmas Shop, it’s been around the corner since August. True story.

To herald the impending festive season, we’ve put together a little duet of the issues we’ve published this year — The Adventure Issue and The Hope Issue — and are offering them up for just £10 + p&p here. Order today and they’ll be on their way to your front door by tomorrow morning.

Alternatively, subscribe from £10 and gift The Adventure Issue or The Hope Issue initially, 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. Just pick the gift subscription option at our subscribe page. Unless you’re buying it for yourself, of course…

To make sure your copies arrive in time, here are our final posting dates:

December 3rd: Africa, Middle East
December 7th: Asia, Cyprus, Far East, Eastern Europe (except Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia)
December 8th: Caribbean, Central America, South America
December 10th: Australia, Greece, New Zealand
December 14th: Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Poland
December 15th: Canada, Finland, Sweden, USA
December 16th: Austria, Denmark, Iceland, Portugal, Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Spain, Switzerland
December 17th: Belgium, France, Ireland, Luxembourg
December 20th: UK (1st Class post)

A poem by Marcus Smith, capturing the energy, atmosphere and excitement that hangs in the air before an adventure. Illustration by Stuart Patience.

The leaves on the oak snapping hard
against each stem binding them fast
are straining to join a silver wind

and somersault into autumn’s sky
to float with the current air and move
with stars, starlings, clouds and smoke,

the leaves that must escape their stems
for the outstretched arms of adventure
and one day do blow free, tumble

across fields to funnel through cities,
to run in red parks, run in the streets
with storms of traffic, then flame out

like brash comets and shrivel and rattle
over cold hard pavement where crushed
and buried when longing to return

to trees and growing and greening
as they once were in a pattern fixed
and clinging before tearing away.

A day at the beach takes a surprising turn in Carol Farrelly’s short story of paralysis, courage and willpower. Illustration by Jörn Kaspuhl.

Calum watches the boy paddle amongst the froth of waves. He’s a disaster in the water, all skinny limbs and nerves. His legs splay like a newborn calf’s. He flaps his hands above the surf as though someone is dipping him in a foul, green medicine. Another child, Calum thinks, who does not live in his own skin. Someone else whom fate might have chosen instead of me.

Calum dog-ears the page on Plockton, leans back and presses his head into the scratchy, orange-striped deck chair. He closes his eyes. Twenty years since he stopped living in his own skin. Twenty years to the day — a day which now drifts pink-orange across the back of his eyelids. He casts his mind back to that very moment, as the boy he once was falls again in slow, balletic motion. White heels slide along tongues of pea-green seaweed. Legs spin up into the air. An airborne gymnast one moment, the hero in an action film the next; then Superman, but Superman losing his powers, pierced by a sliver of kryptonite. Jags of black rock bite once more into his ten-year-old spine. Snap. He crumples just like the actor who pretended to fly. Paralysis from the waist down. End of the show. Curtains. Lights. Feet crunching against scattered popcorn and crumpled tickets.

Now the faces clamour above him again, fuchsia blotches against the summer sky. His mother’s blue eyes stare down at him yet seem farther away than the sky. And Rob was there too: the first to reach him. His galloping feet sprayed coral sand across Calum’s arms and chest; his bubblegum breath cooled Calum’s cheek. He stared and did not laugh or tease, in that moment when Calum stopped feeling his legs.

Calum frowns. He cannot be sure of the memories. Stories that one’s grown-up self pastes together and tells the remembered child. Perhaps he only imagines these thoughts for his ten-year-old self. Maybe there were no visions of gymnasts or superheroes. No god’s-eye view. No jags of jet-black kryptonite. Rob might not have been the first to reach him. But the slow motion is true. He is certain of that slow swirling silence. The absence of sea and wind and children’s chatter. The sound of paralysis about to shudder into him. Nobody can make up a sound like that.

‘Maybe it’s time to go now, eh?’

He opens his eyes and stares up into Rob’s tanned face. ‘No thanks. Quite happy where I am.’

He looks towards the sea again for the wobbling, calf boy. He’s still out there, up to his waist in the water now and he moves as though he’s ploughing treacle.

‘Sure?’ Rob mumbles.

‘Positive.’

Rob disapproves of their return to the beach. The victim, he thinks, should never return to the scene of the crime. Last night, he tried to talk Calum out of it, like most folk would — the folk who think you should move on, adapt, celebrate the ‘just-glad-to-be-alive’ philosophy. Folk who wish you would just accept the inability to walk, run, jog, tiptoe, creep, saunter, hop, spin, waltz. Rub out all those words. Too many options, anyway. Even those who can, don’t. Accept with the same resigned spirit as they have accepted the receding helmet of hair, the middle-age paunch, the tone-deaf ear. And they’re right, of course. Never play the dying swan. Never consent to the eyes that turn away from you. The sudden hunt for a mobile phone that is not ringing. The third-person questions they vomit onto the nearest, likely chaperone.

Rob sighs and faces the water, hands on hips.

They both stare out at the matchstick boy. The waves are lapping against his ribcage, but still he stays upright, afraid to launch himself into the rolling waves.

‘Ironic, eh?’ Calum laughs.

‘What’s that?’ says Rob.

Calum nods towards the boy, a daub of frantic pink amongst the turquoise waves.

‘That he’s allowed his legs.’

‘What?’ Rob turns.

‘It’s a waste. I’m sitting here, coddled in cushions, my legs atrophied. Meanwhile, he’s got perfectly good legs and he’s afraid — afraid to use or enjoy them.’

Rob’s cheeks colour. He turns back towards the sea.

People don’t like it when you started cooking up self-pity. Never mind when you become vengeful, when you want to steal boys’ limbs just because you could use them better, just because they lack your gift for the water. And people are right again, of course. Rob’s right to be sickened, right to jog away from him now and head towards the water. Envy, however, is an instinct with him now — a simple bodily reaction, like goose pimples. The boy he used to be flutters before him sometimes, like a watercolour ghost. Swirls of sunbaked skin against churning, gymnastic water. And he rages at the loss of the sleek, amphibian body.

Rob, though, should understand. Rob knows what Calum lost that day. Two years they trained together, battering up and down the swimming pool lanes every school night, every weekend. Rob knows that Calum was an extraordinary swimmer. He must remember how he glided and surged and arched. A superboy in the water. It’s because he remembers, perhaps, that he says nothing; he drifts away now towards the fringes of coral shore, pretending to scour the demerara sand for shells. And that’s why twenty years ago, for those long eleven months, Rob did not once visit his hospital bed. Calum was a hard act not to follow.

Rob knows all that. He must hear that story now in the shell he lifts to his ear. Other men simply fail. They never become footballers or lead guitarists, never see their names in neon, never even strap a battered backpack around their shoulders. Not enough talent or perseverance. But Calum’s dream was pulled from under him. The world folded its arms and shook its bearded, sea-green head. You’ll never swim again. No Olympics. No applause slapping against wet, white tiles. A crumb of prehistoric rubble got in the way. Forget predetermination or rhyme and reason. Just snap. Snap went his backbone and his life. A parched strand of seaweed underfoot.

Rob places the shell he lifted back onto the beach.

Calum turn and stares again at the boy with the wasted legs. The sea has reached his chest now, but still he plants his stubborn feet upon the seabed, an astronaut visiting a world that does not like him. He won’t offer himself up to the water. He thinks walking the seabed is good enough, brave enough. And perhaps he has a point. The lapping of green water against your skin is enough. Sand and crushed shells pressing into the balls of your feet, fronds of seaweed licking at your hands. These are surely enough.

Calum’s gaze drifts. Rob still paces the sea’s edge. A pair of newly-weds or dirty-weekenders splash one another in the shallow waters. A family, comprised of Mum, Dad and a small red-headed girl, shake the water from their limbs and jog towards their deck chairs, already tasting their chicken sandwiches, fruit cake and lemonade. But the boy, their boy maybe, is suddenly nowhere. Gone. No sign on sea or land.

And then, he’s there. His blonde head bobs above the water. And then he’s gone. The water sucks him underneath. Calum begins to count. One, two, three…and the head reappears. Then under again. The boy can swim, after all. He is treading water. Calum shuts his eyes and drifts back again. The waves close above him. The warm waves, like cat’s tongues, purr against his scalp. His legs begin to float in the salt water. And he pushes himself up, up towards the sun and air and people; he opens his eyes.

The boy is still moving through the water, but his movements are too sudden. Each duck and rise is frantic. His arms flail against the water as though he’s inside a nightmare, fighting. The boy cannot swim; his legs are no use to him. He’s drowning.

Calum scans the beach. Nobody else notices. Rob is strolling farther along the shore; the couple are chasing each other through the water; the family are biting into their doorstep sandwiches. All are absorbed in their perfect day at the beach. Nobody but Calum sees that a boy is drowning.

‘The lad!’ he shouts towards the Mum and Dad. ‘He’s drowning!’

The smiling parents continue to rustle their foil-wrapped sandwiches. They do not hear.

‘Rob!’ he yells.

Rob is too far away; he does not turn.

The boy’s head bursts again through the water.

Calum closes his eyes. The water is lukewarm against his skin. His toes tickle a mane of pea-green seaweed, soft and feathered in the water — the beautiful, transforming water. It’s tempting to stay beneath in this forgiving, underwater cocoon. The immersion in a slower world, where the softer pull of gravity makes you glide and drift rather than tumble and crash and break. Kindness without white uniforms. Massages without paid hands. It is better, perhaps, to stay underwater.

His eyes flash open.

‘Face down,’ he whispers. ‘Trust the water. Breathe out. Push your palms against the water. Face down now. Trust the water…’

Calum imagines the boy’s arms rising through the air. He closes his eyes again. He sees his perfect legs paddle up and down, up and down, steering a course through the sand-misted water.

‘You’re flying, remember. You’re the next superhero. This moment, right now, you’re invincible. Enjoy it…’

Calum hears a clamour in the world above. Legs run; voices cry.

He opens his eyes. Rob is racing into the water. Ten years as a lifeguard. He knows what he’s doing. He’ll reach the boy and save him. Lifeguard saves young boy. Hero. Colossus. Superman. The red-top headlines already rustle in Calum’s hands. They might even describe the tragic accident Rob witnessed as a child, the accident that spurred him on to wear that invisible superhero cloak. And, in the closing lines, they’ll mention that the crushed boyhood friend, the paraplegic, witnessed the rescue and was ‘proud.’

‘Feel the water,’ he continues. ‘Don’t surrender. Trust yourself.’

The boy’s head emerges again. He’s nearer now to the shore. And then the head ducks. His movements are cleaner now. Up and down, push and pull, trusting — just as Calum instructed.

‘Good boy,’ he smiles, closing his eyes again.

He feels his arms surge through the water, pulling apart a glorious blue channel in the waves — a speed tunnel or ‘the aquatic wormhole’ as he called it as a boy. And he remembers again. There’s nothing like the touch of sun-golden water on your ten-year-old limbs. The feathered salt cleaning out your insides. The kindness of levitation. A halfway house between earth and moon. No raised voices or ambulances. No wheeled chairs or cushions. No school reunions or best man speeches. No past. No future. Just now. And that’s what he mourns most of all.

The boy careers out of the sea, refusing Rob’s arms. The mother rushes up to him. The father and little girl scramble after her. The mother drapes a plaid picnic rug around the boy’s shoulders, but he shrugs her off. His younger sister bounds in front of him, sideways, like a crab. She doesn’t say a word. She just stares as though she’s never seen him before, this boy who has just walked on water.

Rob slaps a wet hand on Calum’s shoulder.

‘Found his feet in the end, eh?’ Rob gasps. ‘Did it all on his own, eh?’

Calum nods.

As the boy draws close, Calum turns to look at him. His eyes are so blue they make him want to look up at the sky. The boy breaks into a grin and Calum smiles back as the last drops of water fall from the boy’s shins onto the dry, coral sand. The last soothing drops. Gone.

Calum pulls at his blanket and turns to Rob.

‘Let’s go,’ he says.

Austin Harlingham’s poem rallies against the monotony of the rat race, celebrating the world out there we haven’t yet explored. Illustration by Chris Ede.

Put down the frown my dear, you don’t wear it well.
Instead, pull that heavy head from piled paper,
and let’s punch into the days.

Leave behind the masks, tasks, the loitering clock,
then let us walk, run, sprint into the coruscating blue,
into buses, planes, trams, trains,
tracking city streets and summer lanes,

Let us follow the unbeaten paths of this planet,
filling our ears and our eyes,
with mother tongues, foreign things,
vibrant places that sink into skin.

For these days belong to us my dear;
the world is our wilderness,
its cities our playgrounds,
our very own spinning blank page,
waiting, waiting for us to scribble in our stories.

Faced with losing his eyesight, an elderly man puts his hope in a circus performer with an unconventional gift in Mike Fox’s short story. Illustration by Luis Pinto.

The old man sat bent forward at his kitchen table, his posture rigid from years of labour. He passed a magnifying glass left to right in three inch sweeps across the newspaper spread before him. His lips moved silently, as though only fierce attention could draw meaning from the smudged print. After a while, he folded the paper carefully and sat back, looking within himself. His life had allowed little poetry of thought, but something encouraged him to believe that what he had read could be true.

Next week, the circus would set up again on the common ground just outside his village. Once an annual event, this would be their first visit since the close of war. Gradually, small freedoms were returning. In the years between, a generation had been taken from the village. The women remained but of the men, only the old and very young. His daughter and her little boy had lost a husband and father respectively. They were now his incentive to continue, if he could find a way.

For nearly four decades, like most of the men he knew, he had worked hewing coal in the local pit until his lungs thickened and his spine faltered. But his wits saved him — he was treasurer of the working men’s club, and could calculate figures as fast as anyone. He was moved above ground to prepare wages for the men he had worked alongside, or those that were left. Everyone in the village was a survivor of some sort.

But within the last year, the rows of numbers had begun to coalesce. Shapes that were once distinct now had to be prised apart. It hadn’t gone unnoticed that the work was taking him longer. Any inaccuracy could quickly lead to discontent amongst men, no longer young, who bought livelihood through the daily pain of their bodies. He had to find a way to heal his eyes or be laid off.

He had heard about others in the same position; tales of ether, cocaine, and shaky, inexperienced hands that could pierce him into sightlessness. Now, if he could believe in magic, or something like it, there might be an alternative.

And so, from the post office he bought two tickets for the circus, and prepared his strategy.

‘He’s not been still since you told him,’ his daughter said, when he called to collect his grandson the following week. He saw the boy’s excitement, and for a moment he felt it too.

As they walked out into the dark evening, the little boy took his grandfather’s hand tactfully, as his mother had told him, and they made their way together. The old man trod carefully but with purpose, each being a guide to the other.

‘Will there be a fire eater?’ the little boy asked.

‘I expect so,’ he replied, and realised he had given no thought to the other acts.

For a moment his grandson skipped from one foot to the other, but then remembered his role, and walked as soberly as his excitement allowed. As they approached the marquee, they were greeted by more and more people walking in the same direction. Everyone in the audience would be known to them. When they arrived and showed their tickets, a steward directed them to seats in the front row.

‘Grandpa wants to be able to see,’ the boy thought.

When the audience had settled, a ringmaster strutted out before them. He wore a polished top hat, crimson tail coat, knee length leather boots and flashing brass buttons; a peacock circling before the grey and darned villagers.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘tonight I have brought you magnificence. I will present you with the utmost variety, I will offer you the strangest sights, and physical feats beyond your power to imagine. I must ask you to believe what you see, as I promise it is all real. My colleagues and our friends from the animal kingdom, will entertain, engross and enthral you. Please open your minds and your hearts. I guarantee an evening that will change your belief in what is possible in this world.’

He swept the audience with his eyes.

‘I will now introduce to you our world famous aerialists. Please welcome them and then maintain silence, as their skills demand the utmost concentration, and they perform without safety nets.’

The lighting changed and taut, muscular bodies plunged from perches high in the marquee. They flickered, twisted and flew between their trapezes, as the audience breathed together in stifled gasps. Then the air cleared and, announced by a drum role, one of the tumblers walked a high wire, juggling small orange globes. With each step, the wire bulged beneath his splayed feet, and the little boy’s legs moved involuntarily as he watched. As he reached the other side, catching the globes with a flourish, relief burst out as applause, and the small troupe slid down the ropes, bowing elaborately to all parts of the surrounding audience.

Both the boy and his grandfather had been lost in the sights above them. But now the smell of sawdust, pipe smoke and fear-tainted sweat brought the old man back to himself, and to his purpose that evening. He looked on with growing impatience as clowns, midgets and acrobats, horses, lions and elephants performed and mesmerised those around him. An illusionist, who lifted and balanced more and more Windsor chairs until he looked like a vast wooden porcupine, briefly took him back into wonder.

Then men in tight vests ran on to assemble a stand bearing a large circular target and, without introduction, Sliding Joe Paine walked slowly to the centre of the ring, dragging a straightened leg.

He remembered the article in his local paper. ‘It is said that Sliding Joe can ride the wildest stallion and put a parting in your hair from twenty feet with a single flick of his knife. But throughout Montana, he is famous as a medicine man. Native Americans are known to have the strongest eyes in the world and, amongst his other accomplishments, Joe is reputed to have learned techniques from the Sioux that enable him to heal eyes that are sore or losing vision.’

One of the acrobats cartwheeled out after him and braced her back against the target, spreading her arms. From the front row, the little boy could clearly see her trembling. To a succession of drum rolls, Joe Paine flung knives fearsomely close to her head and torso, each hit making the target shudder. When she finally stepped away, the audience whistled and beat their palms together, glad to release their tension. She bowed and left the ring with the elegance of a gymnast. Just as she reached the curtain, the boy saw her put her hand to her mouth, as though she was about to vomit.

For a few moments, Joe Paine pulled two pistols from the holsters on his hips, and spun them around his fingers and into the air like a juggler. It was as though he commanded the obedience of any object he touched. Then a riderless mare was led into the ring and began to canter around the perimeter. Joe remained in the centre throwing shapes with a lariat until, with a deft flick, he spun its noose around the horse’s neck and drew the animal towards him. When it came near, he mounted it with a powerful movement of his arms and circled the ring bareback, his stiff leg pointing askew.

As he came past them, the little boy saw his grandfather, with a sudden urgent gesture, thrust a sheaf of pound notes out towards the performer and point towards his eyes. The cowboy looked at him briefly and nodded. He finished circling, doffed his Stetson in all directions, and rode the horse from the ring.

The ringmaster reappeared.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘your evening’s entertainment is almost complete. Please welcome back all of our cast and crew. We bow before you in gratitude for the generous appreciation you have shown us tonight.’

The ring flooded again with jugglers and clowns, animals and their trainers, and all the other circus acts, swirling in choreographed patterns before the audience. The individual entertainers stood in the centre, bending low with flourishing hands. Acrobats cartwheeled and pirouetted around the edge of the ring, until one, twisting elegantly as she passed, dropped a piece of paper in the old man’s lap.

‘What does it say?’ he asked his grandson.

‘It says “come and find me after the show” grandpa,’ the boy said.

The applause died down and the ring cleared.

‘There’s someone I have to see before we go home,’ the old man said.

‘Are we going to find the acrobat?’ the boy asked.

‘No son, we aren’t looking for her,’ the old man said, ‘it’s just some business I have to attend to.’

They waited until the crowd cleared, then went outside. The old man took the boy’s hand and they walked towards a line of painted wooden wagons. They passed a midget struggling to carry a large pallet.

‘Where will I find Joe Paine?’ the old man asked him.

‘He’s in the fancy wagon at the end,’ the midget replied, gasping at his exertion.

‘Should we help him with that, grandpa?’ the boy asked, looking back.

‘Not now son,’ the old man said, touching the boy’s hair, ‘but it’s a good thought.’

They reached the heavily decorated wagon. Its door was open and Joe Paine stood inside, a thick mug in his hand.

‘Mr Paine,’ the old man said, ‘I’ve come to ask for your help.’

Joe Paine was still in his cowboy gear but shorn of the ring’s mystique, he seemed smaller. He gestured to a roughly hewn colonial chair.

‘I know why you’re here sir,’ he said. ‘You’re not the first. Sit there and lie back as far as you can.’

As he bent over the old man he saw the little boy flinch.

‘No one’s going to come to any harm, son,’ he said.

The old man felt calloused fingers in his eye socket, holding his eyelids open. He felt sharp bristles against his cheek, and smelled whisky breath. Then a tongue, hot and doused in alcohol, caressed first one eye then the other with unexpected tenderness. He felt saliva run like tears down the side of his face. Then Joe Paine lent back, spat through the open door, and it was over.

‘Stay away from sunlight for a little while,’ he said.

The old man sat up. For a moment, he seemed to be looking into distance, as though his gaze could take him beyond the restraint of his life. Then, blinking, he reached into his pocket and held out the pound notes.

The cowboy pressed them back into the old man’s hand.

‘Pray for my soul,’ he said.

The little boy, looking on, suddenly understood what he had witnessed.

His grandfather took the cowboy’s hand and bent to kiss it. They left without further words.

As they walked home, the night air was cold and full of energy. Images danced in the boy’s mind. He sensed new strength in his grandfather’s step, and power in the hand that gripped his. He could still picture the aerialists, the acrobats and the fast, undeviating knives. Surely anything was possible in this world? As they continued to walk, he kept glancing up at his grandfather, searching his eyes for light.

Inspired by a photo of a stranger on a friend’s wall, Sharon Lask Munson’s poem considers the nature of our relationships to our ancestors. Illustration by Yaimel Lopez.

Our children, of course,
retain memories — loving or not.

Grandchildren might remember
the pipe smell of Dunhill London

or sugar cookie dough,
rolled out on a kitchen counter.

For great-grandchildren,
a framed portrait

tucked away in the linen closet
is merely that of a stranger,

something to be added
to garage sale odds and ends

along with the chipped Wedgwood
no one in the family wants.

A great-great grandchild,
rummaging in a local junk shop

might spy a familiar likeness, framed —
heart-shaped face, jutting chin, widow’s peak,

something about the mouth, the jaw
and on a whim, claim the old canvas,

hang it beside a corner bookcase
filled with used novels bought in bulk

to make a new home ageless.

A man tries to unshroud the mystery of his parents and his past in Ty Landers’ short story, set in the American South. Illustration by Bartosz Kosowski.

We got out of the car and walked up a little gravel driveway that led to an overgrown foundation where a house had been.

‘Son,’ my father said, ‘this is my hometown.’

He paused and surveyed the small plot of land that had been mostly reclaimed by the scrub brush that surrounded it. There were some railroad tracks thirty or forty yards from where we were standing and I could imagine pots and pans rattling in any house unfortunate enough to be situated in that spot.

‘Everything that I can’t explain about myself…everything that makes me the way I am…can be traced back here…to this house.’

It was quiet. We had been on the road for a long time and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I should say anything at all or if this was one of those times when silence said more than filling an uncomfortable space with nervous words.

My father started to cry. It was the first time I had ever seen him cry and it scared me. I had seen his dark side. I had seen him mean before, and drunk plenty of times. In those days when I saw his ancient silver flask peeking out of the pocket of his work shirt I knew I would probably be sleeping in the car or the shed that night while he stalked around the house looking for something to break or scream at.

I didn’t question these parts of him or the things he did, didn’t question why we moved around so much – Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, and now Alabama. I didn’t even question why we changed our names every few years, why we had no family, or why I didn’t even know my mother’s name. My father wasn’t a communicator. He wasn’t the type of man who let you in or filled in the blank spaces.

I couldn’t look at him. I thought I might turn to stone if I did, and hearing him try to contain the sobbing made me want to leave that place, to get back on the road and start trying to forget any of this had ever happened.

Summer bugs, unknown to me, purred and snapped in the tall grass all around us. Sweat poured down my back in runnels and my clothes were tacky against my skin. He gathered himself but continued to breathe heavily. He put his weathered hand on the back of my neck while his chest hitched and eventually settled into a steady rhythm.

We got back into the car, pulled out of the little gravel driveway, and picked up the highway after weaving in and out of roads I had never seen before and would never find again.

We drove into a sunset that looked like a watercolor painting by a small child with no concept of subtlety; a riot of pinks and oranges that fused together in a gaudy show that pulled us west. After some time my father broke the silence. ‘They got a rocket in Huntsville, the real deal, one of them that they sent to the moon back in the sixties.’

‘Is that right?’ I asked, looking out of the window at the passing countryside.

‘Oh yeah, once them Nazi scientists realized they were licked and was going to lose the war, they gave themselves up to our boys. The army snatched up as many of those egg heads as they could with all their plans, and schematics and such, then shipped them over here to build rockets for us.’ He readjusted his hat. ‘That’s what put Huntsville on the map. I think you’re really going to like it.’

‘If they were Nazi’s, then how come they didn’t get in trouble after the war for the things that went on in them camps?’ I asked.

My father thought about this, one hand on the steering wheel and the other rubbing the stubble on his chin. ‘Son, sometimes your potential outweighs your misdeeds.’

The sun went down and the stars came out. We drove on without saying much else. I thought my father might talk about my mother, or maybe tell me about my grandparents for the first time, or anything about where we came from. But he didn’t. He seemed to have moved on to Nazi’s, spaceflight, and Wernher von Braun. I got the feeling that if he was ever going to talk, it would have been at the end of that little gravel driveway, mired in all that grass and a symphony of bug songs, peering out over the wreck of a house that he considered the genesis point of his peculiarity.

That night I had a dream. I was walking down a long hallway in a castle somewhere and the hallway kept pushing me deeper and deeper into the interior of that strange place. Along the corridor there were these huge Nazi flags billowing in sinister dream light. They were the deepest red I had ever seen with their dark black swastikas standing out in their menacing white circles. I walked until I came to a huge circular room. The walls were covered with the same ominous red flags from the hallway and they stretched up into darkness. The ceiling and roof were gone and I could see an endless sea of stars. My father was there, in a brown uniform expertly tailored to his slender frame, and he held a baby in his arms. In the center of the room there was a little rocket that looked like it should be sitting out in front of a grocery store, giving jerky rides to kids for a quarter a pop. My father placed the baby gently into the little rocket and then stood there silently watching it. It reminded me of the scene in Superman where Marlon Brando put baby Superman into a sharp crystal pod and blasted him to safety in Kansas before his home planet was destroyed. It was just like that except Superman’s dad was my father and also, a Nazi.

In my dream the little rocket blasted off and my father vanished in rocket smoke, flame, and the eerie green dungeon light of the castle. The rocket peeled off into the sky in this drippy orange arch and I was able to follow after it, chasing it through the slipstream. Then I woke up. I never caught it and I never knew exactly where it was going. Maybe Kansas, or some other backwater – hopefully somewhere safe.

My father started a job in Huntsville doing maintenance at a tire plant and we never talked about the trip to his hometown again. I finished high school there and we settled into the first period of stability that I could remember. I made some friends, dated a few girls here and there, but I could never really get into the habit of letting people get close. The urge to change my name and move to a new town came over me regularly and I assumed that was either a hereditary trait my father passed down to me, or something I learned from our nomadic lifestyle.

I remember asking him once why we had moved around so much when I was younger. I expected him to say something about work being difficult to find or something along those lines, but he just sat in his old chair staring at the fire over a glass of bourbon and half melted ice and said ‘restlessness’. I didn’t press the issue any further.

He had a heart attack when he was sixty and died instantly, hanging halfway out of a machine that he had probably worked on a thousand times. The funeral was simple and cheap because we didn’t have any family that I was aware of, and my father’s only acquaintances were the guys he worked with, the men who worked at the liquor store he always went to, and me. I didn’t even bother putting an obituary in the paper. I sat down to write one but realized I didn’t know enough about him to make it worth the effort.

Cleaning out his house was easy. I called the Salvation Army to come and take everything they could fit onto the truck. While going through my father’s bedroom, I found a shoebox in his closet where he kept his important papers. Mixed in with his social security card and his ancient birth certificate – different names on both but names I was familiar with – I found a picture of a basketball team. Blue Pond High School, Blue Pond, Alabama, Class of ’68, was written on the back in faded pencil. On the front, kneeling down in the first row with a crew cut, but still looking very much like me, was my father. There was no name on the picture but I would have known him as easily as I would have known my own face. I took the box and the picture with me and looked at it for a long time that night. It was somehow comforting to know that he had been young once, I had proof of that, and I knew the name of the town where we had spent that brief and awkward summer afternoon when he had almost opened up his personal vault of secrets.

The photo sat on my kitchen table and I stopped to look at it every time I passed it for about two weeks after he died. It drew me in time after time as I did little chores around the house. I couldn’t get over how young he looked and how much I looked like him, or how much he looked like me. It was nice to have a glimpse into the past he never spoke about, to have some insight, and it left me wanting more.

So, I got up one morning, grabbed the photo of my father, and punched Blue Pond, Alabama into the GPS on my phone. I also grabbed the flask that my father had carried with him the entire time I had known him; one of the only items of his I had kept besides the picture. I filled it with bourbon in his honor, and drove south into the deep green countryside.

I arrived in my father’s hometown at about midday. The better part of three hours were spent driving aimlessly around, hoping some landmark would stand out and jog my memory enough to take me back to the empty lot my father had placed so much importance on. I didn’t know what I hoped to find when I got there, I just felt an overwhelming urge to get there. Something was pulling me back and I had to see it again.

There was an old walk up burger stand called Dairy Dream at a four-way stop at the end of the main street that ran through town. It was the first landmark I remembered seeing from our trip because it had a sign depicting a gorgeous blonde genie emerging from a lamp, cheeseburger in one hand and a soft serve ice cream cone in the other.

There was a gas station beside the burger stand and I showed the photo to the lady working behind the counter, but she had never seen my father and didn’t remember ever hearing his name. I sat on the hood of my car outside the Dairy Dream and drank from the flask my father had carried with him for years, trying to get my bearings. When I ran out of realistic solutions, I decided to let fate sort it out. I placed the flask on the hood of the car, spun it like I was playing a game of spin the bottle, and decided I would go in whatever direction it pointed. It came to rest pointing south down the road that headed away from the tiny oasis of civilization there at the four-way stop. It felt right. I can’t explain how or why or what force was behind it, but I knew it was the way I needed to go. I repeated the trick several times over the next forty-five minutes or so. Every time I would come to a turn, I got out of the car and spun my father’s flask on the hood without questioning the logic behind it.

I drove down a long country road, surrounded on all sides by farmland that was broken up by sporadic stands of trees here and there. The road ran parallel to a set of railroad tracks and upon seeing them, I knew I was headed in the right direction. Despite a history of skepticism regarding supernatural intervention, I knew that my father’s flask had led me there. Eventually, I found myself pulling into the faint remains of an old gravel driveway that led up to the foundation of the old house, now firmly buried beneath the wild brush that ran up to the railroad tracks.

There was a house across the street that hadn’t been there when my father and I had visited years before. An old man leaned against a fencepost while having a heated conversation with a big black bull standing in a pasture, shoulder deep in yellow wildflowers. He stopped talking to the bull, watched me pull into the driveway, and then resumed berating the huge animal.

I got out of the car and stood there in a daze. I couldn’t believe I had found it, I couldn’t believe the flask had brought me back. Now that I had found it, I didn’t know what to do there. The flask was still in my hand. I had been holding it like a talisman of some sort since deciding to surrender my fate to it, and I decided that all I could do was make a toast. I held the flask up to the overgrown foundation of the house and to the railroad tracks beyond it. ‘This is for you Dad, thanks for bringing me back. I wish I had been able to…I wish I had known more…’ I paused and couldn’t think how to finish. ‘I just wish I had known you better.’ I tipped the flask back and enjoyed the burn down my throat.

‘You lost?’ the old man said walking across the road, and shaking me out of my daze.

‘Lost?’ I said. ‘Kind of, just making a pit stop.’ I shook the flask at him.

‘Son, you sound like a man after my own heart.’

I offered him the flask and he took it, clapping me on the back and showing a huge friendly grin.

‘We don’t get many day drinkers out here.’ He took a long pull from the flask and then shook his head from side to side like a dog just emerging from a pond.

‘Woo! What is that…kerosene?’

‘Sorry,’ I said laughing, ‘It’s my Dad’s bourbon and it’s a bit rough.’

‘Well, it’s better than nothing. My wife found the bottle I kept in the shed and I ain’t had the balls to replace it yet.’ He shook his head again and passed the flask back to me. ‘Holy Roller that wife of mine, she does not abide the bottle.’

‘Is this your land? I didn’t mean to trespass.’

‘Nah, this ain’t my land, belongs to the Shields family. They own about a thousand acres, this here is the ass end of it. Hell, they probably forgot they own this.’ He leaned against my car.

‘Do you know anything about the people that lived here?’ I asked, handing him the flask again.

‘Well, this house burned to the ground, awful really, I guess it was the late seventies, early eighties. There was a young couple that lived here, had a baby. House caught fire, some kind of gas line thing or hot water heater…pilot light maybe went out and the old boy tried to relight it.’ The old man hit the flask again and looked at the ground, sucking air between his teeth to help with the bite of the bourbon.

‘Was anybody in the house, anybody get hurt?’ I asked.

The old man looked around at the fields that were surrounding them. ‘You know, back then, there wasn’t much around here,’ he laughed a little, ‘not that there’s much out here now but back then there was even less out here and I guess the fire burned for a long time before anybody…the fire department or whoever…could get out here.’ He handed the flask back to me and then hooked his thumbs in the straps of his overalls. ‘They found enough of the girl to know it was her but they never found that old boy or that baby.’ He made a sympathetic grunting sound, ‘breaks your heart don’t it?’

We sat in silence for a little while as the wind pushed itself around in the treetops.

‘What’s your interest in this place?’ he asked after some time. ‘If you’re thinking about buying out here or getting into farming I’d like to talk you out of it.’ He laughed his good-natured laugh but my mind was already a million miles away.

I had a hard time finding the words. Hundreds of questions swam around in my head and I wanted to sit down. I thought about my dream. The castle, the baby in the rocket, and watching my father disintegrate under a blanket of smoke and flames. I thought about the number of times that we had moved for no reason and how desensitized I had become to assuming a new name and a new identity.

‘What’s my interest in this place?’ I asked the old man absently. ‘I think that…everything I can’t explain about myself…everything that makes me the way I am…can be traced back here.’

A hope-filled poem by Katherine Venn, referencing the slowness that exists before a major change in one’s life. Illustration by Silvia Stecher.

You’re used to slowness, how most things take their time to shift
from one thing to the next: the way leaves emerge like mist
round trees, unfold into magnificence, then fade and fall,
and gently drift against the mossed garden wall;

the way life gathers shades and textures to itself,
the slow accretions, like dust settling on a bookshelf,
or water collecting, after each soft rain, in a water butt,
the way things drip and pool, spread slowly, silt up;

but sometimes things are different. It’s as if an ocean liner
had sailed right down your street and brassily come to harbour
outside your front door, and holds there, waiting, the sound of faint
music spilling from its deck, your face all astonishment

that this is here to take you beyond what you thought you knew,
delivering the horizon, a gift, to you.

A woman uncovers a curious truth as she explores the house she’s been gifted by a perfect stranger. Short story by Christine Burns, illustration by Elina V.G.

At first glance, the house looked inconspicuous, but who knew what lay inside.

Maybe I should have waited for the daylight, but as the new custodian of the key, it was burning a hole in my pocket. Mr Bartlett had tried to find parting words befitting the situation but, being as bemused as me, my usually articulate solicitor had been tongue-tied.

My hand shook as I turned the key in the lock. Crossing the threshold was a terrifying prospect. Mr Bartlett had been unable to help me form any expectations, given he knew no more than I did. The dull legal terminology of the will hadn’t provided a portrait of the previous owner. The executor had been unwilling to meet or provide any explanation as to why Laurel House had been gifted to me.

The handle turned easily but I had to use my weight to inch the door open. In the dingy glow, I glimpsed the barricade. A stack of newspapers stood shoulder height. As I shoved the door, they formed a landslide and a time-bleached copy of Today slapped at my feet. The face of a long forgotten politician stared up at me. Curious, I thought, like Alice going down the rabbit hole.

I called out a ‘hello’. Looking back, I have no idea why. I’m not sure who I thought could be there. Mr Bartlett had done his research and, according to the records, my benefactor had no offspring or spouse.

I had to squeeze past the stacks of papers that lined the hallway. I dreaded to think how much stuff had been hoarded.

The first room on the right was the lounge. It was the strangest thing to walk into a room that looked as though it had been inhabited only a moment ago. A newspaper folded on the settee, a potted ivy on the windowsill, even an empty mug on the little table. Unlike the entrance to the house, this room was neat and tidy. Comfortably lived in.

Nobody had been here to tidy a life away. Mr Bartlett had asked me if I wanted the house cleared but of course, I didn’t. Rifling through personal possessions was the only means I had to learn about the man who had left his home to me, a perfect stranger.

Some people say momentous events have a dreamlike, hazy quality. Not for me, I can remember every little detail with absolute clarity. Like the dust motes dancing when I turned on a lamp. Like the faint smell of liquorice. Like the blanketed dog basket next to the settee, which made me feel so sad I had to leave the room.

Across the hall was the bathroom. The one room in a house that lets you peer into another’s psyche. Not immaculate, but far from disgusting, this space too contained the intimate detritus of life. A toothbrush, an old- fashioned razor and a badger hair brush. A pink towel dropped in the bath, left to languish.

I remember that a wave of panic came over me there. This was someone else’s territory, someone else’s life. What right did I have to wander around like a tourist in an exhibition. I had to splash cold water on my wrists to cool down and calm my pulse.

Everything around me fitted the profile Mr Bartlett had given to me. My benefactor had been an elderly man; eighty-two, to be precise, according to the death certificate. He’d written his last will and testament twelve months before he had died which showed him to be a meticulous man. He’d left astonishingly clear instructions for his funeral. He’d even paid for it in advance. This house was him. Apart from the errant towel, and the wall of newspapers, everything was in order. The neat line of toiletries. The careful white brushstrokes on the back of the glossy door. I had never known the owner of this house but, standing there, I pictured him as a kind, studious man, who liked his own company and routine.

The next room made my heart freeze. I had expected a bedroom, and maybe it was, but this room held no furniture to reveal its identity. But the walls were decorated. Decorated with hundreds upon hundreds of photographs that reached from the skirting board to the ceiling. My mind, fuelled by tabloid frenzy, went into overdrive. I am ashamed now to say that I thought the images would be of a perverse nature. Perhaps, in some ways, they were, but not in the ways I was thinking as the moment unfurled.

At first, I was too scared to look at them, and hovered in the doorway. But this was my house now, and I needed to know what had gone on here, if anything. I can still hear the creak of the bare floorboards as I tiptoed towards the gallery — a memory that is tattooed on my brain.

The first photo was blurred, but I could make out the view of a street; cars parked along the kerb and a stretch of green on the other side. The next image was clearer and of the same subject matter, an everyday scene of a residential street. Cars, houses, people, or rather, one person, who wore a mac that was just like mine. Who held a handbag, just like mine. In the neighbouring photo, the woman was closer to the camera. Her dress could be seen now, a quite unique cerise with white polka dots — just like the one I had bought from a vintage fayre. And those sunglasses, wayfarers, just like the pair my friend had bought for me. I scoured the photos around me, frantic and with bile rising in my throat. They were all of me, every single one. Me walking to work, me doing my weekly shop, me meeting my friend after work. Me, me, me, me, me.

A poem by Gavin Bryce, inspired by the miraculous first few hours of his son’s life and its maritime parallels. Illustration by Ricardo Bessa.

When you burst the air headfirst, it scattered down
your throat and set you going with a gasp,
the sails of your lungs kicked open
by this sudden ocean blast, like a ship
surprised and lurched away downwind,
scrambling to bridle up the dashing air.

I listen to your breath tumbling out-in
unevenly – then stop. ‘Not used to breathing yet.’
I lean over you, my breath like prayer.

I’d seen my father die, his breath undressed
in front of us, his sails of skin and bone,
the riggings of his blood sighing, then still –

but you breathe, and breathe again, and now you’re held:

a gust caught full in broad, new sails.

A swift inhalation of every page from our recently launched Hopeissue, condensed into a 16 second animated GIF for optimum sensory overload.

In spite of the digital world’s many innovations, it’s still not that easy to get a feel for a magazine online. Nothing really beats the quick thumb flick that takes place at the newsstand or within the walls of a finely arranged bookshop.

That hasn’t stopped us trying though. With the arrival of our 16th issue just under two weeks ago, we’ve now created a 16 second animation that takes you from the front cover to the back cover in thumb-flicking mimicry.

Have a watch above and if you would like to sweep through the new issue in real, tangible form, buy a single issue for £6 + p&p or subscribe from £10. Subscribers will receive The Hope Issue as their 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.

A short story by Eleanor Pilcher, based on the adventures of an aspiring WW1 reporter who was the only British female to make it to the Western Front. Illustration by Roland Hildel.

He arrived by car, no bigger than a twelve-year-old child, standing in the street distorted by the rain like a watermarked photograph. I stared at him through the bars in the window and waited for him to spot me. He didn’t.

Later, when he joined me in the mess room, he made a performance of dragging out his chair from under the desk, slamming down a folder, which he never opened, already inclined to believe I would tell nothing but lies.

I sat, a picture of unloveliness, coddled and wrapped in padding and a dirtied uniform, green in the face and thinning for the first time in years, from exposure, semi-starvation and fear. I was exhausted from my interrogations by men, who all thought I was a German spy.

‘Your name?’

‘Dorothy Lawrence.’

‘How old are you, Dorothy?’

‘I’m twenty years old.’ I sighed and crossed my arms, leaning towards him so as to not appear afraid or off-put by his strange mannerisms.

This was my sixth cross-examination, my fingernails were bitten to the nub and days-old sweat covered me. Breathing was an effort through the exhaustion my whole body felt. I could barely hold myself up and stare at the little man; answer his questions honestly or even keep my own eyes open.

‘How did you come to be at the front, madam?’

‘I travelled. By bike.’

‘Without any identification of who you were, except a falsified passport and a note, no doubt written by yourself, claiming that a ‘Denis Smith’ was on special leave. Is that correct?’

‘I had a sauf conduit as well. From Paris.’ He nodded, his hands clasped together on the table.

‘Yes.’

‘It was signed, by a French maire.’ He made a ‘hmm’ sound, never letting his piercing stare falter.

‘I’m telling the truth sir, I’m no spy.’

‘Impossible.’

‘Please, let me explain…’ I began.

‘Nonsense!’

I shook my head and tried not to laugh. In a moment of madness I saw myself and this little man and it seemed so funny. Me, ragged and stiflingly pungent, with him smelling like Ivory soap, sitting snug in his jacket with perfectly combed eyebrows and a beauty spot on his cheek.

He must have led a life of luxury going from interrogation to interrogation to break men into spilling their secrets. But I was a woman, without a secret, just a story. He couldn’t break me, not after what I had seen. Graves upon graves, men sitting in the holes of mud smoking and crying, beating each other for paper to write to their loved ones. Rats on pikes, blood swirling in rain puddles and the constant drumming of the ground being beaten by shells and gunfire and cordite.

‘OK. Start from the beginning and explain yourself. If you have nothing to hide, explain!’

I cleared my throat and nodded, no longer hiding my smile.

‘I went…I wanted to be a war correspondent, sir, so I went from paper to paper begging them to let me prove myself.’

‘Where was this?’

‘London, sir. I’m from London.’

‘Carry on.’

‘They wouldn’t let me, but I wanted to prove myself, sir, I wanted to show that I could do one better than those big men with their cars, credentials and money. So, I sold everything I owned and booked passage to France. I went to Creil and learnt what I could, hoping to get to the front to report what I saw.’

‘Which is illegal.’

I shrugged and looked around the room absent-mindedly. I knew full-well why no reporters were getting to the front. I had lived in the trenches and seen with my own eyes what the papers back home were banned from broadcasting. It wasn’t just the interrogations that were stopping me from sleeping.

‘I didn’t learn much in Creil, sir,’ I said, ignoring him. ‘So I got a sauf conduit and went to Senlis and–’

‘Which Senlis?’

‘P-pardon?’

‘There are three places called Senlis in this country. To which Senlis did you go?’

I had no idea there was more than one. I was dumbstruck and too tired to think. ‘I’m telling the truth,’ was all I could say.

‘Which…Senlis?’ He began to smile thinking that he had discovered the proof to my falsehoods. I began to stutter, unable to think of a coherent answer, my memory dirtied with the horrors I had seen since.

He shook his head and began to laugh under his breath, still staring at me. I looked to the floor and blinked away the tears, feeling like my stomach was shrinking in size and I was about to vomit the meagre contents.

‘Who helped you?’

‘What?’

He sat forward, resting his elbows on the edge of the table and clasped his hands together. ‘Who helped you? You didn’t do this alone, you’re a woman.’

I scoffed. ‘No one helped me.’

‘That’s a lie,’ he said, prodding the folder and pushing it towards me. ‘You’ve said so before, it says so in here. Men helped you.’

‘Two soldiers in Paris,’ I said defiantly. ‘English soldiers.’

He sat back and huffed.

‘I went up to them and said ‘hullo boys’ and told them what I wanted to do; to get to the frontline. They agreed to help straight away, got me everything I needed: clothes, a haircut, some training, and then they sent me in the direction of Bethune.’ He said nothing, but continued to smile inanely. ‘They just wanted to help me.’

‘And the other?’

‘Other?’

‘The other soldier. The one you refer to as Sir Galahad.’

I smiled and began to chuckle again, not attempting to stop since I saw how much it irritated him.

‘You should write some of this down, Dorothy.’

‘Dorothy? I said you should write some of this down,’ I repeated, waiting for her to continue speaking, but my suggestion had interrupted her train of thought and immediately her milky eyes closed and her mouth shut.

‘Dorothy?’ I pressed, but she did not stir.

I had an inclination that she had not realised she was talking aloud, and her mind had wandered. In my stupidity I had interrupted her, bringing her back to the present.

She was not in a mess room in France in 1915. She was not surrounded by plain walls, chipped tables and paraffin lamps. Her uniform was not khaki but cotton, an old cotton nightdress, stained yet clean.

‘Can you tell me anymore?’

She sat silently.

I sighed and gave up. I pushed my chair back into the corner of the room, quietly, taking her medical folder from the floor and placing it in the crook of my elbow as I picked up my coat and leather briefcase. I briefly stopped as I opened the door, thinking that I had seen a flicker of movement, but the only movement was the constant tremor of her hands against the threadbare armrests of the armchair that she sat in. I looked around me, at the sparsely decorated bedroom with its brick and board bookcase and bowing bed, but there was nothing else to see besides an old woman with mottled hands and drooping lips. I pulled the door shut, listening for the click of the old Victorian catch and then took my keys from my pocket and locked the door. Ritually, I placed her medical file in the slot beside her door and proceeded to complete filling in the blackboard, which hung on a piece of string in the middle of the door, with the relevant information needed for the night porter on duty.

DOROTHY LAWRENCE, Aged 76, Psychosis; hourly obs. Dr. I. Bennett.

I sighed and readjusted my grip on my briefcase, all the while thinking of Miss Dorothy Lawrence, the doddery old lady who liked to tell tales. Lately, she lingered in my mind long after I left, sitting in the centre, her hands clasped in her lap and her icy eyes piercing me with a look similar to the one that my Grandmother used to give me before telling me to clear my plate or to stop fidgeting.

My original idea of Dorothy, from when I was just a trainee psychiatrist, was one of an insane old woman with a compulsion to lie. But she had grown on me as a person, thanks to her constant tales of World War I adventures, and I was finding myself viewing her ‘insanity’ as less of a condition and more of a stalemate description of her tendencies to tell stories. The stories are so fantastical — unbelievable of course, but well-rehearsed — that even I find myself slipping into them as I stare at her decaying in her chair. She can remember the street names of Albert in France, and how far she biked over them to reach the trenches. She can recount the names of the men that, supposedly, helped her; the ones from Creil, Paris and Amiens. She can even tell me how heavy the footfalls of the men that came to arrest her were, although I believe she is confusing these men with the men that came to section her in 1925. Yet, she has no recollection of those men, or that she is in Friern Hospital. She still believes that she is in France, despite the fact that the war is over and there has been another since.

I searched the interior of my briefcase for a cigarette, suddenly desperate for one, and lit up as I reached the front doors. I stopped to button my coat once I reached the green of the drive, my cigarette hanging from my lips, as I observed my surroundings with morbid reflection. The hospital itself, at least the building, was ironically beautiful. There are endless arches over doorways and windows and endless windows in which no one is ever seen. Like Buckingham Palace, everything is shuffled inwards at a safe distance from the public. There are beautiful flanking campaniles in which no bells have ever rung, some raised porticoes left bare, hip-roofed turrets and tarnished gold bricks, surrounded by forsythia. It looks like a Tsar’s palace without the snow.

I wondered if Dorothy could remember it, the sight of the hospital. Or, if like many, the sight had driven ice into her mind and numbed her senses so that she truly forgot where she was. In 1925, when she was committed, according to her notes, she had broken her own wrist trying to escape the grasp of the nurses who dragged her from the car to the hospital. Such terror and ire had long since disappeared within her, along with her mind it seemed.

There is a tray of food left for me on a collapsible table, along with a newspaper that states the date is December 1st 1963. I push both away from me.

I miss meat, the taste of succulently roasted meat. I would rather eat a can of bully beef on dog biscuits than this slop that they serve me in this prison cell.

My mouth waters when I think of the stew that my friend, Sapper Tommy Dunn, cooked me whilst he hid me off the road by the trenches. I can see him now, cooking up a storm on a hotplate on the muddy ground of a burnt-out cottage, sitting on a makeshift mattress of a rotting eiderdown, dog blankets and an overcoat.

‘Eat up, love,’ he said.

As soon as I met Sapper Dunn I knew that he could be trusted. I had approached the frontline a few days beforehand and Sapper Dunn had stopped me on the road, all bluster, red hair and alabaster skin. He championed my cause of getting to the front and reporting the truth to the masses from the outset, and he was the exact kind of man I needed to help me get away with it.

Imagine it, a twenty-year-old girl, with a boy’s haircut and this bemused fatherly forty-something-year-old man, with pictures of his three daughters in his breast pocket, sitting on the floor in a muddy cottage, one mile from the front.

‘Yer the only one that made it through,’ he said with pride. ‘Someone can finally tell them what’s ‘appenin’ ‘ere. And truthfully. That’s important!’ His shaking hands gripped mine and shook them roughly.

He packed me away in the hollowed cottage off the main route to the front. Each night I fell asleep listening to a chorus of cracks and booms and rapid fire. It hardened my disposition to report the truth, but also weakened my temperament considerably. My hands never stopped shaking.

Sapper Dunn got me into the trenches without so much as an odd glance from another soldier. But with each day I stayed there my nerve was driven away by the grinding of the earth, like a mason’s mallet and chisel to my soul. Every time I fell asleep I woke to the bang of destroyed earth. When it wasn’t a bang it was a cry, then a whistle, then screams and calls for stretcher bearers. I saw men fly up into the sky and fall back as a heap of blood, guts and bones.

In a moment of cowardice, perhaps madness, I took out all my papers, bar the sauf conduit and my special notice, and burnt them. I feared for the safety of my soldier friends, who would have been revealed upon my discovery.

‘Tommy…I need…I need you to tell them that there’s a woman in the trenches.’ He did not protest. ‘I need you to send them to the cottage. I’ll hide out in the cottage.’ He nodded and squeezed my shaking hands in his own. ‘Thank you, Sir Galahad,’ I mumbled as he went to fetch a sergeant.

I sat on the floor of the cottage, facing the wall, rocking and holding my knees, shivering with exhaustion as a knock came on the door. I turned, expecting to see three officers coming to arrest me in the name of the King, but instead a man in a white coat entered.

‘Good morning, Dorothy,’ he said. I didn’t recognise him, so I sat back in my chair and fiddled with the spoon that sat in the slop that they had served me. I presumed he was another interrogator, so I sighed and waited for the questions to begin. I heard him dragging the chair from the corner of the room over to where I sat, keeping a polite distance between the two of us. He sat down heavily, dropping the folder he carried to the floor, believing that he would not need it for I would tell nothing but lies.

I looked up at him and smiled briefly, knowing the drill well enough. ‘My name is Dorothy Lawrence…and I am not a spy.’

To mark National Poetry Day 2016 and its theme of Messages, read Lucy Winrow’s sincere poem, published in our latest issue. Illustration by Ivan Canu.

We ink them all over in kisses and hearts
Fuse fingers into nests around each flame
We wait for a slow, rolling heat to blister the air
Letting out a rash of white balloons
Their flickering skins dancing on the blacks
Of our eyes.
And even though my head is in the bin
With the cellophane and its 99p sticker
And even though my head is in a tree
Two weeks from now, imagining the ribs of it
Charred orange with rainwater, bust open
Like someone’s taken a tin opener to it
Our wet words bandaging the branches and leaves
Something heavy has lifted away from me
And it keeps on rising.

Our brand new issue is out today, exploring the theme of hope through a beautiful and bizarre collection of illustrated short fiction and poetry.

We’re delighted to announce that our sixteenth issue, The Hope Issue, is fresh off the press and out now. 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. To introduce it in a little more detail, here are some words from our editor:

“Despite having been on our list of potential themes for a while, there’s something that feels rather timely about putting out an issue on the theme of hope. When we announced the theme of this issue and opened up for literary submissions, the UK was just three weeks away from the EU referendum vote and Donald Trump was threatening to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. By the time submissions closed, the UK had voted to leave the EU and Trump’s threat had become a frightening reality.

Although the mainstream media would probably have you think otherwise, it’s not that these are dark times or that hope is needed any more than it has been in the past. This isn’t the first time we’ve had the threat of a lunatic in charge of a major superpower. Or that the UK and Europe haven’t seen eye to eye politically. Or any other current cause for concern outside of world politics. But for something as inherently timeless as hope, there is something that makes it feel strangely opportune.

Hope treads an intriguing path between darkness and light, pessimism and optimism. It is the ground for believing that something good may happen, typically from a place where goodness hasn’t prevailed. And that dynamic from bad to good, wrong to right, dark to light, is why hope felt like such an important subject to explore.

The result is a collection of poems, short stories and illustrations that, predominantly, champion the moment when the first glimmer of light breaks into the darkness. From Rowan Dent’s May, a poem drawing parallels between nature’s transition from winter to spring and our own, to I Hope This Email Finds You Well, Elizabeth Lovatt’s short story about a person locked in a dark room with no memory of how they got there, the idea of emerging into the light features regularly — in both a literal and metaphorical sense.

Nature is also a prevailing theme. If the pieces in this issue are anything to go by, we look to the natural world when times are tough for a sage reminder of the order of things. Storms always pass, trees shed their leaves then replenish them, and the sun always rises again. In the darkest of times, only hope allows us to see that.”

To get your hands on a copy, buy a single issue for £6 + p&p or subscribe from £10 to get The Hope 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.

Due for release in a week’s time, flick through a few spreads from our forthcoming sixteenth edition to get a taste of what lies within.

Last week, we unveiled the cover of our sixteenth edition, The Hope Issue, illustrated by Ivan Canu. Bringing together 40 writers and illustrators, the new issue features a timeless collection of poems, short stories and illustrations that explore hope in all its weird and wonderful ways.

Now with just a week until its release, we’re pleased to present some spreads from the issue too. To place your eyeballs on them, head to http://popshotpopshot.com/20161221-issue-16-the-hope-issue/

Pre-order your copy for £5 + p&p or subscribe for £10 to receive three print issues and complete access to our digital edition, with all postage included. God bless economies of scale.

A beautiful poem by Inua Ellams, honouring his father’s defiance and ability to laugh in the face of death. Illustration by Richard Wilkinson.

They say
when death laughs at a man, all a man can do is laugh back
all he can do is stare into the definite, definite blackness
reach past the bellied butterflies, their scared wings tickling
bring something between a middle finger and a fist
of giggles into the air, let it hang
defiant, there

When he tried to walk again, he needed two nurses and I
to lift him off the hospital floor. He looked up through
his crashed glasses, stiff left face and drooping cheek
eyes glistening, I held his failed left hand whispering
It will be okay

We work by lamplight. Dad writes a letter, I research how
stroke victims are prone to second ones, when the lamp dies.
He reaches out into the definite, definite blackness, unscrews
the light bulb, delicate in his left hand, the thin glass between
his now nimble fingers, and laughs
defiant, there.

Due for release on October 1st, glimpse the cover of our forthcoming Hope issue, illustrated by Ivan Canu and now available to pre-order.

After sending our sixteenth issue off to print this morning, we’re delighted to unveil its cover artwork, created by Milan-based illustrator, Ivan Canu. While it’s being printed, trimmed, dried, bound and boxed over the coming weeks, we’ll be gradually releasing snippets from the issue over at our Facebook and Instagram.

The Hope issue can be pre-ordered for £5 + p&p right now (usual price is £6), or you can subscribe from £10 and receive Issue 15 in the next few days, followed by Issue 16 in October and Issue 17 in the spring. A print subscription also grants you complete access to the digital edition of Popshot, containing every issue we’ve ever published. Find out more at our subscribe page.

Gregory Heath’s poem looks at the powerlessness that can accompany true love, whether you choose it or not. Illustration by Tobias Hall.

When I say I have come to love you
I do not mean that I have become
accustomed to your morning moods
or the way you reduce my friends
to nervous wrecks at parties.

When I say I have come to love you
I am not talking of time having passed,
of feelings that grew imperceptibly as flowers,
bursting one day into tender shocking blooms.

When I say I have come to love you
it is not because you please me.
You are reckless, you are spoilt,
and you are careless with my heart.

God help me.
When I say I have come to love you
I mean that is what I am here for.

A lifelong friend is discovered to have a plethora of horrific secrets in Adena Graham’s macabre short story. Illustration by Thomas Danthony.

Ever since I’d known Talbot, he insisted he had been raised by wolves. Of course, I never really believed him. Until now, as I sit in the public gallery, watching his almost inhuman stillness as he stares unblinkingly through toughened Plexiglas while the charges are read out.

Whilst many would argue that wolves are feral creatures, capable of extreme violence, none have ever been accused of keeping a severed head in their fridge. It was a head – that of a woman in her late twenties – which finally gave away the extent of Talbot’s savagery, rather than any lupine faux pas, such as ordering raw meat in restaurants or rummaging through bins.

Indeed, had the head never been found, I would have continued to view Talbot as an affable, if slightly unconventional, sort of a chap. All of this has now made me doubt my judgement. I’ve always considered myself to be good at reading people, but I had actually sat with Talbot, putting the world to rights over a tumbler of Glenlivet, while a head nestled between a wedge of Stilton and a bunch of grapes inside his fridge.

I first became friendly with Talbot in our final year at university. Indeed, I’ve known him for a long time: a fact that always causes raised eyebrows amongst people who assume I must have known he had a fondness for storing body parts. If only I did.

When we met, he was bearded and cut a rather dishevelled figure. I wasn’t sure whether he had cultivated the beard to give credence to his story about being dragged up by wolves or if the beard came first and then the story popped into his head. Either way, while most of us laughed at him, both to his face and behind his back, he persisted with this tall tale and at times, when he was at his most unkempt, I could almost believe it.

Looking back, this idiosyncrasy was probably the first seed of Talbot’s ripening insanity. After all, most young men don’t go around claiming to have hunted in a pack at the age of six, or to have suckled from the teat of a grey she-wolf. But would I have said then, or over the subsequent years, that he was the type to do what he later did? Certainly not. He was odd, no doubt about that, but odd and evil are worlds apart, supposedly.

There was one thing, though, that did give me pause for thought. This would have been when we were in our early thirties. All of us, except for Talbot, were married by then with children of varying ages. However, his singleness had always been something of a taboo subject. In all of the time that I had known him, he had never spoken of dating anyone, or even having a fling with a woman, or man. He was, if you’ll excuse the pun, something of a lone wolf. However, true wolves tend to gather in packs and it was this enforced solitude, more than anything else, that made his story seem far-fetched.

Interestingly, he was still rambling on about having been reared with these animals even then, a decade after we had first met. I wouldn’t say it was a frequent topic of conversation, but it did crop up with surprising regularity. For example, you might tell him about something your child had done, and he would say, ‘If I had done something like that, I would have been given a sharp nip on the back of the neck.’ I would always wait to see the glimmer of humour in his eyes – something to say that he was finally ready to admit this had all been one long joke – but it never happened. He would always regard you levelly, seriously, as if challenging you to snigger or call him out on it.

Anyway, this incident was one of the only things that made me wonder if Talbot was simply eccentric or whether there was something truly dark lurking inside him. As I said, raising the issue of his single status was something of a no-no. We had learned over the years not to try and push him on the subject, not because he reacted in a violent or angry manner, simply because it was the one topic that guaranteed to make Talbot clam up.

The university bunch had tried to set him up on a blind date in the early days and we didn’t see or hear from him for two weeks after that. He froze us out as though we had never existed. Then, one day, he just turned up again and no more was said about it. After that, nobody pushed the issue again. Other than the wolf thing, he was actually pleasant company, entirely agreeable to be around, and none of us wanted to upset him.

About twenty years ago, a little more than a decade after Talbot and I had met, my wife Marion arranged a dinner party. She has always been good at organising things, so I just gave her the name of a few friends and their wives, and she got on with it.

On the night, I was surprised when Talbot showed up. I hadn’t asked her to include him because a dinner party is generally something that you invite other couples to, and I wouldn’t have subjected Talbot to sitting there like a gooseberry. Nonetheless, I offered him a warm welcome and hid my surprise well enough. It was only when the next guest to walk through the door happened to be a recently divorced friend of Marion’s that the alarm bells went off.

I cornered my wife in the kitchen and asked her what she was playing at. She giggled mischievously. ‘Poor old Talbot’s always alone,’ she said, ‘and Lucy’s been really down since she and Tom split, so I thought I would try to subtly set them up.’ I blanched at that. I had never explained to Marion why none of us interfered with the wolf-man’s love life, and I had never considered the possibility that she would try to play Cupid. ‘This is a disaster’ I had hissed, but at that point Lucy, the divorcee, had sidled into the kitchen and I had been forced to take my leave.

To say that the tension was palpable when Talbot was directed to sit next to Lucy is an understatement. I genuinely thought he was going to refuse to take his seat. He just stood there, gripping the back of the chair, while his knuckles turned white.

Eventually he did sit, but not before casting my wife an utterly hateful stare. She didn’t notice, as she was already heading towards the kitchen to round up the first course, but I certainly did. Even now, I can recall the sinking sensation in my stomach and the chill that flitted through me. Here was a man I had known for years, someone whom I trusted, eccentric though he might be, but that look he threw my wife was one of pure loathing.

Talbot barely spoke during the meal and the atmosphere in the room grew increasingly uncomfortable. If my old friend was aware of this, he either didn’t show it or didn’t care. There was one more thing during that abominable dinner party that made me suspect I was in the company of someone who had a far darker side than I had ever imagined, and that was when my wife presented the main course of steak au poivre. Perhaps, had Talbot torn into it with his bare hands – as might befit a man who claimed to have been raised by wolves – I would have found it less alarming than the furious way he attacked it with knife and fork, hacking at it until it looked like my wife had served up mince.

After that dinner party, I didn’t see Talbot again for a few years. It’s not that anything was said or that we fell out, we just quietly parted ways. There are some people, however, who are destined to remain in your life, and we eventually bumped into one another in a London wine bar. Enough time had passed for me to have forgiven, or at least justified, Talbot’s behaviour at the dinner party. What had seemed sinister at the time, I now put down to extreme discomfort on his part. After all, being paired off had always been one of his phobias.

And so our friendship resumed and the years ambled by, as they do, with nothing to indicate that there was anything more amiss with him than being a confirmed bachelor who still insisted he had been brought up in a pack.

Now, as I sit in court, listening to Talbot’s guilty plea, I wonder if his youthful reluctance to be set up was some attempt on his part to contain a wildness, which even then he knew was spreading through him. Did he seek solitude for fear of what he would do to a female, should he ever find himself alone with her? That head was just the tip of the iceberg. What they found buried in Talbot’s cellar, beneath his garden, behind the garage brickwork, was the result of decades of dedication. How many times must I have popped round for a pint and a chat over the years, unaware of the dark secrets that lurked in Talbot’s heart and behind his walls?

At first I am confused, furious, betrayed, disgusted, hurt, shocked, as the prosecutor reads out the details of the offences. I don’t think there is an emotion that doesn’t hit me as I sit rigidly on the hard bench of the public gallery. And then Talbot’s defence counsel begins his mitigation and reality takes a subtle shift. What a childhood he had! Privileged beyond imagination; holidays in exotic locations, riding lessons, fencing lessons, designer clothing, but all of it hiding the most terrible abuse imaginable.

Inside the six-bedroom house where he lived, there was a space reserved for him – but not inside the blue and white bedroom adorned with toy soldiers, games, books, and puzzles. No, that was all for show. Talbot’s life was spent in a small cupboard under the stairs. He was fed scraps, burned with cigar butts, forced into cold baths and more, so much more.

There is a silence in court when the barrister has finished. Maybe the shock is greater because you don’t expect to hear about that sort of abuse happening in upper-class, wealthy households.

Now, suddenly, I understand. The enigma of Talbot has been fully revealed to me. He escaped, finally taken into care when he was twelve and once free, created an alternate reality for himself. A family of wolves whom, wild and untamed though they were, couldn’t have been any worse than the hand he had been dealt. After all, when humans have let you down, what else is there to turn to?

In fact, I now understand that Talbot would have fared better had he truly been raised by a pack. He would have been looked after, protected, shown right from wrong. He would have been blessed with a mother who would have fought for him, tooth and claw, rather than handing him over to a man who waited with a burning cigar and an unfastened belt.

Talbot had lived through most of his childhood in a wasteland of neglect and abuse. Humans had shown him no kindness, nor taught him any kind of moral code. When, eventually, he was forced out into the real world, he brought his feral beginnings with him. Sadly, for the many women he encountered over the years, these weren’t the values of the pack, as he had always claimed, but that cold absence which sometimes arises in earth’s most dangerous of animals: man.

As Talbot is led away to the cells to end his days as they began, in confinement, he pauses. Glancing back over his shoulder, his eyes meet mine. I finally see in them a pain which he has kept hidden all these years, and I nod a silent goodbye to the man who never really belonged.

Throwing back his head, he releases a blood-curdling howl. It echoes throughout the courtroom and bounces off the wood-panelled walls, filling every corner of this large space. At that moment, I realise that for all his claims of being reared by wolves, this is the first time I’ve ever heard Talbot howl. In reality, he had been howling all along.

Tim Hawkins’ poem captures the feeling of growing up too fast during the transition from childhood to adulthood. Illustration by Chengsi Lu.

Round here, the grass grows at 5000 miles per hour
sprinklers spit carelessly onto blankets of moist green
like sheets wet with the seed of teenage dreams.

Round here, girls and boys run barefoot across that lush carpet
shoots chase lifted soles, each footprint a memory
born and dead in the same instant
a Polaroid spontaneously combusting.

Round here, dogs chase cars, snapping at fleeing bumpers
we sit with girls, light cigarettes
and watch them burn away in a single breath.

Round here, hearts beat fast like hummingbird wings
drowning out everlasting promises
scratched in chalk before the rain
and the girls swell like backwards balloons from the pin-prick.

Round here, the grass grows at 5000 miles per hour
I can hear it from my bedroom window
never-ending, pushing us taller, away from infant roots
gravity pulling so light, we fill our pockets with stones
clutch at weighty bottles and hope we don’t float away.

And I sit and listen to that green sea growing
the world turning so fast it crushes my chest
and pins my ears to the side of my head
and I hear my bones creaking and cracking
and I wonder, who will I be when this is over?

A poem by Jacqueline Saphra, noting how modern entertainment is often found within failure rather than success. Illustration by André Gottschalk.

We’re the sofa public, fingers kissing
power keys. We make our judgements quick
on sing and wheedle, glad it isn’t us
with jitters and bad microphone technique.
We watch for mouths that dry to dumbness,
lyrics stuttered out of synch, a dodgy dress.
Show us your failing breath, a smile to crack
under the lights. Some hold, some break.

You want to make your mothers cry, you ache
for fame, the paparazzi at your gates,
you want us to applaud this new success,
but we prefer to watch you fall, to see you hurt.
Glory’s boring; it’s your pain we can’t resist;
Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this.

A sinister short story by Georgia Oman, addressing the hidden peculiarities that simmer under the surface of everyday life. Illustration by Sean McSorley.

The scones were arranged in a perfect circle, enveloping two small pots of clotted cream and raspberry jam. ‘Homemade’, Patricia had hastened to add. The rest of the morning tea had been arranged with similarly singular vision. Spread across the coffee table, itself neatly covered by a spotless lace doily, were two sets of delicate china teacups and saucers, accompanied by a catalogue of intricately decorated, tea-related accoutrements. The rest of Patricia’s home was just as clean and neat. Evelyn had known the turn-off to her house from the main road by the topiary hedges flanking the gravel drive, twisted by iron contortions and obsessively trimmed to perfect uniformity.

The house itself was a small stone cottage, but lacked the ramshackle charm of others in the village. It had recently been repointed and retiled, and the centuries-old stone gleamed like new. Meticulous garden beds, planted in perfect symmetry, funnelled Evelyn up the pathway to the front door where Patricia welcomed her. She led the way through to the sitting room at the back of the house, polished floorboards squeaking underfoot, and folded herself into an armchair, gesturing Evelyn towards a floral settee opposite. There was an uncomfortable silence, broken by Patricia pushing the plate of scones towards her.

‘Please, do eat something.’

She herself seemed contented with her cup of tea, which she raised to her lips occasionally to take an inaudible sip, waiting for Evelyn to speak.

‘These scones are simply delicious, Patricia.’

Patricia smiled and pushed the plate closer to Evelyn across the coffee table.

‘I’m so glad you like them. It’s my grandmother’s recipe.’

Evelyn flicked a trail of crumbs off her cardigan, only succeeding in relocating them to her tweed skirt.

‘They’ve got a little something extra in them that’s just marvellous,’ she said eventually. ‘Your grandmother must have been a wonderful cook.’

‘Yes, she was,’ said Patricia. ‘She was the President of the local Institute in her day, as was my mother. That’s me as a child with the two of them.’

Evelyn squinted across the room through her bifocals. The physical evidence of Patricia’s achievements covered an entire wall of the sitting room. Lengths of show ribbons hung in colour coordinated bunches of blue, red, and yellow, draped over shelves of trophies and medallions. Interspersed between framed certificates were several family photographs, sepia-toned and faded. Evelyn could just make out a small dark-haired child in pigtails standing between two women, a blue ribbon clutched triumphantly in her hand. Sitting across from her now, Evelyn was struck by how unchanged Patricia was. Her face was older and her hair threaded with a grey that seemed silver against the black, but her eyes were still the same. Patricia alone had remained unaffected as, one by one, all the women in the Institute reached middle age and succumbed to glasses. Her own vision, she assured them, was perfect, and Evelyn believed her. Her brown eyes, framed by brows as dark as her hair once was, reminded Evelyn of a hawk. It made her a particularly diabolical judge at show time, spotting burnt edges and lumpy icing from across the hall.

‘I had just won my first ever baking prize,’ said Patricia, gazing fondly at the photograph. ‘I was the youngest entrant, as I recall, but nobody could beat my Victoria sponge. The ribbon is still up on the wall.’

Evelyn glanced politely towards the wall, as she felt she was supposed to. Patricia had returned once more to her tea, and seemed content to allow the silence to continue.

‘You must have been a very disciplined child,’ said Evelyn at last. ‘I think I was still making mud pies at that age.’

‘Oh, I practically learnt to read from the Institute constitution,’ said Patricia lightly, waving a dismissive hand. ‘All those rules and regulations simply thrilled me, and now I can’t cook any other way. Have you looked closely at the scones?’

‘I can’t say that I have, I’ve been too busy enjoying them – ’

‘Five centimetres diameter,’ interjected Patricia crisply. ‘Every single one. Do you see how straight the sides are? Well risen, of course, not too dense. A thin crust on the top and bottom, but not burnt.’

She turned one over to demonstrate, revealing a perfectly golden underside. In a single, sharp movement she snapped it in half, revealing the spongy centre.

‘A fine, moist texture and a good crumb. And no excess flour, of course,’ she added, wrinkling her nose slightly in distaste as she replaced the torn scone on the platter, as though the very idea itself was unpleasant to her.

‘Heaven forbid,’ muttered Evelyn, taking a sip of her tea.

Patricia raised an eyebrow almost imperceptibly.

‘It may seem strange to you, Evelyn, but I always say you can never get enough practice. All year, every time I open the oven door, I’m preparing for the annual show. And I think you’ll agree,’ she added, with a nod towards the trophies fighting for space on her wall, ‘that it hasn’t been an entirely unsuccessful strategy.’

Evelyn was saved from answering by a low, scraping sound followed by a dull thud coming from outside the house. It took several uneven repetitions before she recognised it as the digging of a spade. She glanced towards the lace-bordered windows to try and spot the source of the noise, but her view was impeded by the wisteria that snaked up the trellis outside.

‘What’s that noise? Have you put your husband to work while we’re in here drinking tea?’

‘Yes, he rather drew the short straw today,’ said Patricia, pouring herself another cup of tea. She clasped it in both hands as she, too, stared out the window. ‘I’ve been at him to enlarge the vegetable patch for months. I do so want to grow our own pumpkins this winter, and we just don’t have enough room in our current plot.’

After several jolting cycles, the scrape and thud of the digging relaxed into a constant rhythm. It seemed to sooth Patricia. She settled back further into her chair and observed Evelyn over the rim of her teacup.

‘I am so glad that you like the scones. There really is nothing more satisfying than watching someone enjoy your cooking.’

‘Clearly your culinary skills run in the family,’ said Evelyn. With Patricia watching her so intently, she felt obliged to take another bite. Patricia laughed.

‘They said that about being President of the Institute as well, but I guess it must skip a generation!’

She took a sip of her tea, but a note of bitterness hung in the air. Evelyn shifted slightly in her seat.

‘Of course,’ continued Patricia, replacing her teacup on her saucer, ‘the next best thing is to have one in the house. I take it you’re here on official Institute business?’

‘Well, yes actually.’

Evelyn had rehearsed what she was going to say over and over again in her mind on the drive through the village, muttering to herself in a tentative soliloquy, but still couldn’t seem to find the right words. In the end, she spoke plainly, her teacup rattling in its saucer as she set it down on the coffee table.

‘I’ve received a complaint, Patricia.’

It struck Evelyn now that, in all the years she had known her, nobody had ever called Patricia anything but her full name. The Institute meetings were populated by diminutives and nicknames — Maggies and Shirls and Jens and Barbs — but no one had ever ventured a Pat or a Trish.

‘A complaint? About me?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Patricia dropped a cube of sugar in her tea and stirred it until it dissolved. The clink of the metal spoon as it skirted the inside of the teacup seemed deafening to Evelyn.

‘It was concerning the spring flower show,’ she continued, when it seemed Patricia wasn’t going to ask. She felt her face growing warm with discomfort. ‘One of the other participants seemed to think that a fertiliser mixture of some sort you gave her… well, it didn’t really work as she thought it ought to.’

‘You’re talking about Margie, I presume?’

Patricia looked coolly at Evelyn. She had stopped stirring, and the sound of the digging from outside punctuated the silence with the regularity of a metronome. It was starting to give Evelyn a headache.

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you who the complaint was from – ’

‘I know it was Margie Howard, Evelyn, and this is all a misunderstanding,’ said Patricia with a smile. She spoke with a slightly condescending air, as though Evelyn had wandered mistakenly into events that didn’t concern her and that she couldn’t possibly understand.

‘You see, I gave Margie a bottle of my worm juice — not a fertiliser, as you said, but a concentrated run off from the compost heap that works wonders on the garden. Now, I specifically told her to use it sparingly on her icebergs, because it’s quite a potent mixture, but from the looks of things she went and poured the whole thing on.’

Evelyn cleared her throat uncomfortably. It had grown a little tight.

‘That’s not what I heard,’ she said. ‘She says she only put a few drops on, and that the whole bush had withered in a week. She says there’s sign of acid damage on the leaves.’

Patricia shrugged and folded her hands in her lap.

‘I’m not sure what she used, then, but it wasn’t what I gave her. Frankly, I think it’s appalling that I’m being suspected of sabotage purely because I tried to help someone…’

‘I didn’t say anything about sabotage,’ interjected Evelyn quickly.

‘But it’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it?’ said Patricia. She spoke mildly, as though simply stating fact, but her unblinking eyes were trained on Evelyn. ‘Otherwise, why would you come all the way out here?’

‘I didn’t come here to accuse you of anything,’ said Evelyn, exasperated. She felt the situation quickly spiralling out of her control. ‘But my hands are tied, Patricia.’ She paused briefly before she next spoke. ‘This isn’t the first time I’ve received complaints like this.’

Patricia sighed quietly, an audible mingling of impatience and resignation.

‘Not this again.’

Evelyn ignored her. ‘There was that business with Nola…’

‘I can’t be held responsible for her inability to distinguish sugar from salt,’ said Patricia, a trace of contempt visible on her face.

‘…and Leslie…’

‘Competition rules clearly state that all elements of a dish must be made by the competitor, and I knew for a fact that her cheesecake base was made from store-bought digestive biscuits. I couldn’t, in good faith, allow it to be judged.’

‘…and Jenny Packer…’

Patricia’s teacup came down hard on her saucer.

‘Just what sort of point are you trying to make, Evelyn?’

There was a tense silence, broken once more by the rhythmic digging coming from the garden. Evelyn felt the beginnings of a migraine. She took another bite of her scone for something to do, but her mouth felt dry and she had to concentrate to swallow.

‘What exactly is Arthur doing out there in the garden? He must be halfway to China by now!’

Patricia watched her closely.

‘Would you like a glass of water?’

‘No thank you,’ said Evelyn, biting back a cough. It was going worse than she had expected. She took a deep breath and tried again.

‘Look, Patricia. I’m sorry, but you can’t deny that the circumstances don’t reflect well on you. Even if it’s all untrue, if it’s all just a series of coincidences, it’s a bad look for the institute. Especially considering your position as Vice President. Surely you can understand that?’

‘Nothing is more important to me than the Institute,’ said Patricia, looking at Evelyn with a fierce sincerity. ‘Nothing.’

‘Then we are in agreement,’ said Evelyn. Her throat felt hot and she took a sip of her lukewarm tea to try and cool it down. Her head throbbed in time to the endless digging coming from outside. ‘We both want what is best for the Institute and unfortunately, that means your resignation, Patricia. I’m so sorry.’

‘I suppose that means another election.’

‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ said Evelyn absently. Now that she had accomplished what she came for, she wanted to get out of the house as soon as possible. She was already looking for where she had left her handbag, but her vision was beginning to blur around the edges.

‘One of the Committee Members will have to take my place until the Annual Meeting,’ mused Patricia. ‘Then you’ll have to elect someone to fill the vacancy.’

‘I’m well acquainted with the constitution, thank you very much,’ said Evelyn testily. She thought she had put her bag down by her chair, but it was no longer there. Or had she left it in the hallway when she came in? The throbbing in her head had turned into a stabbing pain, and the sound of Arthur’s digging grew louder and louder. Patricia continued as though Evelyn hadn’t spoken.

‘Of course, there’s no backup for the Vice President like there is for the President. If the President were unable to fulfil her duties, the constitution states that the Vice President can assume the role.’

Evelyn didn’t even bother to reply. Her throat burned with a prickling fire and the blinding pain in her head was beginning to make her feel physically sick. She clutched the edges of the settee as the living room began to spin. Patricia regarded her calmly from across the coffee table, her head cocked to one side like an inquisitive bird. Her dispassionate voice echoed in Evelyn’s head, as though she was speaking to her through water.

‘Are you quite sure you’re alright?’

Darkness began to creep in around the edges of Evelyn’s vision. As the room seemed to contract, she noticed that the scone on Patricia’s plate remained untouched.

‘The scones…’

‘Ah yes,’ said Patricia, reaching across the coffee table to pick an uneaten specimen from the platter in front of Evelyn. She held it aloft, examining it in her fingers like a triumphant prospector. ‘It’s my grandmother’s recipe, as I think I mentioned before. She always loved to put a little twist on the classics. I’ve inherited that from her.’

Outside, in a corner of the garden away from the vegetable patch, the digging steadily continued. Arthur was submerged up to his knees, and the mound of discarded earth beside the vegetable patch continued to grow in size.

‘The scones…’ repeated Evelyn, quieter, this time.

‘They’re pumpkin,’ continued Patricia chattily. ‘Home-grown, of course. I’ve always prided myself on my pumpkins. I’m looking forward to a bumper crop next year.’

Inspired by her experience of working with the Welsh National Opera, Joanna Jones’ poem considers the rich history that lives within a national song.

A winter chill carries the Welshman’s song
Through puddled streets and lamp-struck fallen leaves
Honeyed mead bubbling from young, tender tongue
And kiss-chapped lips raw from bittersweet deeds.
That same voice echoed through soot-blackened mines
Warming the warren with exultant odes
To sweat-slicked mountains and hoarse battle cries
Of nation and valour and sins homegrown.
That clash and clamour is sunk in the soil
The ring of swords drowned in clogged city drains
And coal mine choristers crumble and spoil
Their faces forgot while the song remains.
Echoes of ages in copper-tint mud
Hum down the pavement and burn in the blood.

Jacqueline Saphra’s poem laments a youthful inability to take risks for fear of the consequences. Illustration by Stephan Schmitz.

Once I had a kite. I guarded it, tried
to hold it near me, flew it safe and low,
dreading that the wind might give it life,
freedom to tear the sky’s fragile skin. You
didn’t know me then. This is the truth:
I feared it; the gasp of twine unravelling,
my dream hurtling towards the world’s roof,
the synergy of air and silk, bent wings.

But that was years ago. Since then, I’ve known
different terrors, remembering the kite
I never flew heavenwards, the way love slips
its noose. I’m turning wild at last. Full-grown,
I long for it: the zip and whizz of flight,
the wind’s force, bloodied palms, losing my grip.

The digital edition of Popshot has been given an overhaul, making all 15 issues of the magazine now easily readable from any device.

In the few years since we released the digital edition of Popshot in partnership with Exact Editions, it’s been mainly available as an app for smartphones or tablets. However, the good folk over at Exact Editions have now built a new web reader, making the reading experience from your computer as smooth as it is on any other device.

Preview Popshot on the new web reader here and if you would like to gain full digital access to every issue we’ve published (most of which are now out of print), you can do so for £5.50 a year.

Or, for the best of both worlds, subscribe to Popshot from £10 a year and receive three print issues plus complete access to the digital edition for as long as your subscription is active. An additional £4.50 to receive three print issues straight to your doormat? Outrageous. Full details can be found at our subscribe page.

Benjamin Zadik’s delicate flash fiction piece muses on a time when people used to be connected by strings. Illustration by Darren Hopes.

As people have drifted further apart from one another, fear has crept in between them. These days, it seems that fear is all that’s left holding the world together. But it stands to reason that, long ago, the world was held together more gently, maybe even with strings. Imagine strings of every colour and expression, tying together every little thing in the world. They would tie tinted loops around every tree and spire, between every rock and blade of grass. And the strings would hang down from the clouds, gently hugging the birds (who would be less willing to stray), and hold tightly to the ground.

Even more beautiful than this — than the strings that held up the world — must have been the strings between people. Tightly wound and followed, there were strings that connected one head to another. Between every man and woman there must have been strings to keep hearts from floating apart. As long as there were strings to keep people together, they could wander without fear. Because how could you feel lonely if you were only a length away from your other?

It’s hard to remember now, but fear was once so scarce a commodity that it was considered rather precious. With their strings intact, people used to be much closer to one another, and there simply wasn’t room for fear to grow. At some point, however, as with any rare thing, people began to collect it. They kept it in bottles like perfume, and used it only on special occasions. Fear was quietly traded in handshakes and kisses, its only use for occasional amusement or thrills.

Soon enough, everyone was wearing fear. Like any modern fashion, fear was mass-produced. Yet, as more and more people started to use it, it began to feel different. Fear invaded the air like a new pollution and as the air became more and more fearful, people moved further and further apart. They would flee secretly to some corner and open their bottle for the momentary thrill, alone and away from everyone. To get further away, people were forced to untie their strings.

Today, the world has lost its strings entirely. People try instead to connect to one another with wires and cords and cables. But these are not true strings; they are not beautiful, and they can’t keep away fear.

All of this I am sure of because it is the only way to explain what people have always believed is a mistake in creation. The lack of strings explains so much. This is why I hurt when anxious strangers bump into me on the street. This is why their eyes prick me, even as they turn away. This is why hearts bleed. All this happens because strings tied between people no longer exist. Only the sharp hooks that used to hold them. And when we tug at one another, we become blistered by the cold edges.

The most painful hooks surely remain in the eyes. In every gaze there is the scratch of freshly cut strings. This must be why people rarely look at each other, and why they meet eyes in fear. The unfortunate consequence is that people end up believing it is best to keep others far away. They are sure that this way, they can never be hurt. But people forget how easily you can throw screams and hate, and how you’ll never feel kisses or hugs or whispers if you don’t let anyone close enough to touch you.

Reader, if I should ever turn away from your stare, if my body should involuntarily move away from yours, please do not be angry with me. You can tell me that I hold fear — I do, I know — but don’t withdraw from me. I promise I will happily share my fear with you, no strings attached.

Emma Jones’ poem addresses the love and heroism that’s resiliently present amidst devastating circumstances. Illustration by Kate Copeland.

I saw you once at the site of an earthquake.
A woman lay in the rubble,
Her panic filling the air thick as brick dust
And strangers’ hands, arms, heaved to free her
Strangers’ brows furrowed, rolled with fresh sweat
Strangers’ lips blossomed with whispered hope
And there you were.
In the pulse of blood through thickened veins
In the drop of sweat that darkened dust,
You. There you were.
I saw you on the slave ship
In the soothing hush of mothers’ shush
The warm and murmured lullabies
I saw you in the death camps
You were the last morsel, torn in half
Proffered with knotted, knuckled hands
In these darkest of places
I have to remember:
You. You still survive
In the clutched embraces
And the tears of grief,
You sit, so quietly,
Underneath.

A short story from Christie Suyanto of a girl who yearns for freedom from the restraints of the patriarchal world. Illustration by Daniel Caballero.

It began with her teeth. It always does, really. Every transformation begins with the teeth.

When she was eight, she started dreaming about her teeth falling out. The phantom version of her held them in its chubby hands, holding them out like a desperate offering. A plea. Sometimes they were frightening: little, white structures with edges sharp enough to draw blood. Sometimes they were friendly: big and rotund with yellow undertones. Sometimes they were paper-light, like a cluster of rice hulls. Sometimes they were heavy as stones. But most of the time they were ordinary. Imperfect. Plain. Neither sinister nor smooth. Sad replicas of her own.

She would wake up drenched in sweat, her pajamas clinging onto her pale skin like film paper. Her fingers would reach for her mouth, tracing the lines of her pink gum to ensure that no mishap had occurred — that everything was in its rightful place and was its expected shape.

One Saturday, at dinnertime, she decided to tell her parents about the dreams. Her father told her it was nothing. She chose not to believe him; he hated all things that were unusual. He hated the improper and the weird. He killed stray cats that defecated on their porch, hunted birds and stepped on small things. Her mother smiled and told her not to worry. ‘People dream about that all the time. It just means that you are growing up. You’ll be a young woman before you know it!’ She wanted to trust her, but couldn’t. There was a foolish innocence, a juvenility in her mother’s smile that made her inexplicably hopeless.

That night, before going to sleep, she stood in front of the mirror in her parents’ bathroom with her purple toothbrush. Her arm moved with a machine-like precision, attacking every gap and dent. When she spat, a pink streak curled down the drain, tainting the snow-like foam. That was the day she realized she was capable of destruction.

When she was ten, her parents took her to the zoo for an exhibition on snakes. Glass boxes, the size of a crib, were displayed underneath the soft, dim lighting inside the dingy, fake caves. There were hundreds of snakes in every colour from places that she hadn’t heard of. The placards were peppered with odd names that resonated within her like fairytale characters. She hadn’t come across binomial nomenclature in class. As far as she was concerned, they were codes for bigger kids.

Amidst the sheer humidity of the place, the pythons looked at her with wide, beckoning eyes, as if urging her to curl them around her neck like jewels. Her fingers traced their outlines on the dirty glass, tempting her to claw at it and free them. For a second, she swore she could see her fingernails turning sharper. She shivered at the queer temptation and the stupid notion, shoving them down into her pockets like dirty dimes.

That night, her mother tucked her into bed, making sure she had bathed herself clean after the long day. Later, her father scolded her mother for coddling her. She fell asleep in an almost psychedelic haze, thoughts swirling into a rendition of her parents’ voices and colours and furs and scales. She dreamt of being enveloped inside a bear and waking up as a new beast.

The next morning, the news reported that there had been a major breakout at the local zoo. That was the day she realized that she too was entitled to freedom.

When she was sixteen, she stood in front of her bedroom mirror, naked. She was a landscape, rolling hills and dark forests framed with snow, soil tracks, and bright constellations. She knew that, but it did not matter to her now. She saved the thought for later, storing it in a zip-lock bag and putting it inside her wardrobe. There was a matter more pressing to be dealt with.

On the small of her back, an itch was materializing. She reached for it, her arm now elongated and more muscular than it was years before. In her fingers, she felt a dangling metal tag.

She unzipped herself and out cascaded a set of wings, stretching for miles, crushing the houses into colourful chunks and crisp pieces. Her mother screamed a string of words from the bedroom upstairs, but she no longer understood them.

She reached for the little chains on her tiny feet, jerking them upwards. They turned into two powerful hind legs, coated with coarse furs, no longer looking like the weak, thin poles that transported her from one place to the next.

Finally, she made four incisions on her cheeks, then cracked her ribs open and tore her lungs out. They were no longer needed, no longer imperative for her existence. Her backbone curved like a roller coaster track and her young skin stretched, sprouting scales that reflected luminous rays of light on her bedroom walls.

She was a new creature and she was glorious. The human inside her, trapped with smooth angles and blossomed cheeks, whispered for her to stay. But she knew that they would shun her like they shunned every other wild thing that came to them. They would break her. They would disjoint her and put her in a plastic bag, drowning and deprived of willing pulses.

So she turned, let out a cry and flew into freedom.

Sophie Clarke’s poem provides a literal tribute to the old wives’ tale that claims a swallowed apple pip will grow in your stomach. Illustration by Zoe Regoczy.

White as knuckles, shoots grip down
in soft pink beds. They plait thinly
over moist, warm organs, until I can’t tell
what is vein and what is root.

Twigs snap. Thick branches break
into the curvature of my ribs, my spine wizens
into trunk. A whole ecosystem heaves
under a canopy of lungs and leaves –

I fear I will be a laughing stock.
What use is a doctor with these ailments
I can’t speak of? My tongue is gashed
black bark, I choke on clumps

of mulch. And each morning I wake
to fistfuls of flora at my ears,
the miniature disaster of my nose
sprouting birdsong.

A poem by Claire Booker, recalling a late-night walk with the moon through the back streets of London. Illustration by Mathieu Persan.

She trailed me three miles home
with her Geisha face, always one step ahead
as if drawn along

like a child’s balloon, descending
into the evening scent of linden, then darting to my left
as if she knew my every move.

Just for kicks, she scaled
tumescent cranes, glided through their box of tricks,
blew rings of softest apricot

to mask her curves, skipped
a row of trees, then dropped into a bedding shop,
left me standing jaundiced under neon.

But still she favoured me, swept back
radiant on a plane’s flume and when I chose to turn away,
scurried down a side alley,

re-emerged ahead, hanging
on staves of telegraph wire — an astonished semibreve.
Every slate and puddled gutter

became her slave that night;
laid their hopeful mirrors at her feet, where she conceived
herself as peacock of a thousand cracks of light.

She blazed so recklessly,
I saw men’s boot-prints studded in her flesh,
then vanished — drawing whole oceans from me.

Set in Africa, Fabian Acker’s story details an idiosyncratic relationship between two men from differing cultures. Illustration by Ann-Christine Voss.

Walking so close that their hands were almost touching, Mark noticed that their shadows, long and soft now in the evening sun of Africa, were identical. Not all that unusual, he thought – a cat and dog might have identical shadows in the right circumstances. But the differences between the two young men were probably greater than between cat and dog. The least of which was that Sisay was black and Mark was white.

Sisay’s face had a touch of Somali; high angular cheekbones, a sharp nose and thin lips. Mark had a touch of the Welshman to him, not unlike Somali features; little flesh on the face, jet black hair, although long, where Sisay’s was tight and curly, and deep black eyes. It was a pleasure to see them smile; rare enough in itself, but when they smiled together it was like dawn breaking.

It’s satisfying, Mark thought, that we both have black shadows. Neither state nor society nor custom has demanded that white men have white shadows.

They had lodged for four or five years in adjoining rooms in a seedy hotel, normally only used by middle-ranking prostitutes, petty criminals or rich back-packers anxious to punish their parents. Neither Mark nor Sisay was known to have a permanent girlfriend, but occasional liaisons with prostitutes reassured the local community that they were not gay.

The black/white liaison was uneasily tolerated; the State was headed by a black president, the town administered by a black governor, and the law upheld by black police: equality was guaranteed by the constitution although ignored in practice, but the fault lines were mainly to do with wealth and poverty rather than black and white. A black/white friendship was just about acceptable across the race divide but only up to a point. The point was reached when a white man married his mistress; it was considered a betrayal by both sides.

The two men had met at the hotel, where Mark was staying after his parents had returned to England, waiting for them to send his ticket. The ticket never materialized and he found the kind of jobs that normally were available to well-born, ill-educated white men; clerking in the bank, helping out at the more elegant shops, or driving rich foreigners around the tourist areas.

Eventually, he found that he enjoyed carrying out the minor repairs on their hire cars far better than driving them; little conversation was needed, and the engines made no arch comment about a handsome white youngster without any commitments. He began to spend more time in the workshops repairing cars than driving them until he was skilled enough to make it a permanent job. The boss was pleased; drivers were common, competent mechanics were rare.

Sisay was staying at the same hotel as Mark because it was the cheapest place available that was safe. The town was populated by his tribe’s enemies who had collectively slaughtered the members of Sisay’s tribe in the bush — as his tribe had slaughtered theirs. He had washed up in the town on a tide of homeless youngsters. While the UN was there, there was a degree of safety, and they had put some of the refugees in the hotel to keep them out of the main town.

When the UN left, the killings flared up again, but on a reduced scale, and Sisay managed to persuade the manager to let him stay at the hotel in return for his washing up, waiting on tables and occasional repairs. He never went out, and welcomed the increasing demands placed on him by the manager as a way of killing time and staying alive.

After a year or two, when the situation was calmer, the manager lent Sisay to do some labouring jobs for a friend, the garage owner who employed Mark. There, Sisay also showed an aptitude for repair work and he eventually worked full-time as a mechanic, cultivating a friendship with Mark that had begun at the hotel but had been restricted by the guest/servant relationship.

When they worked on an engine together, they were like surgeon and anaesthetist. Unbolting the big end, refitting the tappets, or adjusting the timing belt, they would work with precision and rhythm, barely needing to talk to one another. Perhaps a better analogy might be a duet between a pianist and a violinist. A glance, a raised eyebrow or a sharp nod was enough to keep the two performances in perfect time, each contributing exactly the right amount of effort at exactly the right moment.

Although their friendship was entirely asexual, it was too strong to allow either of them to keep a girlfriend for more than a week or two. And as their tastes and backgrounds were so different, it would be impossible for them to share the same woman, although there were quite a few women in the town who might have welcomed the prospect of either or both. They were, after all, young, personable, and withdrawn enough to be mysterious.

While their friendship was apparently permanent, Mark was conscious of a growing rift between them. There were occasions when Sisay would return to the hotel just as dawn was breaking, smelling of vomit and beer and sometimes with bruises or dried blood on his face and arms. In the dark regions of the town, where white men couldn’t or didn’t go, Sisay would try to forget his bonds to Mark; loving and hating him simultaneously, he would resolve his conflicts in violence or drink or sex.

Sisay also had to cope with the more immediate tension. News of inter-tribal massacres would drive him in to himself, and his conversation, laconic at the best of times would dry up. After work, he would leave Mark to eat his meal alone, and he would go off to tread his own lonely path. But these edgy episodes were forgotten on certain rare evenings, when, for an hour or two, when the African night was calm, they would become perfect partners in a strange duet.

On these occasions, when they had gone to their rooms after a day’s work that had gone well, and after an evening meal marked by quiet harmony, they would meet a few hours later on their joint balcony. Standing naked side by side on the balustrade, neither looking at each other nor speaking, they would each stretch out their arms like men anticipating the Cross.

Then, with their fingertips just touching, they would float gently off across the sleeping town, swooping, soaring, wheeling like falcons or hovering like kites, fluttering like death above the streets. Sometimes they would skirt the edges of the forest and see a jaguar padding purposefully along a twisted path. Or sometimes, on the edges of the black township, see two lovers hugging the shadows, hurrying towards a clandestine meeting.

Without talking or even glancing at each other they would hover above the squalid one-room brothels and the ragged-roofed huts, where beer and palm wine were sold. Laughter, shouts and sometime sweet music would float upwards towards the two friends, and as dawn started to break, they could see the men and women leaving for home, swaggering or stumbling on the same paths that Sisay sometimes used.

The days after a flight were difficult for both men. Sisay would go on three or four binges in succession, leaving Mark as distressed as a mother worrying over a sick child. And their working rhythm would suffer. Probably not enough to be noticed by an outsider, but both would feel anxious and disjointed. They never spoke about Sisay’s defections, nor the disjointed tempo of their work, nor for that matter about their flying — but each knew that the other was not at ease.

Sisay took to his solitary pursuits more often as the news of tribal conflicts became more frequent, and Mark would increasingly think about flying, longing for the calm affection that would accompany them above the town. But it could only follow an evening of comradeship that was generated by a day of successful work. It could only happen spontaneously, and without any conscious effort.

One night, despite the feeling that the conditions were not right, he stood on the balustrade, willing Sisay to join him. He stood for many minutes with his arms outstretched, eyes closed until he suddenly felt the swift pleasure of Sisay’s fingertips touching his. His soul lifted, and the pain of the last few weeks dissolved. Leaning confidently into the warm night air, he plummeted like a falling angel.

It took months for him to recover, even though he was flown to the capital to a ‘proper white’ hospital. But he was young, the bones knitted, and the ruptured liver healed.

He went back home, first to the garage to ask about Sisay. His former boss was pleased to see him. ‘Sisay? I don’t know who you mean kid. There was only one other mechanic apart from you. Pierre – you remember him don’t you? He’s gone home to Belgium. There’s Olu there,’ he gestured, ‘but he doesn’t count. He doesn’t know a spanner from a horse’s arse.’ Olu, hearing his name, smiled obligingly. ‘You can have your job back as soon as you’re ready, son,’ he smiled. ‘Lots of customers have been asking for you. In fact…’

He stopped talking. Mark had already turned away and was hobbling on his crutches back to the hotel.

The manager had changed since his accident. No longer the deathly thin ex-Legionnaire wearing tattered khaki shirt and trousers with a cough that could be heard throughout the hotel, but a smart white young man, dressed in tidy shorts and a crisp white shirt with matching teeth. Unlike his predecessor, whose characteristics of despair, indifference and contempt were immediately visible like the flakes of dandruff in his beard, the new one was tight, bright and brisk.

‘And you are?’ he said smiling tautly, as Mark leaned his crutches against the reception desk.

‘I live here. Room 15. Next to Sisay Kazibwe. Room 16. Been here nearly five years.’

‘Well I don’t think I can help.’ He smiled again, with the cheerful warmth of a cobra. ‘We don’t have a Room 15. They have names now, not numbers. New York, London, Moscow, Paris, each themed according to its name – so I’m not even sure what room you mean. But in any case we’re fully occupied, and, since I’ve taken over,’ he lowered his voice, ‘we let our rooms to exclusively, well, lighter-coloured clients. So I don’t think your friend would find it comfortable here, even if we had a vacancy.’

Mark was too engrossed in his search for Sisay to feel the arrogance and hostility. ‘Do you know if Mr Kazibwe left a forwarding address?’ He felt dry and anxious. He already feared what the answer would be.

Mark glanced at the barely familiar reception area, with its now mahogany floor and crisp pictures of impossibly beautiful views of Africa. The tatty ‘Joyeux Noel’ banner which had been hanging from the ceiling year in, year out since he had been there had gone, and there were hundreds of tiny mirror tiles where once the plaster had bulged and crumbled.

He looked up at them behind the reception desk and his heart leapt. He saw Sisay’s fractured reflection smiling at him, and turned around quickly.

Nothing.

Nothing.

A poem by Tyler Quick of love, loss and the incompleteness of continuing life’s journey companionless. Illustration by Miranda Meeks.

The facial imprint left so long ago on your pillow lingers,
a chasm forged by the eruption of your departure.
And now, I must traverse this canyon without you.

Know this:
I would chase your ghost to the farthest stars,
if it meant a little bit of closure.

And there, we would watch the novas together
and let their dying echoes reanimate your phantom,
if only for a minute, even if I must rejoin the living alone.

A tranquil hot air balloon ride takes a tumultuous turn in this riveting short story by Pete King. Illustration by Marie Bergeron.

The hot air balloon ride was a thirtieth birthday present from my wife, and a surprise. I was given a window of dates in June and told it would be a short notice call one afternoon from a local guy. It turns out the local guy was once a bit of a name and well known in ballooning circles. He brought his grandson along and our three other passengers included a man of about my own age, another in his sixties and a young woman who had to be helped into the basket by her parents on account of her disability — which I later discovered to be cerebral palsy.

The teatime air was blue, warm and virtually windless. It had been a near-perfect forecast, with the only doubt being the potential for thunderstorms. These would be confined to the west of the Pennines apparently, if at all.

Looking back, the irony of the balloon ride was that, for the early part, my principal emotion was one of vague boredom and I seemed to be the only one of the paying party that didn’t have this as a life’s ambition. Martin, the guy of my own age (but hopefully the only similarity) was like an incarnation of Google Earth, analysing and calibrating himself as we climbed and drifted. He didn’t dominate the conversation exactly, more enlightened us with a continuous commentary of the landscape.

‘So if that’s Bishop, then we’ve got Shildon just behind us and Crook over there. The Wear goes through them trees, that’s why it seems to disappear for a while.’

Nobody had asked him about the disappearing Wear; he was good at answering his own questions. I felt a little sorry for Sarah. With her condition she needed to hold the edge of the basket most of the time, which Martin mistook for keenness and so engaged her the most. The other man, David, who described himself only as retired, kept his own company in a quiet corner.

I chatted mostly with Rodney the balloonist or played sticking out tongues with his young grandson as he peered out from under his granddad’s legs. But to say it was totally dull would be disingenuous as the view was excellent and it was interesting to plot the landscape against familiar landmarks and settlements. Having not thought much about it beforehand, one of the things that surprised me most was the complete lack of breeze or rather, because we were floating with it, the lack of sensation of breeze around us. Our quiet voices echoed around us as if we were in a concert hall, giving it a strange god-like acoustic quality.

‘Where do we come down?’ I asked Rodney. It hadn’t specified the landing point in the literature. My wife was hoping to bring the twins and get a photo as Daddy descended.

‘I’m not sure.’ Rodney smiled as he gave the balloon another burst of flame. ‘Sorry lad, just having you on. I used to get in trouble with the company because they would tell the customer one thing but the balloon and the weather might think differently. See, this evening, when we took off I’d have said it would be a nice simple southwesterly that would float us somewhere near Sedgefield, but up here it’s decided to pull us west. If you need to let someone know, I’d say we might get as far as Hamsterley.’

And on we drifted.

Of course, the serenity and the vague boredom couldn’t last. I wouldn’t be telling it otherwise. The clouds that were meant to restrict themselves to the far side of the Pennines began to appear westwards. I saw them from a distance and so did the very quiet, retired, David. He turned and raised an eyebrow when he saw me staring. Martin kept up his chatter obliviously and Sarah politely held her attention his way. Rodney the balloonist said nothing but his actions began to betray his thoughts, and his nervousness. He began to lose us height.

‘Not going all the way to Hamsterley then?’

‘Err, no. I don’t want to use up unnecessary gas just to get there.’

‘Nothing to do with those clouds then?’

He glanced at the others. Only David was listening. Rodney put his fingers to his lips.

I can only compare the next moment to when a plane is waiting to take off at the end of the runway. All potential energy and instability. Our basket shook, even before the cloud engulfment and Rodney was suddenly pulling safety harnesses out of a rucksack and handing them out.

‘Clip on,’ he said assertively, and with precision timing. A few moments later, we were suddenly launched upwards.

We felt the wind then. It plastered our hair downwards and we climbed inside the vortex. Where previously we had been surrounded in deep blue, we were suddenly launching up through billowing grey. A smokestack of maelstrom and volatility. And it wasn’t short-lived or pleasant. The basket began to tip, first one way and then the other. If it wasn’t for the harnesses then we wouldn’t have all stayed in. It pulled us upwards and sideways. Still we climbed and rocked, still there was no visibility. And then, despite the vertical wind, I became aware of the thinness of the air. How high were we? Rodney’s grandson was crying. Sarah shrieked once and then shut her eyes, her knuckles white on the rim of the basket. The men said nothing, equally white knuckled and barely more stoical.

‘How high are we?’ I shouted.

Rodney shook his head. ‘High,’ he mouthed. Maybe he mouthed something else. He looked up, my eyes following his. The balloon was beginning to lose some of its shape, like it had been kicked on one side.

‘What did you say?’

‘We’re not out of this,’ he said. ‘The worst is still to come. Everyone hold the central column.’

Martin helped Sarah across the middle, both stumbling.

‘Rodney! What the hell is happening? Have you experienced anything like this before?’

He shook his head but then nodded. ‘Morocco.’ His attention was taken by the balloon again, the dent in the side even more pronounced. We never did find out what happened in Morocco.

And then, just as it was beginning to get difficult to breathe, we were out; out of the seething mass of cloud, catapulted into pale blue above. The high atmosphere, dazzling and translucent.

Like two cars chasing each other into a bend, momentarily our basket caught up with the lifeless balloon and then suddenly we were weightless. Weightless for a good few seconds. The basket tipped and we all hung in suspension, tethered to nothing.

‘Holy Christ,’ said Martin, ‘we’re in space.’

‘No,’ said Rodney. ‘It’s the top of the vortex. Hold on, all of you.’

And then, beyond the clouds, we fell. A huge pendulum that ripped and shanked as it plummeted earthwards. Everyone screamed. Me, everyone, and then we gripped on for our lives.

I knew we were all dead at that point. The basket swung and fell and the cables holding us to the balloon creaked and throbbed as they scythed against each other. Somehow keeping his composure, Rodney attempted a burst of gas, but swinging around so wildly, never directly below the limp balloon for more than a split second, it was completely futile. We fell towards Earth, still far below.

Rodney ordered us all to take off our shoes. Holding on, we obeyed. It was only when he threw his pair over the side, did I realise why. He grabbed a couple of our rucksacks, a camera case, a thermos and threw those over too.

‘What the hell’s the point?’ I shouted. ‘There’s no weight in any of it.’

‘The boy has to stay,’ Rodney yelled. ‘He’s got his whole life.’

‘No-one’s asking him to jump!’

‘We’re too heavy.’

‘Okay, okay,’ I shouted back. Around me were hollow faces and vertical hair. ‘We’re all going to get out of this fine. This is County Durham, for Christ’s sake!’

Martin spoke up. ‘I can’t jump.’

‘No one’s asking you to mate.’

‘I can’t jump,’ he repeated. ‘I’m the only one who knows the code for the grid.’

‘What grid?’ I shouted against the wind.

‘The electricity grid. When we have a blackout, I’m the only one who can bring the power back up. All the way to Carlisle.’

‘This is not the time Martin.’

‘We need Rodney to bring us down, so that leaves you three.’

‘Martin, we are not having this conversation. And anyway, why the hell should a bloody autistic electrician be any more indispensable than the rest? Come on!’

I could have also said a junior pathologist was at least his equal, except I felt a hearty slap across my back.

‘Fellas, fellas, please!’

It was the retired David. The first thing he had said in ages.

‘Sarah has to jump,’ said Martin. ‘Look at us, we’re too heavy, swinging like this. It’s got to be her. What’s she got to offer the world?’

It had only been a warning slap across my back. Rightly, David then punched Martin in the jaw, knocking him off his feet. Only his harness saved him from flipping out. I’m sure we all looked at it and thought the same thing, fleetingly.

‘Rodney,’ said David, ‘are we going to make it, all of us?’

‘No, the weight is too much. We can’t stay stable long enough to fire up the balloon.’

‘And would it save the rest, seriously, if one of us was to leave?’

David said ‘leave’ like it was stepping off a bus.

‘Maybe. Well, yes.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

The next moment will live with me forever. As the basket continued to swing and the air rushed around us, David unclipped his harness and sat back on the rim.

‘Hold my hand please,’ he said to me. I stepped across and took it. ‘Rodney…tell me when.’

He looked up at the limp balloon. I realised what he was thinking. He needed to time his departure just right. So that the pendulum swing would be reduced and we’d have the best chance of stability to fire the flame into the balloon. I opened my mouth to say something but David stopped me.

‘It’s okay. Really.’

When Rodney said ‘now’, David leaned out at the top of the swing. He unhooked my fingers and rolled backwards and away like a scuba diver from the edge of a boat. We continued to swing two or three times more, each time noticeably slower and suddenly hot air was shooting towards a small hole in the balloon and just beginning to find its way inside.

No one said anything. We all just looked from one to another. Martin started to speak but then we heard another sound. A sound far below that sounded like a scream. Actually, it was more like a euphoric roar. We all peered over the side.

Far, far below David was skydiving. Whether he had done it before, I didn’t know, but from where we were, his technique looked perfect. And he was roaring. From hundreds of feet above it was obvious that his cries were filled with adrenalin and pleasure.

I saw David again five days later. I hadn’t wanted to and promised myself I wouldn’t get involved, but when his sister came in to my department on the Thursday and asked for me specifically, I couldn’t say no.

I met her in the relative’s waiting room whilst the orderlies brought David’s body out from storage.

‘Thank you for meeting me. You were up there with him weren’t you?’

‘Yes, he was incredibly brave.’

‘But you understand now why he did it.’

I told her I did. My senior colleague had discovered the cancer whilst doing the autopsy. It was impossible to miss. It still didn’t lessen his courage however. She told me a bit about her brother. David had never married, living in Southern Africa most of his working life before being forced out by Robert Mugabe. Before she pulled back the sheet, she asked whether he was recognisable.

‘Yes, amazingly so. He managed to find a field with hay bales piled high and landed on his back. The impact killed him instantly of course, but his front remained almost unscarred. Remarkable.’

‘He was a great brother. I will miss him. He was keeping a list you know, one of those bucket things. Twenty things to do before you die. He didn’t show it to me but he would ring up after each new one was ticked off. Ballooning was number eighteen.’ She paused and fingered the corner of the sheet that covered him. ‘Shame he never got to finish it.’

I left her then, gave her the space she deserved. I waited outside and when she emerged a few minutes later, I hugged her before she left the building. I shed a few tears for the first time as I walked back along the corridors. Maybe they had been right. Maybe I had come back too soon.

Rachel, my senior colleague stopped me halfway.

‘John? Are you alright? Is the deceased’s sister still here?’

I shook my head. ‘Pity. We had a couple of effects to pass on. We’ll post them.’

I hadn’t realised. Rachel was holding a zip seal plastic bag. Inside was a smashed wristwatch and a crumpled sheet of paper. She opened the bag and passed me the contents.

On the paper, in impeccable handwriting, there was a numbered list of twenty things. It was untitled but by its nature, it was clear what it was. Number four: Read The Grapes of Wrath. Number twelve: Visit the cemetery at Ypres. Number eighteen: Ride a hot air balloon was unticked. I was tempted to do it myself, but then thought about his sister. It was a shame it was unfinished.

And then I looked again, at the remaining two.

‘Oh my goodness,’ I said.

‘What?’ said Rachel.

‘He did it. He finished the list!’ I looked up smiling. ‘Look. Number nineteen: Do a skydive. And number twenty: Donate my body to help someone else to live. He did it Rachel, he actually finished it.’

I ran back to the public area and out through the exit, managing to catch David’s sister just as her bus was arriving.

A nostalgic poem by Annette C. Boehm, taken from her debut poetry collection, The Knowledge Weapon, published by Bare Fiction.

Please accept this spirit
bottle as our gift.
Inside, the extracted specimen
has been carefully preserved.
Formalin may cause slight
hardening, changes in color,
perfect for such a soft body.
We’ve cut it wide open to show
it is constructed, like an egg,
of two concentric spheres.

The outside is synthetic
blue as you stomp through
anthills on a red dare, unscared,
run after him, into the under
growth, — you’re his,
you’re the wild one, you both
piss into the ravine.

Night comes with berry stains
on your shirt, your shorts
muddy, your knees black and glue
on your hands, arms marked
by brambles, lost ballpoint pens.

Inside, the smell of your father’s
repair shop, of soldering irons,
dust and grease and circuit boards
in a jungle of crates, blind vacuum
tubes and purple tins that clank, ready
to spill screws. You sit, tailor style,
between drips of lead
on the linoleum. Thirsty,
you reach out and drink.

A poem by Bethan Parker-Luscombe, providing a sweet snapshot from the halcyon days of an innocent youth. Illustration by Esra Røise.

Sticky haribo against my lips,
Stopping the words I wish to whisper,
In the darkness of the night
Giggles floating along the air,
Like musical notes,
The feel of smooth skin on hands
We hold as we run to the bathroom,
Too scared of ghosts and men wielding axes
To brush our teeth alone.
We unfold our hearts like diary pages,
To one another as we hide under sleeping bags,
Sheltered by the torch’s glow.

Now I wish I had those hands,
That heart and that crumpled hair
Spread over the pillow like a map,
The scent of excitement to
Flow into my heart, making it beat like
It once did, as in spotty pyjamas we huddled near,
Watching those grown-up films,
Back then, our only fear.

Roisín O’Donnell’s flash fiction piece explores the mystery, beauty and potential of an unborn child in the mother’s imagination. Illustration by Louise Pomeroy.

I used to imagine you as an astronaut. A rogue intergalactic agent who had escaped a despotic starship, and who was sheltering inside my belly like a dwarf planet, a tail-chasing comet, an unnamed nebula. It was some shock to find an astronaut hiding out inside me. I received your first coded astro-signal, a pink line on a white plastic stick. How will we manage? was my first thought, but I quickly realised that even NASA never had a secret astronaut like you. My little sputnik, from my mother ship I sang you songs of freedom, while for twelve weeks I navigated your rebellious cosmic arch.

Walking the city streets with an astronaut inside me, I dreamt up futures for you down to the colour of your hair. My North Star, my axis and my meridian, you wandered leaving finger-nail-sized footprints over my belly’s slowly expanding world. Breathing through umbilical tubes, you illicitly moon-walked my dark and unknown spaces. Down the pulsing lily slide of uterus to cervix. You set off bravely on a two-hundred-and-sixty-eight day trip. Your destination – life – uncharted territory into which you ventured. You jetted at light-speed towards a life that no one else had ever lived before.

Then on my bed sheet one morning, I found you’d left a sample of flowers from another planet. Nothing as violent as roses. Cherry blossom maybe or sweet pea crawling the summer terrace, waiting to bloom. In the Rotunda hospital, that soundless space on the monitor yawned inside my womb. The nurse stared at the black hole into which you’d floored us all by teleporting, without a trace. You’ll have another one soon, the nurse said, but she didn’t realise that rogue intergalactic zygotes are hard to find. As I sat on that high white bed, the nurse took my blood. I could have cut out my heart and handed it to her after you had left me sitting in the middle of a supernova. A silence that eclipsed my heartbeat like a new moon’s orb. Do you want a copy of the scan on disk? Sometimes it helps, the nurse said, but I shook my head, imagining you counting down to take off into the celestial heights.

I didn’t need a disk to remind me of your diverted space mission. In an aging, fading mint-green universe leaking light and gravity, our paths continue parallel through the chinks in space and time. In every waning and waxing phase of life, our two trails interlink like asteroids destined never to collide. I imagine you now as a satellite, trekking each night’s dark turnings, intercepting signals and beaming rebel poems from pole to pole. Smart and stubborn as Galileo, my little freedom-fighter, I see you aiming your silver skyrocket towards a full moon’s orbit of some undiscovered planet on a distant, troubled star.

The latest issue of Popshot can now be found within the walls of the highly reputable lifestyle retailer, Anthropologie.

We’ve long been fans of Anthropologie — an indefinable retailer that sells everything from clothing to homeware to beauty products to, as of a few days ago, Popshot. Sitting alongside lifestyle titles such as Kinfolkand Cereal, it’s the first literary magazine that the retailer has taken on.

Inside London, Popshot can be found at their Regent Street, Kings Road and Spitalfields stores, and outside of London, in Edinburgh, Bath and Guildford. If you’re passing, pop in and have a flick through our latest issue. Or if you don’t live anywhere near an Anthropologie store, pick up a copy direct from us or subscribe from £10 a year to receive three print issues plus complete digital access to all of our out-of-print editions.

Our fifteenth issue, featuring twenty pieces of stunning new writing that explore adventure in its countless forms; from the exhilarating to the frightening to the extraordinary. Spread across its pages, expect to find an alluring collection of illustrated poems and short stories that take us to the moon, the end of the world, a deserted cluster of islands, a lake in Mexico, a turbulent hot air balloon ride and an infant’s first encounter with language.

Words by Karen Jane Cannon, James Hatton, Abigail Hodge, Allie Jenkinson, Eleanor Pilcher, Jacqueline Saphra, Sophie Fenella, Drew Tapley, Frankie Kennedy, Pete King, Ash Huntley, Ethan Chapman, Luciana Francis, James Glossop, Georgia Oman, Karen Harvey, Marcus Smith, Joshua Schouten de Jel, Odette Brady and John Rowland.

Illustrations by Thomas Danthony, Tom Radclyffe, Oli Winward, Plantmonster, Adams Carvalho, Peter Locke, Stephan Schmitz, Matt Harrison Clough, Mitt Roshin, Dave Hänggi, Marie Bergeron, Cristian Fowlie, Marco Melgrati, Matthew Brazier, Paul Lacolley, Stuart Patience and Bren Luke.

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Inspired by the weather and dreams, Ash Huntley’s poem imagines the two intertwined, each telling the other’s story. Illustration by Phill Darlington.

Mesmerized by the moon
between slatted blinds,
sing yourself to sleep,
dream through waterfalls,
row over heavy clouds,
gasp when you disperse
as rain falling
into eyes and open mouths.

Let yourself be drunk in,
flow like blood
through earth,
veins of leaves,
fingers of a working hand,
pumping hearts.

And, when you wake
to the sun’s soft dawn,
eyes blurred by visions,
thunder in the distance,
clouds dimming the rays,
stand and peer
out the window.
Watch life
fall from the sky.

Isobel Dixon’s short yet powerful poem, taken from her latest collection entitled Bearings, laments the loss of her father.

It’s not just twins, identical,
who feel this way
(thinking as one),
same-egged, conjoined,
deep life-long linked
till hit and run –

or old age in my case:
not twinned, but fathered,
equally bereft.
Death, it seems, the fiercest
raider of identity,
for the survivor too – self’s theft.

Once genetic double,
mutual-celled;
equalled, answered, met –
you were almost only goodness,
I’m the damaged bit that’s left.

Having discovered how to bottle time, an elderly man begins to reject the value of his own creation in Laura Gabrielle Feasey’s short story.

Mr Dufour looked at the line of people; several days’ worth easily, perhaps even weeks. They snaked between the weighty columns of the room and bent out of the door. He couldn’t see the end of the queue outside, but he knew it was forever growing.

When he first started taking requests from his visitors, his heart said yes to almost every appeal. Dying parents that needed more time, lost children that required longer to be found, even the young at heart that weren’t ready to grow old. But with every yes he gave, a hundred more of the same would journey to his door, and with every granted wish, his creation would be forced into overdrive.

When Mr Dufour discovered the bottling of time he made a promise that he would never take it for himself, but hundreds of thousands of requests later, he was feeling weak and old. The skin on his hands was thinning, his spine was beginning to curve, and his once coarse black hair was now an unkempt tuft of grey clinging to a line between his ears at the back of his head.

Initially he thought he had changed the world for the better, but over time he came to realise that he had just made it more arduous. The further he prolonged life, the longer everyone needed to live, the more time he gave to those who were failing, the more they needed to succeed. The days he granted to the dying meant the diseases became more aggressive, the hours he presented to the needy made them less able to survive next time. It was this very morning that he noticed more of his hair scattered across his pillow, and he knew a dark cloud was lurking in the distance.

From his usual seat, Mr Dufour welcomed a frail old lady stood at the front of today’s line. She clung to a walking stick with her left hand, and her husband clutched the rest of her body from collapse. A clear tube was taped to her upper lip, and between them they wheeled a tank that made a noise every few seconds as she inhaled. She edged towards Mr Dufour a centimetre at a time, taking a moment to steady herself with every movement. She wanted just a few more weeks to spend with her beloved. Some precious days to hold his hand as they watched their favourite film, some evenings to view the sunset from their special place, a few hours to hear him read to her at night. Their faces were paved with the maps of a life well lived: laughter lines, frown folds, traces of memories both happy and sad. Mr Dufour recognised these only in others, his own face filled solely with deep trenches left by the weight of the world. The couple gazed at him expectantly, waiting for his decision, but certain it would be what they were hoping for.

‘No.’ Mr Dufour’s voice cut through the hollows of the room. Hurried whispers hacked at the fading reverberated refusal, whilst endless sets of confused eyes tore through his skull in a bid to see what was going on inside.

Weeks of rejections later and only the desperate continued to come to his door. But still Mr Dufour had to say no. Patients were wheeled in on beds, hopelessly clinging to their last hours, scientists came clutching details of impending discoveries, future leaders arrived with all the problems they didn’t have time to solve. But what he was waiting for never came.

Months later and Mr Dufour would only hear the footsteps of an impending appeal every few days. He started to grow tired, his back began to ache, his lungs were beginning to resist, and time became tedious in this chamber that was only filled with the sounds of his struggling breath between the silence.

His stores of time began to fill the space that was once overflowing with people. The golden cylinders spiralled towards the ceiling until he switched off his invention and sat frail in a room filled with potential, yet no one to help realise its possibilities. With a life devoted to this, he had no where to go, no one to see, and nothing to do besides being a servant to those who wanted the extra hours he could create.

Mr Dufour’s eyes grew heavier each day, and his heart soon followed. He started to doubt the existence of a request that was worthy, started to believe there was no reason for this mountain of time, until he heard the comforting sound of footsteps moving along the corridor towards his chamber. When their owner came into view he recognised her face. Through his clouded eyes he could make out her familiar gaze. It was so sad when he first saw it years ago, but today it was happy, today it was filled with promise.

The woman knelt down beside Mr Dufour and put her hands on his knee. ‘I know you don’t usually grant a request to someone more than once, but I think you’ve been waiting.’ She turned around and surveyed the room, taking in the towers of glistening canisters, each one a precious gift but with no one there to accept it. Mr Dufour wheezed as he tried to gain the strength to talk. ‘I know you. You were the first.’

‘And I shall be the last,’ she replied. She stood up then picked up the nearest cylinder, holding it between her hands. It hypnotised her just as it had many years ago, the clear glass filled with spiralling tendrils of time, almost whispering from within. ‘This has been waiting for one soul. One so precious that it’s the only one in the world that will ever be worthy of such a gift.’ She knelt down again and placed the canister into his lap, taking his hands and folding them around it. ‘For you,’ she whispered.

Mr Dufour knew that this is what he had been waiting for. He took in his blurred view of the room; it must have been filled with years. Years he had spent listening, creating and sacrificing; years he had never even left this building.

The woman bent down to pick up something she had placed on the ground before kneeling at his chair. She struggled to lift the long wooden handle, weighed down by the thick metal club at its end. When her eyes met his after gazing towards his creation, he understood. Holding it high in the air above the sacred machine she looked scared. ‘May I?’ she asked.

The corners of his mouth twitched – it felt like the first genuine smile he’d made for as long as he could remember. He nodded softly. ‘It’s time.’

We are now open for short fiction and poetry submissions for our forthcoming issue of Popshot on the theme of ‘Hope’.

Despite having been on our list of potential themes for a while now, there’s something that feels rather timely about the theme of Hope. Although the mainstream media would probably have you think otherwise, it’s not that these are dark times or that hope is needed any more than it has been in the past. This isn’t the first occasion that we’ve had the threat of a lunatic in charge of a major superpower. Or that Britain has been on the cusp of a possible European fallout. Or any other current cause for concern outside of world politics. But for something as inherently timeless as hope, there is something that makes it feel strangely opportune.

Hope treads an intriguing path between darkness and light, positivity and negativity. It is the ground for believing that something good may happen, typically from a place where it hasn’t. And that dynamic from bad to good, wrong to right, dark to light is why we’ve decided to name ‘Hope’ as the theme of our 16th issue — which is now officially open for literary submissions.

If you would like the opportunity to have your short fiction or poetry published and illustrated in the next issue of the magazine, find out the full submissions guidelines at our submit page.

A nostalgic poem by Melanie Whipman, looking back to the halcyon days of an endless childhood summer. Illustration by Lizzie Downes.

I still remember Southwick Beach.
Allowed out with the older girls.
The smell of the salt
And the tar and the rust
Of the boat yard gates.
The sting of hessian
Against yesterday’s
Sunburn. The gut-swirling
Freedom of four girls alone.
I remember the eyes
Of the cycling boys.
The slouch
Of their salt seared shoulders,
The casual drape of their hands
As they wheeled like circling gulls.
The white of Kim’s teeth
And her cautionary hiss
Not to look, not to stare, not to care.
I can still see the neat boundaries
Of their towels on the stones
And their careful grace
As they slipped off their clothes.
Their bikini’d confidence
As effortless and endless
As that long Summer day.

On June 2nd, the theme for our sixteenth issue will be announced and the doors will fling open for short fiction and poetry submissions.

We’ll be accepting short stories of up to 2,500 words and poems of up to 25 lines. To get a better idea of what we’ll be looking for, read the short article that our editor wrote in the lead up to literary submissions for our last issue. It points to a few standout pieces of writing from previous issues and attempts to verbalise our instincts for what makes for a truly great piece of writing.

The opening of submissions will be announced here in less than a week. Stay tuned to find out more and to get the best idea of the kind of work we publish in Popshot, pick up a copy of our latest issue or subscribe from £10 a year and receive three print issues plus complete digital access to all of our out-of-print editions.

Set in a dense woodland, Alex Eastlake’s short story follows a lost young man as he tries to find his way back to safety. Illustration by Pedro Semeano.

It was only minutes ago that Christopher could still hear the calls of the group. He’d stopped to take a picture of a toad, which had been following him briefly, and when he looked up, he was all alone. There was no real track through the woods, the guide knew the route; she had the compass. Panic was starting to draw in. Christopher felt that his cries seemed to be losing distance, as the woodland thickened. Barely any light fell through the thick canopy. Dense, stringy moss hung from the branches of the old oaks, and a damp smell of organic waste permeated throughout.

Seeing that he had precious few choices, Christopher pushed on through in the direction that he believed the group had headed.

From the corner of his eye, Christopher noticed, in the gap between two stunted trees, what looked like a building in a clearing. Seeing a solution to his current predicament, he crossed the clearing and approached the house. Whoever was living there was sure to have a phone; there was bound to be a track that would lead to civilisation. He knocked confidently on the door. A long time passed in silence, and he noticed that there was no clear break in the surrounding tree line; no visible track. He decided to try the bell that hung from an old rope in the eaves of the porch. The sound rang off into the clearing. A bird flew from a nearby tree, then all returned once more to silence. A light shuffling could be heard from inside, then the sound of a key in the door. Christopher thought that he should probably announce himself, to avoid alarm.

‘Hi. I’m really sorry to bother you, but I’ve strayed from my group. Can you tell me the way back to the village, or could I use your phone?’

There was no reply from within. The key still turned intermittently in the lock. Suddenly, there was silence, then a click. The door opened awkwardly inwards, catching on the curtain, which hadn’t been pulled fully across. A small, very old face peered out from behind the door.

‘Sorry to bother you. Could I use your phone?’ Christopher repeated.

The curious and searching face suddenly broke into a beaming smile.

‘Of course you can. I’m sorry for my delay in answering, as I’m sure you can see, we don’t have many visitors. We weren’t sure if we’d actually heard the knock, or imagined it. The mind starts to play tricks as time draws on.’ She placed a finger to the side of her head, and rolled her eyes. Christopher felt himself become instantly relaxed. ‘Please, come inside.’

Christopher stepped inside. The door closed firmly behind him with a click. He followed her as she shuffled through the dark corridor and into the kitchen.

‘Tea?’ she asked with a grin. ‘Oh, and this is Graham, though I call him Vic. I don’t really know why now, it just seemed perfect for him. Doesn’t he look like a Vic? Yes, Vic. You can call him Vic.’ Christopher turned and noticed, for the first time, the slumped and frail-looking figure sitting in the armchair, just beside the door.

‘Hello there,’ Vic said with a strained smile. His wheezing voice seemed laboured, so Christopher merely replied with ‘hi’.

‘So, tea was it?’

‘Please,’ Christopher replied, quickly scanning the surfaces for the phone. The old lady filled the kettle, then placed it onto the stove and took a seat. Christopher followed suit, and sat opposite.

‘Lost, did you say? Terrible situation to be in. I hate being lost. Though I rarely stray further than our clearing these days. Hard to get lost in your own back yard.’ She looked him up and down once more, studying him. ‘Won’t you have a scone, while we wait for the tea? I made them this morning.’ He obliged; they were delicious.

‘Alan!’ the voice from the chair wheezed. ‘Looks like him, eh?’

‘Certainly does Vic. I saw it as soon as I laid eyes on him. Sorry dearie, it’s just that you look so much like our grandson, Alan. We basically raised him, after his parents’ accident. He was so good to us. He looked after us. But there comes a day when wings must be spread. He still pops by, though the gaps between are increasing. Hold on, I’ll find a picture for you.’ She shuffled from the room. The kettle began its low whistle. Christopher didn’t feel it his place to remove it. He turned to Vic and smiled. The old man stared at him.

‘It’s a beautiful house you have,’ Christopher offered, feeling awkward. The low whistle slowly increased in pitch. Christopher looked once more for the phone. The old man looked at him and shook his head. The door knocked against the chair. The old lady re-entered the room holding out an old photo, warped at the edges. In her other hand she held a camera. The picture was of a guy of about Christopher’s age; the similarities ended there.

‘An absolute doppelganger, eh?’ The old lady looked so expectant. Christopher couldn’t bring himself to let her down with his true feelings.

‘Umm, yep.’ The kettle reached fever pitch. He looked from the old lady to the kettle. She just smiled at him. ‘Should I get that?’

‘Oh, if you would.’ Her smile broadened. He turned to the stove and from the corner of his eye, he saw her nod to Vic.

‘Do you mind?’ she asked. Christopher turned. She was holding the camera. ‘It’s a polaroid, so we can see the results immediately.’ Her smile broadened further, her head slightly tilting. Christopher was starting to become edgy.

‘No, go right ahead,’ he replied, trying to feign relaxation. A bright flash stole his vision. As the room faded back into place he noticed that she’d moved over to Vic, and was fanning the picture above his head. They both held him with their gaze. For the first time, Christopher noticed the stain on the edge of the Belfast sink. A spatter of blood. The old lady followed his gaze.

‘A pheasant, dearie,’ she said, almost disarmingly coolly. ‘We have a trap. It was a kind of parting gift from Alan.’ Vic coughed. She shot a sidelong look at him, and then melted back into that Cheshire cat smile.

‘So, you said you have a phone?’ Christopher asked, trying to appear nonchalant.

‘Oh yes, of course. I’d almost forgotten that you’re lost. You know you seemed almost part of the family.’ She revealed that smile again. He was beginning to loath it. ‘Yes, it’s just up the stairs on the landing.’

He made his way from the room, and up the dark hallway to the stairs. The walls were dotted with pictures of the young man, Alan. He made his way to the top of the stairs and found the phone — an old relic of a thing. He lifted the receiver and heard a tone. For a minute, he thought he was about to lose hope. He swung the round dial around, to engage zero. No luck, just the same dial tone. He tried again, with the same result. He tried the other numbers. They all worked, except the nine; the nine and the zero. Without a zero, it would be impossible to make any calls. As he stood in frustration, he took a closer look at the portraits on the walls. He couldn’t be sure, but the face in one of the photographs didn’t look like the picture of Alan that the old lady had shown him. He looked to another picture. In the dim light it was hard to tell, but no, he was sure. It was a different face. He looked to another, then another. They all had different faces. They were different people. The only similarity, in fact, was the feigned look of relaxation. His heart started to race. He headed back downstairs to the kitchen.

‘The phone is broken,’ he said, his voice wavering. He realised he was talking to an empty room. His head began to spin. He looked to the table. Beside his half eaten scone was the photo, where he stood in feigned relaxation. He was practically on the wall already. His vision began to wobble; the scone, it must be. He felt his knees buckle, as he tried to steady himself on the edge of the table. He heard a click from behind him, then a shuffle.

‘Yes Vic, he really is a spitting image. Our saviour from the woods.’

Sheila Jacob’s short poem addresses the difficult birth of her first child and the complex relationship that followed. Illustration by Leib Chigrin.

Your drowsy eyes were ringed by bruises
matching those where two doctors
and Kielland’s forceps prised us
apart, our struggle for separate worlds
so ferociously induced
we spent half a lifetime
plaiting a slippery bloodstained rope
to haul each other back.

Jeremy Colangelo’s short story tells the curious tale of a man who falls into a deep pit and spends the rest of his life in freefall. Illustration by Shaun Lynch.

It was an early morning in June when Alfred Arnold, sanitation engineer for the Helheim Digging Company, fell into a deep pit. He had slipped on the edge, and he screamed as he fell. But after an hour his throat began to burn and soon he stopped. He was a good worker, a dignified man, and to scream like a lunatic at such a triviality was beneath him.

Alfred tried to climb back up, but he was falling fast now, and the pit’s walls were too smooth to hold. He decided that it was impossible, but sometimes he would try again. It was like a weekly mid-life crisis.

The pit was very deep. A machine was digging it down almost for forever. They tried to make a forever pit, the digging company, as their crowning achievement (for no digging company had ever made one before), but they hadn’t yet. The exact depth was very close to infinity — infinity -1 if you like — and still, at the bottom, the machine is digging.

Poor Alfred, he knew about the pit. His union had told him everything while they were on strike the year before. They were trying to get hand rails. Oh well.

So Alfred knew that he would fall until he died. He tried starving to death to avoid the ‘splat’, but he couldn’t make himself. People liked to throw things down the hole, bits of their lunch, their scraps. Alfred, you see, had to wear weighted clothing as part of his job. It involved jumping into fluid tanks to fix clogged pipes. Most of the fluids were very dense, like molasses, so most people were too light to dive. There was depilated uranium woven into Alfred’s clothes to keep him at the bottom. Alfred, then, had a lot of inertia, so he fell faster than almost everything else. The food was old by the time he reached it, but still safe to eat. It was the preservatives.

Other people had fallen down the pit too. One day, Alfred met Angela. This was a few years later. Angela had come to the factory for ‘take your kid to work day’ and had slipped. The company paid her father a small settlement and transferred him to Iceland – which had been best for everyone. Angela was twelve when she fell, and now she was thirty. She wasn’t wearing weighted clothing, so she fell more slowly than Alfred. A bag of marbles in her pocket kept her going fast enough to catch food. Alfred gave her his shirt so they’d fall at about the same speed. When they were bored, they made love like eagles.

Anton was born soon after. It became hard to feed three people and Anton was always bored. Thankfully, someone had dropped a case of books and a puppy down the pit. Alfred and Angela read the books, and little Anton rode the puppy’s skeleton like a rocking horse. When Annette was born, he had trouble sharing with her. Luckily, they found a dead cat. Now the girl had a toy too. But they were still hungry.

Alfred began sneaking away some of his food during meals to hide it in a hole in the book case. When Angela went to sleep, he gave it to the kids. Angela didn’t like it, she wanted everyone to get enough food and had set strict rations – she was smart like that. But the children loved their daddy, and he loved them too. That’s why he starved to death, for love.

Everyone was very sad, especially Angela. They took the weighted clothing off Alfred’s body and let it fly upwards. He hit a discarded propane tank and burst into flames. A viking funeral.

The children were eight and four. They missed their father still, though he had been dead for a year by then. At bedtime, Angela would tell stories of the surface. She taught Anton to read with the books from the shelf. Annette tried to eat one. She bit off a chunk and choked to death. Another funeral. They sent her up with the cat.

It was just the two now, mother and son. Anton was a clever little boy. He said that he didn’t believe in his mother’s surface stories. They were just to keep him from misbehaving. Those horrid tales of work and school and booster shots, none were real. He was a very smart boy, but he was also very stupid.

They had an argument, Anton and Angela. Anton was twenty by then. He decided to go off on his own. He found an iron spike that had once been part of a threshing machine and jammed it into the wall. His fall slowed, and his mother was soon deep below him. Depressed, she stopped eating and removed her weights, and Anton saw her corpse fly by a few weeks later.

Anton was alone. He flew down the deep pit and thought many lonely thoughts. He wondered about the pit. Was it a god? Was it the belly of a worm? Was it his fears and hates made manifest? What of the food? Who gave it to them? Men dropping strange and random things into a dark hole, or manna from the unseen sky?

Anton thought still more thoughts. He found an empty notebook and a pen and he wrote his ideas down. When he was finished, he let it fly above him. Maybe someone would find it?

Anton never saw anyone else. He lived to 108 years old and didn’t see a single other human being. Anton could have lived forever. Or, at least, forever -1. Philosophers always live a long time. But then something happened that Anton never expected, a singular event which pre-empted his long and fruitful life. Anton hit the bottom.

Home to some of the most prestigious poets in its long publishing history, The London Magazine is now open for submissions to its annual poetry prize.

First established in 1732, The London Magazine has a long and highly illustrious history. Not only is it one of the few magazines that can claim it had to temporarily cease publication because its editor was shot in a duel, it has also published original works from the likes of H. G. Wells, Sylvia Plath, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ted Hughes and Harold Pinter.

For its annual poetry prize, The London Magazine is looking for previously unpublished poems of up to 40 lines. There is no criteria as to the theme, form or style of the poems, but they are looking for diverse work which is not afraid to innovate and startle. The competition will be judged by Andrew McMillan, whose debut collection Physical was the first ever poetry collection to win The Guardian First Book Award, and Rebecca Perry, who gained a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and a T S Eliot Prize shortlisting for her debut collection, Beauty/Beauty.

To put your work forward for a first prize of £300, second prize of £200 and third prize of £150, plus publication in the magazine itself, head to The London Magazine website for full details. Submissions close on June 30th 2016.

A short poem by Karen Harvey, inspired by early memories of oppression and a longing for freedom and adventure. Illustration by Matteo Gallo.

How I longed for the
weightlessness of flight,
to feel the wind in my hair
and the breeze against my cheeks,
but you, were determined
to clip my wings.

I can still see us now.
You staring down at me
with the shears in your hand
and me, curled up
on the floor
playing dead.

Set in the aftermath of the Great War, an exclusive excerpt from Aliya Whiteley’s brand new genre-defying story of fate, free will and the choices we make in life.

I cannot sleep.

Today I overheard Mrs Barbery in the street gossiping with the other mothers. She said, ‘He isn’t a real man, of course, not after that injury.’ I walked past and pretended not to have heard. He limps, a little, but it does not constrain his activities. Sometimes I wonder what is under his shirt and waistcoat. I imagine something other than flesh to be found there: fine swan feathers, or a clean white space. No, Mr Tiller is not what passes for a real man in these parts, and all the better for that.

My feelings for him have infused every aspect of my existence. My heart leaks love; it seeps out and gaily colours the schoolyard, the village green, the fields I walk and the books I read. My father comes back from his work at times and finds me in the armchair by the front parlour window, curled up in thoughts I could never dream to share with him. It has become a ritual with him saying, with a smile, that I have a talent for wool-gathering and that he’ll sell me to the shepherds.

My mother sometimes brings me tea, creeping into the parlour as if she does not quite belong there. She bears a curious expression in these moments, perhaps best described as a mixture of pride and worry. It troubles me. I think she knows my mind, even though we have never spoken of it. She was once an uneducated version of me, of course – the raw clay from which I am formed. But then she returns to the kitchen, and there she is a different woman, bustling to and fro, laying out plates for the workers at the long oak table. The workers are the remains, and the reminder, of the war, but they work hard, as does everyone on the farm, including the animals. Apart from me. I am marked for something else.

This is a different age, a new era, and my feelings are all the finer and brighter for my luck in having the time to explore them. The upward path of humanity, out of the terrible trenches, will come from the cultivation of the mind. And women will have an important role in this, as teachers, as mentors, to the exceptional men who will grow from the smallest boys, with our guidance.

Once I asked my father if, once all the young men were dead, they would send women to fight at the front, and he said I had the mother of all imaginations. Well, that is what is needed now. After such a war people must think new thoughts, give birth to lofty emotions, and love is surely the best place to begin. I am in love. I am in love: Shirley Fearn, landowner’s daughter, is filled to the brim with love for Mr Tiller.

Look how love coats me in a shiny slick that no grim thought can penetrate. It lights the dark, and distinguishes my being. I am set alight by it. Love no longer belongs only to Byron and his like – to the real men, as Mrs Barbery would have it; it is now the province of schoolgirls and cripples. It is, for the first time, universal.

Besides, I am not so very young, and could have left school two years ago if my father wished it. I am about to turn 17 years of age, and Mr Tiller only limps a little.

Outside my window, the owls screech and the leaves of the trees murmur and hush. I can picture the branches swaying in the breeze. The fields have been sown and the crops are growing, slowly pushing from their hidden roots. The worms and moles are there, burrowing blind, busy busy busy in the earth. Such thoughts of dampness in the dark quiet my mind, and lead me down to my sleep.

The land is green and sweet. The walk to school – a few miles from the farm to the outskirts of the village – is easy in late spring, and these are my father’s fields upon which I tread. I grew up with them, and I know their rotations and their long, ploughed lines. In summer they can be headstrong, and fight my progress along their hedges with thistles, nettles and squat, tangling weeds. When winter comes they turn into a playful mess of mud, determined to swallow my boots. In such weather, by the time I reach the school I feel as if half the field has come with me; on one occasion Mr Tiller looked at me and said, ‘Out!’ upon my arrival, before I made a state of the flagstone floor. The others laughed when I sat outside and tried to prise the knots from my laces with frozen fingers, blushing at my own incompetence. But Mr Tiller came out to me then. He knelt by me, and helped me to cast off my boots and forget his harshness.

Undoubtedly I prefer these spring days. It’s easier to dream when the mud does not drag me down.

Here is my plan: Mr Tiller and I will marry, and I will become a schoolmistress to raise the finest generation yet known to England.

Well, to be precise, that is the culmination of the plan. First I must go to Taunton and earn my teaching certificate, and I will cram all life into those years so that I can settle with ease when I am married and I return to the village. I would hate to have regrets. Bitterness in a teacher can spoil a pupil, I think.

The last field ends in a stile that intersects with the new road, and I hop down upon it and follow it onwards. It’s easier walking here, but I dislike the sound my boots make on the stone. The village is over the curve of the next hill. I have friends there, other girls my age, but I have yet to find a close companion of the heart. I want to find others who dream, like me. Or perhaps I would rather that this weakening need for company would pass. I do not think mingling with lesser minds would be good for my intentions.

I crest the hill, and there is the village. It seems quiet from here but it will already be alive with tradesfolk, meeting and murmuring about their daily business. I shake out my skirts, square my shoulders, and walk down to the yard, looking neither left nor right.

The younger children are skipping, singing songs. The clock in the steeple ticks down to nine o’clock. I go inside, taking care to wipe my boots clean on the mat, and find the classroom empty, the blackboard wiped, the slates not yet set out upon the desks. Mr Tiller is late. This is not unheard of, and it does not worry me. I go into the small store room, where the rows of shelves hold chalk, beaten books, rulers and other delights of the teaching trade. I take out the slates and start to set them out on the desks, looking at the messages children from then and now have carved into the wood. They must all leave their mark somehow upon this place, even if only their letters remain.

The clock bell strikes, and the children come in. There are 12 of us, of varying ages; I am the eldest. Our desks have been allocated according to age and ability. I sit at the back, on the left, next to the spinning globe of the world – a position of responsibility, since the younger children would spend all day with their grubby little hands upon it. Behind me is a shelf that bears the bound works of great minds that have gone before. ‘If you are seeking inspiration,’ Mr Tiller once told me, ‘take down a book from that shelf, Miss Fearn. You have a keen mind. Let the books take your intellect to far-off places, and who knows what you may find?’

The children are noisy today, even the older ones. The blacksmith’s boy, Daniel, enters with a yell, and sees my frown.

‘I tripped on the step,’ he says.

I take a breath and move to the front of the classroom, putting the blackboard to my back and pulling myself up straight. They pay no attention, so I clap my hands together. They find their desks and fall quiet.

I am about to speak. I am sure some words of wisdom are about to flow from me, to prove that my dream of a scholarly vocation is a worthy one. Wait – nothing is coming—

Wait—

‘Mr Tiller says go home!’ shouts Jeremiah Crowe, who is nothing but trouble, and the children scream. The smallest ones even start to get out of their seats.

‘No, Mr Tiller does not,’ says that familiar voice, the one that bolsters my faith, and he limps into the room at speed, to stand beside me. ‘You are too impertinent, Crowe, as ever, and you’ll stay late to clean the slates tonight. Right. Let us settle ourselves and prepare for learning about one brave adventurer, Marco Polo, and the wonders of the Orient.’

What should I do? Should I sneak back to my place as if I never tried to take his? I wait for a word from him, but nothing comes; he turns to the blackboard and picks up chalk from the wooden lip of the frame. He wears no coat today, and I watch the muscles of his back bunch together under his shirt as he writes, marking out the M, the A, the R.

‘Sir,’ calls the irrepressible Crowe. ‘You haven’t taken register, sir.’

‘I thought Miss Fearn would have completed that task. Well, no matter, she can rectify the oversight now.’

I am raised high, and all the little faces turn up to me as I move to the teacher’s desk as in one of my dreams. I call out the names and mark the list. We are all here. From despair to triumph in a moment – how unpredictable my life is! I finish the task and look up to find Mr Tiller smiling at me, an expression not just of pride in a student, but perhaps in a future companion? I am moved beyond delight. It is as if he too has pictured our future, and found it pleasing.

I sit in my room, listening to the men eat their supper at the kitchen table below, and compose my letter to the newly founded Municipal Teacher Training College for Women.

I write of how I am inspired to teach by my own instructor, and how I am already of use to him in the classroom. I write of my knowledge of Lamb’s Shakespeare, of Keats, of my understanding of the parts of Chaucer that are considered suitable reading, and of how I excel at the multiplication of large numbers. I am proud of how the passion within me becomes visible on the page.

I keep writing, and find myself explaining thoughts that solidify into purpose. I explain how cultural beauty only enhances our connection to the natural world, and is only a refinement of our urges to walk among flowers, touch tree trunks, squint up at fierce sunshine: this is all true learning, too. Those from farming stock can possess as fine a brain as an Oxford scholar, if he is shown the way to use it. My handwriting falters in the excitement of elucidating such ideals, but still, it is an impressive letter in its fullness. I have stated my case.

I will post it tomorrow.

I light my candle as evening falls. The workers are loud, and merry. I will read for a while, as I listen to the hum of their conversation through my floorboards.

I post the letter and receive only a mild interrogation from Mrs Crowe at the counter.

‘That’s tuppence. Does your father know you’re writing to colleges?’ she says. She wears a white ruffled blouse with an air of superiority, but she looks swollen and pained in the way that I have noticed happens to many women in the village once they have had many babies. The two youngest Crowes, a toddler and a very little one with jam on its chin (at least I hope it is jam, and she is not raising carnivorous primitives who work at raw meat to be sated! There goes my imagination again), sit in the post office window and wave at the people who pass. The rest of the Crowes will have already departed for school, no doubt, in the cleanest clothes they could muster. I will be late myself if this conversation continues for much longer.

‘At this stage I am only enquiring, Mrs Crowe,’ I say. ‘Exploring all possibilities.’

‘Are you now?’ she says as she puts the letter under the counter. ‘That schoolmaster will have a lot to answer for if he’s putting grand thoughts in your head.’

‘Mr Tiller has not encouraged me,’ I say, and that is the truth. I know honesty shines from my face. Mrs Crowe looks confused, then smoothes her ruffles. The toddler starts to bang on the window, and as she moves to retrieve him I take the opportunity to flee.

The day passes in the ongoing company of Marco Polo. What an adventurer. How wonderful it must have been to be Polo’s teacher: to encourage his ingenuity, his desire to see all, learn all, and hear about it upon his return.

‘Pay attention, class,’ says Mr Tiller, ‘even you, Miss Fearn. I see you at the back there, daydreaming about your own visit to China one day.’

I catch his eye and say, ‘No, Mr Tiller, I was not dreaming of that at all.’ Let him make of it what he will. I like the confusion that springs into his eyes, and the way he tilts his head.

The hours pass slowly. I watch him for the rest of the day, feeling quite certain that I’m doing the right thing, and that he needs to know of my plans. Finally, the school day is done. When the children are gone, I loiter, and Mr Tiller looks to me with raised eyebrows. His voice is that of a schoolmaster. ‘Go along, then, Shirley.’

This is not what I want. But I find I must be given a window of opportunity to speak as a woman, not as a child. He is using his superior tone against me. I look at his hands wrapped around the worn textbook he holds. I see him tremble, and then I understand. He is trying to keep me away.

‘Yes, sir,’ I say, and I leave the schoolroom. I emerge into the late afternoon sunshine alone, with the children already scattered for home, or maybe to the bakery to see if Mr Clemens will part with any of his stale buns for no more than a smile.

I will soon be expected back home, but I find I cannot turn in that direction, because I have seen Mr Tiller’s trembling fingers and I know I am the cause. I cannot think of anything but those fingers. The village is unaware how much has changed in the last few moments, and how much I am changing within it. I feel strong, powerful, ripe with possibility. I feel it. I walk out of the yard and turn away from the road home, walking with what I hope is the air of a girl on an errand with every right to be travelling in an unexpected direction.

I was right. There are a handful of girls and boys in the bakery. I spy them through the window, but they are too preoccupied with badgering Mr Clemens’ daughter, Phyllis, to see me. Along the row of shops, I cast glances through each window in turn and only see myself, reflected. I am unremarkable, surely, from the outside. Why would anybody look twice, unless they knew me well and could see the change upon me through my white skin, lurking within?

My luck runs out at the church. The wall that runs along the graveyard is high, but not high enough; I catch sight of Daniel Redmore’s golden hair, and before I can duck he has turned his head. His eyes are the brightest blue I have ever seen them, and his face is red and swollen. He is crying.

I walk on before he can decide what to say to me. I know what he’s doing, anyway. He stands at his mother’s grave. She was kind and good, and lost to the influenza not so very long ago, so I suppose a boy can cry for her still. There’s no shame in it. Although it is different for women, I know that my mother still weeps for the children she bore after me. They were born not breathing, yet were perfectly made to the point of having hair and fingernails that she trimmed herself, and now she keeps those trimmings in a mother-of-pearl box upon the mantelpiece. They do not lie in the churchyard, as they could not be baptised, so my father buried them in the kitchen garden from boxes he made himself.

I don’t weep for these lost siblings. I never knew them, even though they all have names: Thomas, Arnold, Henry, Frederick. I feel no particular sadness for them beyond the pain they have caused my mother. But I can appreciate how great a loss Daniel feels, greater still than my mother’s; after all, he knew the intricacies of his own mother’s spirit, and had grown within its shelter. She was a fully grown tree, her boughs curved around him. She was not simply the first sprouting of an acorn.

I hurry on, and decide that I will not tell a soul that I caught him crying. In return I have to hope that he will not mention my passing presence outside the church. This could be our unspoken pact, if he has the sense to understand it.

Past the church there is the row of cottages where the families that no longer have fathers live by the grace of the parish, squeezed into small rooms with Mrs Colson and Mrs Wells taking in washing when they can get it, and then the road curves around, the hedges spring up high, and there is a loosely pebbled lane leading off, downwards, in the direction of the river.

The trees grow over this lane, forming a darkened tunnel, and the birdsong is loud at this hour. My boots skip over the pebbles with purpose as I approach my love’s cottage. His house is a little way from the village, where the old sisters Wayly once lived. They died within a day of each other, from the influenza. At the funeral the Reverend Mountcastle said he thought they never wanted to be parted from each other, but I thought of how they never served a cup of tea without a saucer, or a slice of cake without a fork, and simply considered themselves to be a matching pair for the sake of neatness.

The garden is not so neat now. Mr Tiller is not a gardener; well, why would a man grow seedlings when he can nurture souls? And I like this wild tangle that protects his door. The roses, no longer trained, do not follow the latticework, but grow out at stubborn angles from the wall to escape the shadow of the house. And the vegetable patches, one on either side of the path, have the rocky clumps, weeds and stones of a wilderness upon them. Where do these stones come from? My father’s fields fill up with them throughout the year, and they must be removed come the spring. It’s as if they work their way up through the earth at night.

The grasses have grown so thick around the walls of the house that I have to push them aside, but at least there are no nettles. I am able to work my way around the corner of the house and then crouch down without worrying about stings and scratches. I find a hiding place; I am ensconced amongst green leaves with the delicate fronds tickling my ears and teasing my hair. I will have to comb my hair out carefully later. Later, when I return to my room and face my father’s wrath for my lateness, I will be a changed woman.

With time to waste, I must consider my plan. Do I have one? No, I am being impetuous, and this is not how I pictured it. But he would not give me the opportunity earlier and so I must make my own chance to explain my feelings to him. He cannot escape from this place; this is his last resort. Besides, I like that word – impetuous. What is the point of being young if one cannot attach the adjective ‘impetuous’ to it?

There are too many questions in my mind and I cannot still my thoughts. They germinate, sprout and form beanstalks that raise up into the sky. I am picturing a wedding in summer with a cornflower and sweet William posy to hold when I hear the door open, and then close.

How could I have missed his footsteps on the path? I thought I would have time to steel myself at his approach, but he is close now, so close, and already in his cottage.

I cannot breathe, but I must. I cannot. I listen for him; I am a rabbit, with tender ears quivering. Has he headed straight for his kitchen? I picture what my father does when returning from work: leaving on his boots, to my mother’s disapproval, and looking in the pantry for something to eat before seating himself in a chair before the kitchen fire. I can envisage any man might act in such a fashion, although maybe Mr Tiller brings down a book from a shelf and actually does unlace his boots and place them tidily by the door, as a gentleman should.

I hear a scrape close by – the sound of a chair along the kitchen floor, perhaps? He is sitting so close to me. If I stood up now, he would see me. I would be as a vision to him, and a wild one at that, with ferns in my hair and a flush to my cheeks that is far from ethereal. I can feel my face burning with heat, although I am not ashamed. It is the excitement of the moment, but how could I persuade him of that? That I feel no embarrassment in my love? He would think me young and stupid, and possibly the instigator of a ridiculous prank, which would be unbearable.

No, I should work my way back to his front door so that I can straighten my shoulders, throw out my chest, and bang upon it with purpose.

But I cannot do that, not when I do not know what my welcome would be. I must see his face first, just a glimpse of it; I must see the man, not the teacher. Then I will be able to address the man as an equal, no matter if he tries to play the teacher with me.

I can imagine him eating methodically, possibly upon a dried apple or a wedge of cheese, with his mind on his book of Wordsworth’s verse, or on the lesson for tomorrow. He will be lost in thought. He will not see if I lift my head, just a little, until I can spy him through the window. He will not see.

I shift to my knees amidst the ferns, relieving the ache in my thighs, and then inch my way upwards so my view through the window changes: the low black beams of the kitchen from which hang dusty copper pans; the top row of serving plates upon the tall dresser; an ink drawing of a robin, the eye a black watchful bead that spies me, hanging in a gilt frame from the wall. Then a crown of brown hair. I raise myself just a little more, balancing on the balls of my feet, and I see his noble face, worthy of a bust from antiquity with the severe slope to the nose but a gentle draw to the eyebrows that softens all expressions. His countenance is cast downwards, deep in private reflection. He does not eat. He sits in a pool of yellow light from the lamp beside him at the table, and he slowly unbuttons his waistcoat. Still his fingers tremble.

I am imprisoned by my love for him. I cannot look away. He is unguarded; he thinks he is alone, but I am here. I am here! I belong to him, and I cannot be freed from the glamour his slow unbuttoning casts upon me.

He opens up his waistcoat and then commences upon the studs of his shirt sleeves. Then he reaches behind his slim, long neck and removes his collar. All the studs are placed upon the table. He slumps, as if these actions have allowed relaxation to come to him. Yes, this is the man. This is whom I wish to marry.

I should move to the door and knock, say my piece before the perfect moment is lost, but then I see his chin raise up once more, and he is about the business of his remaining buttons.

I have seen my father in his vest often enough, but it is not a vest that Mr Tiller begins to expose. It is skin.

No, it is not skin. It is the puckered edge of a thick scar, white and ridged at the hollow of his throat, leading down, and I remember what Mrs Barbery said – that he was not a real man. I am afraid of what I am about to see.

He unbuttons all the way down to the line of his trousers, pulls open the leaves of his shirt front, and then I see the scar is not a scar. It is a pattern revealed, which decorates the entire of his chest and stomach, and lower; I cannot comprehend so many lines and angles, made in his flesh. Except in the centre of the pattern, where there is no flesh at all. There is rock.

How can it be rock? It is solid, and juts forth from the bottom of his ribcage, making a mountain range in miniature, sunk into the body in places and erupting forth in others. There are seams of a bright material within it that catch the lamplight, and glitter, delicate and silvery as spider thread.

Mr Tiller places his hands upon the rock and throws back his head, his eyes closed, his mouth open. He forms words that I cannot hear; perhaps he does not speak them aloud. I am struck by the thought that he is communing with it.

He opens his eyes.

He sees me.

This is an extract from ‘The Arrival of Missives’, the latest story from Aliya Whiteley, published by Unsung Stories. Pick up a copy of the book at the Unsung Stories website.

A haunting story by Stephen Hargadon which sees the purchase of an old book lead to devastating consequences. Illustration by Kate O’Hara.

‘Good choice. It’s a lovely edition and a very fine story.’

The speaker — presumably the owner, or some lesser representative of the bookshop into which Max Lorimer had drifted — was a man with grey, frizzy hair and yellow teeth, who seemed to have appeared from nowhere. A dusty creature, he might have been one of Cruikshank’s caricatures come to life. Perhaps this was Mr Perkins himself, the man whose name was above the shop. He had a twinkly, ingratiating manner, as if proffering something for the weekend, and wore a tatty black jumper under a many-pocketed waistcoat of the kind used by anglers. Lorimer noticed that there was a bulge in every pocket, with pens sticking out, so that the garment resembled a collection of pencil cases stitched together.

‘Only came in yesterday,’ said the bookseller. ‘First edition of course. Dapper jacket, great design. Highly collectible. Sturdy binding, deckled edges. It’s even signed by the author herself. Look. Isn’t that wonderful? A gem! Of course, such details affect the price. Five, ten years ago, I couldn’t give her away. You’d have found her in the 50p box out the front. But she’s undergoing something of a reappraisal, a revival. I wish I could have a revival. There was a nice piece in the TLS. Of course, the cultists never deserted her. They kept the faith.’

‘Cultists?’

‘Figure of speech. The fans. The devotees.’

Max Lorimer, dapper in light tweeds and a pale pink shirt, considered the book and then the bookseller.

‘It’s a handsome thing,’ he said. ‘Handsome price too.’

‘As I say, it’s signed. She was something of a recluse, I believe. I’ve never seen a signed edition before. And the condition, well, you can see for yourself it’s almost immaculate. A touch of discolouration, you’d expect that, some slight foxing, but otherwise top notch.’

‘Could you do a deal?’ asked Lorimer.

‘Eighty pounds is the lowest I can go.’

‘I’ll have a think about it.’

‘Right you are. I’ll be over there if you need me. Lots of sorting to do. Just had a consignment of Penguins.’

The man, seeing that Lorimer was not going to comment on the Penguins, scuttled past Philosophy, turned right into Local History, and sat down at a desk in the corner, where he began to inspect a stack of orange spined paperbacks, muttering to himself.

Lorimer, satisfied that he would not be interrupted again, turned the book in his hands and flicked through its pages. It was indeed a fine edition. Through The Flowers by Felix Colyer — the pseudonym of Phyllis Gauld. Published by Lemmer and Haughton in 1952, with illustrations by Harris Quinnell. The jacket, also by Quinnell, showed a delicate, rather romantic drawing of a wildflower meadow, framed by vibrant geometric patterns. It was a peculiar combination, but it worked. The lettering was bold and white. Looking closer, Lorimer saw that at the centre of each flower was an eye, some of which were shedding tears of blood. From a distance, these tears looked like petals. The effect was most unsettling.

The inscription on the frontispiece was similarly odd, for it was signed Phyllis not Felix, and contained a rhyme.

To one of the best –
Through the flowers my darlings go,
Year by year their flowers grow
All my love – Phyllis xx

Lorimer was surprised that the zealous little man hadn’t mentioned the personal nature of this inscription. The book was a great find. A charming and, no doubt, highly desirable edition. Was eighty pounds too much? Lorimer did not know and he did not have the appetite to look it up on his phone. To do so would sully the magic of the discovery, for he already knew that Valerie would love the book.

The author of Through The Flowers was a writer of strange tales and macabre, sometimes brutal fantasies. She had a penchant — in her fiction, if not in life — for doing terrible things to children, and this talent gained her a small but committed following. She drowned her little folk in baths or hanged them from horse chestnut trees. She left them alone in basements and attics, among the musty and discarded effects of adults. Colyer’s was a peculiar style: chatty, rambling, seemingly inconsequential. Her finest work was built around ‘a web of sullen trivialities’, as the critic Peter French put it, and the reader would realise too late that they had been caught, at which point spiderish Colyer delivered her venom. Another expert likened her prose to ‘the tea-and-biscuits chitchat of a maiden aunt, if maiden aunts still exist, which they do in Colyer’s world, if only to be chopped up into several pieces.’ Her output was small, and the novella Through The Flowers was perhaps her most accomplished and original work, though not her most popular.

Lorimer looked through the book again. The illustrations were delightful, he had to admit. Eighty pounds was a lot of money for a book, even for Lorimer, who could well afford it, for he made a decent living as a freelance logistics consultant. Never an avid reader of fiction, he enjoyed a spot of Dickens on holiday — Barnaby Rudge in Provence, Martin Chuzzlewit in Sicily — but mostly stuck to politics or history, occasionally cricket. He’d certainly never been picky about specific editions. Valerie, however, his partner of eighteen months, was a confirmed bookworm. Her flat in Lytham was lined with books; they seemed to sprout from the walls. He found them on tables, chairs, even in her bed. He knew that she had been devoted to Colyer in her teenage years, reading cheap paperback editions until they fell apart. In fact, she still had them, covered in obsessive notes. A man not given to superstition and less given to visiting musty bookshops, Lorimer nonetheless felt that fate had brought him here to buy Valerie this precious and beautiful volume.

‘I knew you’d take it, sir,’ said the eager seller, looking up from a scattering of Penguins. ‘It’s such a pretty thing. Hard to resist, isn’t it? Are you a Colyer disciple?’

‘Not particularly. It’s a gift.’

‘Yes, I’m sure she’ll adore it. I presume it’s a she? They often are. Just look at the artwork on the cover. Fascinating detail, isn’t it? You could stare at that for hours. Are you interested in Quinnell by any chance? Underrated artist. I have a delicious volume of his Cirencester woodcuts. Only fifty were ever printed. No? Oh well, if you change your mind you know where to find us. I’ll slip one of these in. We’ve just had them done.’ The shopkeeper showed Lorimer a bookmark. One side gave the shop’s details — ARNOLD PERKINS RARE & COLLECTIBLE BOOKS, Specialists in Modern First Editions & Literary Ephemera, 9 Fox Street, Burnstone, Lancs— along with the types of stock it held, everything from religious tracts to medical monographs. The shopkeeper flipped the bookmark to show the other side, a photograph of a summery, flower-flecked field. When the man tilted the image, it changed to a winter scene, frost and bare trees beneath a severe blue sky.

‘Clever isn’t it? Holographic. We had them done specially.’

‘Most effective,’ said Lorimer.

‘That’s Hopper’s Meadow. Lovely at this time of year. A riot of colour. Wildflowers. It’s not far. And that winter one, that’s Leppard Woods, next to the meadow. It’s a lovely bit of country round there. Great for walking. Are you a walker, sir?’

‘Only from A to B.’

‘I see. Motorist are you?’

‘Yes, but not a car cultist. I drove up this morning from Marple with my partner. She’s staying at Brindle Lodge. Art holiday.’

‘Oh yes, that’s getting to be very popular. She’ll be painting in Hopper’s Meadow, I expect. Lovely up there it is. A real display.’

‘She’s looking forward to it,’ said Lorimer.

‘And you, are you an artist, sir?’

‘Can’t draw to save my life.’

‘No one is required to. Are you staying on in these parts? Visiting the castle, perhaps? The lake at Meazey Vale? The old quarries?’

‘No, just passing through. I saw your shop and was curious. I thought I’d have a nosey. A rather expensive nosey, as it’s turned out.’

‘Your lady friend will thank you for it.’ The man had already returned to his Penguins.

‘Thank you. Goodbye,’ said Lorimer.

‘Au revoir,’ said the shopkeeper without looking up. ‘Call again.’

It was an overcast day. Having put the book safely in his car, Lorimer walked around the village. There wasn’t much to see. A church, a graveyard, a rather plain war memorial. He had last visited the place ten, perhaps fifteen, years ago. It had been a vibrant place, full of families and quirky shops. He had come with his wife at the time, Judy, to visit an antiques fair in some hall or other. But the hall was no longer there, replaced by hutch-like flats, most of which looked empty. He saw a sign for the woods and the meadow that the bookseller had mentioned. He put his head in at The Bell, hoping to have lunch, but found it a gloomy place, smelling of grease and cleaning fluid, the endless interior punctuated by huge screens showing sports news.

He bought himself some chips from a place over the road and sat down to eat them by the war memorial, hoping the rain would hold off. He tried to remember that day with Judy but it wasn’t clear. They had separated since then and he had seen her on two, possibly three occasions. They didn’t keep in touch. He did not desire her friendship, and he did not think it fitting to remain friends, yet the absence of her somehow rankled. She had remarried, a decent fellow called Ian, a town-planner. Lorimer was not enjoying his chips. He tried not to think of the past but coming back here made it inescapable. Perhaps it had been a mistake to come, although he had managed to find a wonderful gift for Valerie.

He had been seeing Valerie for two years, although they did not live together. Valerie, a skilled amateur painter, but lacking in confidence, had been persuaded by Lorimer to spend a week at Brindle Lodge, an artists’ retreat not far from Burnstone. The previous night, she had travelled from Lytham to stay at his place in Marple — wine, curry, a dull French film. In the morning, he drove her up to Brindle Lodge, a secluded spot in the Lancashire countryside. On the way, they stopped off at Burnstone for a coffee, it had been too early for lunch. After parting at the Lodge — ‘I feel like it’s my first day at school,’ she had said — he returned to Burnstone and found himself in the bookshop, intrigued by its cluttered windows.

He felt a raindrop on his hand, then another on his cheek. They were light, skittish drops, but they quickly gathered momentum, and soon the sky was ragged with rain. He ran to his car.

Back home in Marple, Lorimer looked at Through The Flowers. It really was a lovely edition in every way. The drawings inside were marvellous. Even the novelty bookmark pleased him. It was a slim volume, not much more than a hundred pages. After dinner, Lorimer settled down to read.

‘In all my life, I have never felt as much joy as I did on the day that I first walked through the old meadow on the far eastern edge of my grandfather’s farm. I had no inkling then of the happiness and horror I would find among those wild, flaming flowers. I don’t mind admitting that I was a bit of tomboy in those days. Mrs Parry…” Lorimer, sat in his favourite leather armchair in front of a blank television screen, sipped his whisky and turned the pages. He found it an easy enough read but after fifteen pages, he nodded off. When he woke up, he watched a bit of news before heading to bed, taking the book with him, but he could only manage a couple more pages.

In the morning, he received a text from Valerie. Love u darling. Lovely here. Painting meadow 2day! Gulp! Hope yr well Xxx. He sent a reassuring and affectionate reply, wished her luck with the painting, and settled down to Through The Flowers. Refreshed by a good night’s sleep, he raced through the pages. He found himself absorbed in the singular world Colyer had created. By mid afternoon he had finished the book. He felt a tingle of satisfaction, a feeling soon dulled by the realisation that the pleasure had ended. Although he was happy with having reached his destination, he wanted the journey to continue. He picked up the bookmark and flipped it, looking at the scene change from pretty meadow to austere woodland. He thought he saw something in the image just as it changed from summer to winter: a shadow, a glimmer. He tilted the bookmark ever so slightly, and there, in the meadow, among the flowers, a body appeared. It was definitely a body. A woman’s body, slashed and hacked, sickeningly desecrated. It was Valerie. Clearly flustered, he threw the bookmark away.

When he picked it up again, and tilted it, he saw no body, just the meadow and the wood, winter and summer. A sordid daydream, he thought, a trick of the mind.

At that point his phone rang. It was Valerie’s number.

‘Hello darling,’ he said. ‘How’s the meadow coming along? I was –‘

‘Is that Mr Lorimer? Max Lorimer? I’m afraid I’ve some bad news.’

The voice, which was fast and brusque, not unlike that of the bookseller, told him that Valerie Hopkins was dead. Butchered in the flowers. Lorimer tried to interject but the voice went on, detailing the brutal event as if describing the condition of an old book. ‘It’s shocking what some men think and do.’

The voice was still speaking as Lorimer let his phone drop. He saw the bookmark on the coffee table, next to the book itself. Feeling nauseous and disorientated, he sunk back into the armchair where he had finished Through The Flowers. He called Valerie’s number but the line went dead. He looked at the slim volume, with its field of eyes on the cover, its proliferating witnesses, and remembered the closing lines. ‘And that, dear friend, is how the flowers come to look so bright, so gleaming. But you have freed me from my curse. For, in reading these lines, you have taken on my contagion, my rot. You have absorbed it into your soul, your heart, the canker is seeded within you, and I thank you for it, reader, for you are now the one to weep and grieve, for you have plucked the flower of death.’

A poem by Marianne MacRae, based on a man she would observe on the way to work who used to stare intently at girls whilst eating various pieces of fruit.

The pervert breathes in.
He is, after all, human.

The pervert wears neat jerseys over neat ties over neat shirts.
The pervert is a civil servant,
boxed in by bureaucracy
and desperate for a taste of something other
than the thin ham sandwiches his wife makes every morning.

He thinks of her hands,
two pink jellyfish,
undulating across the kitchen counter,
reaching for the butter.
She never spreads it evenly,
the sting of the knife leaving a pattern of pecks and pits
in the centre of the slice,
the edges dry as the stale potpourri
that waves him off and welcomes him home
at the hallway sideboard every day.
Putting her sandwiches in his pervert mouth
leaves him oily and unsatisfied.

I watch the pervert eating an apple,
tearing rouge skin from white flesh
with desperate teeth.
His wedding band flashes like a napkin ring
around his smooth pervert finger,
there to stop his hand unfurling across someone else’s lap.

Inspired by classic fairytales, Gretel Keyte’s crepuscular poem speaks of letting go and seeing who you really are. Illustration by Rachel Orme.

In the envelope of the night sky
you whispered that we’re all the same,
for tonight our sins will seal shut
in grand sweeping chaos.

So I let the twisted hands
of oak creep across my body,
repenting my misfortunes to
the milk dusted stars in the heavens above.

It doesn’t matter what has happened now,
we’re all the same, between
our pearled teeth
and bloodied tongues.

We howl out to the deep,
curdling our voices until
nothing is left, but
crumbled ashes at feet.

The night has devoured us,
pitied our longings,
ripped from our souls the
wrong we have done.