An isolated community finds itself at the centre of mysterious events in Adena Graham’s disconcerting short story. Illustration by Isabel Seliger.

When the first fence went up, we thought nothing of it. Indeed, if Haigh hadn’t been pig-headedly tracking a deer, we’d never even have realised it was there. It was some thirty miles outside the village and nobody, other than Haigh, would have wandered so far or spent five days tracking a skittish white-tail. But he did, and that’s how he was the one to spot it.

When he finally returned with the handsome creature slung lifelessly over his shoulder, my normally taciturn husband had slumped down at the kitchen table and tugged thoughtfully on his beard. ‘Well now,’ he’d said. ‘What do you reckon I saw when I was out there roaming?’

I glanced out of the window at the higgledy-piggledy shacks leaning towards each other like weather beaten old gents. Beyond that were our animal pens and, further out, the fields of wheat and barley, along with the fruit orchards that gave our community its daily sustenance. Then, towards the horizon, the rolling hills which had made up the backdrop to the canvas of my life since the day I shot out from between my mother’s legs.

I couldn’t imagine what, exactly, Haigh might have seen among the vast sweep of nature. Wild and untamed though it could be, it was nevertheless predictable in its own way. Seasons came and went; harvests were sown then reaped; animals and people mated and, in turn, animals and humans came squealing into the world, borne on a tide of blood and gratitude. Our old passed on and were buried out yonder, but still we remembered them. We never forgot. Generations ago, we had turned away from the harsh sweep of modern life, choosing a remote corner of the earth to call our home. Warfare, consumerism and the technological advances that had turned other people into unthinking, unfeeling drones were left behind. We had opted out and never looked back because, despite its hardships, ours was a gentle way of life. We tamed the loamy earth, looked after it and, in return, it looked after us.

So, as my husband sat drumming his fingers on the table, I simply waited; silent. I knew he wasn’t really expecting an answer and, for once, I sensed that he needed to talk. ‘It’s the damned oddest thing, Gretchen,’ he finally said. ‘I found a fence. Out there.’ He gestured towards the grand outdoors.

This was unusual, but not impossible. Apart from Haigh himself, our people tended not to roam too far — and while we knew that others were going about their daily lives somewhere, their existence was far from ours. Further than we’d need or want to travel. We were self reliant; there was no requirement to trade or mingle with others. That’s not to say, though, that others wouldn’t or couldn’t creep closer. ‘Maybe someone else has set up on the land — had the same idea as us? A fence isn’t so odd really,’ I said. Setting our kettle onto the stove, I glanced out of the window at our own little white picket affair, which contained a small herb garden.

Haigh followed my line of sight, shaking his head. ‘No, not like that, Gretchen,’ and, for the first time, I noticed the fear in his eyes.

‘How then?’

‘Well, here’s the oddest thing. It didn’t end. And it was tall. Really tall.’

I planted my hands on my hips and chuckled. ‘Don’t be silly, Haigh, of course it ended. All fences end somewhere.’

‘Well, this one didn’t,’ he said, his cheeks reddening. Haigh didn’t like to be laughed at. ‘There was no end to the thing. It just went on and on as far as I could see — east to west. I followed it for a few miles but with the deer on my back, I finally gave up. I just know it didn’t end though, here in my gut,’ he said, smacking his palm against his hard stomach. ‘So there.’

The next morning, Haigh and ten of our strongest men set out to find the fence and discover who might have sent it snaking across the earth. We didn’t see them again for two months.

By the time Haigh and the others returned, their womenfolk had given them up for dead — myself included. The longest Haigh had ever been away was a moon’s turn. He was our community’s explorer — if wandering off for a few weeks could every truly count as exploring. By and large, those who are satisfied with their lot don’t go looking for more beyond the next horizon and the next. So when the men failed to return, we feared the worst. We could little have imagined, then, that their reappearance would bring with it something more troubling than death.

After the initial tears and embraces came the questions. Did they find the fence and, if so, where did it stop?

‘It doesn’t,’ said Haigh. Again, I almost laughed. Two months to bring back the same ludicrous notion he’d first hazarded. Except, this time, he had evidence.

‘We found it and followed it,’ said Denny, Beatrice Jones’ son, stumbling over his words. ‘It just loops round in a huge circle. And it’s tall, really tall. Too big to climb, unless we’d taken a ladder with us. But who goes journeying with a ladder?’

‘So what’s it for? What land are they protecting?’ asked Beatrice.

‘And who are they?’ shouted one of the old folk at the back.

At this, Haigh shook his head. ‘I don’t know. That’s the strangest thing of all — we never saw another soul that whole time. We walked till our feet bled and blisters grew on our blisters but there was no sign of life. We hollered and helloed as we went, but nobody ever helloed back.’

We are not a curious people by nature. We know what we need in order to survive, but the need to seek out new territories and boundaries is not bred into us. Quite the opposite really; our forefathers opted out of society for a reason. If you go looking for trouble, you’re like as not to find it, as my great grandmother used to say. Which is why, after the initial reconnaissance, nothing more was done about the fence. It didn’t affect our daily lives and our curiosity ebbed as our harvesting work increased.

The fence may even have been forgotten altogether if it hadn’t been for the wrong two people falling in love. We are not a large community and because of this, we have strict guidelines about whom can marry whom. So when Solomon Adams declared his love for Isabelle Talbot, they were told to nip it in the bud. Their families were too closely related and such an alliance risked muddying the community gene pool.

Unfortunately, Solomon and Isabelle had other ideas and decided to elope. It didn’t take long to figure out what had happened when they went missing. What we hadn’t reckoned on was the speed with which they returned. Two days after they left, they were back. ‘I-it’s the fence,’ cried Isabelle. ‘There’s another one!’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Haigh.

‘It’s a second fence,’ explained Solomon, who had been part of the first expedition. ‘But it’s closer. We hit it after the first day. It’s taller too. So we turned back.’

If things weren’t the same for Isabelle and Solomon after the discovery of that second fence, they weren’t the same for the rest of the community either. A second party was sent out and confirmed what the couple had recounted. This time, the men were only gone a week. The fence, as Solomon had described, was higher and closer; its circumference smaller.

It’s true that the fence didn’t overly affect us directly. The sun continued to rise over our fields each day, bathing them in its holy, life-sustaining glow. Three babies were born and one of our elders passed on. The days crept past and time turned over on itself. Yet something had changed in our hearts. We were still free and part of the land, but we didn’t feel it quite so much anymore. The mere existence of the fence niggled at us. What was it supposed to be keeping out?

Then, one day, Annie Tailor woke just before sunrise and the cry she unleashed roused the whole village. I jumped out of bed and ran to the window, leaning out to see what all the commotion was about. As I did so, I was assaulted simultaneously by the sound of my neighbours crying in dismay and the sight of an insanely tall fence following the line of our little village. It was made of iron and, through the tiny latticework pattern, I was still able to view our fields and the hills beyond — both the tamed and untamed land that had made up our village’s world for years. However, there appeared to be no way through it.

This time, there was no need to send out an expedition to negotiate the fence. It was plain as day for us all to see. The sheer height of it was dizzying, and it curved in at the top, its iron tips touching, making escape futile. Indeed, it ran around the outskirts of the village, penning us in; not so much a fence as a metal cage. Whoever was responsible must, somehow, have erected the structure in the middle of the night. But this seemed impossible. There were nursing mothers, light sleepers, insomniacs, lovers, children — surely someone must have seen or heard something. Yet, we were all present, and none could account for the existence of this latest enclosure.

It has been two weeks now and the fence is still there. I keep thinking I will wake to find it has all been a bad dream. Already, in this short time, three of the villagers have gone mad. We are used to living in close proximity, but now it is enforced. We are no longer free to tend our fields, to roam, to simply know that we are able to explore a limitless world, if we so wish. We can still see it, tantalisingly close, through the ironwork of the fence. It is all still out there, that vast wilderness of freedom and possibility. There beyond those bars.

I am not sure how long we will survive. We are fracturing. The fence is breaking us down, making us hyper-aware of both ourselves and others. I feel like running from people I’ve spent my whole life living cheek by jowl with; even my own husband. And then there is the feeling of being watched. After all, if someone put the fence there, then someone has to be watching.

It has already claimed lives too. Yesterday, two more people were found hanging from it, unable to accept a future locked in behind its unyielding form. Now, as Haigh dozes fitfully in the chair, I set aside my sewing. Normally he would be out working the fields, but since this latest fence appeared he has lost all interest in life.

Wandering outside, I sit on our stoop. The fence throws dark shadows across the earth, a latticework tapestry that would be beautiful under any other circumstances. For years, we have been a people who’ve lived without boundaries — the ones who opted out of society and are of little interest to others. We saw no need to fence our terrain, our simple existence making us unafraid of attack or invasion. Yet now I see it; none of the fences we discovered were constructed to keep other people out. They were there to keep us in; narrowing our territory bit by bit, entrapping us like animals to the slaughter.

I am sitting there, sifting dirt through my fingers when a hum fills the air. It’s not a loud noise but even so, it feels as if it’s inside me and around me, shaking me to the core. A giant shadow falls across the earth, blotting out the sun, turning my vegetable patch dark. I know what it is. I know without even looking up. I thought it was the stuff of fables, storybook legends; the tale of the monster in the sky. Now I know that it was true. And in my gut, I am certain that this horror has visited other quiet corners of the planet before. It came for them, as it has come for us today, because it knows that we are all alone; outcasts from society. It was safe for it to encroach upon our lives slowly, gradually, watching and waiting, observing us going about our daily lives, playing with us until it was ready to strike. Before it whisks us away, it will wipe out all traces of our little community. Because who else would even know we existed? We have lived our whole lives as self-imposed outcasts, and there is nobody else to notice our absence or mourn our passing. Our isolation has, ultimately, been our undoing.

I stand, refusing to look up, and return to Haigh. For a few minutes more, at least, we will both be real. And, in those final moments of existence, as his eyes meet mine, we can pretend that we still matter.

Sophie Fenella’s poem, from our recent Adventure issue, explores the ways in which adventurous personalities can affect the dynamic of a relationship. Illustration by Matt Harrison Clough.

Come, I am already with you
in damp grass, earth worms,
a night too dark for us to see.

Trampoline bellied, saucer eyed,
you wrap your arm on auburn bark,
ascend into childhood dreams of flight.

I am yellow bellied under your feet,
catching kisses dropped to earth
tasting the wet of your lips.

My neck is craned for you, hoping
to solidify your swinging feet
as you hang like clothes from a line,

I am right here with you
only gravity bound.

You think I need saving
from my concrete steps
but your glass pierce scream
is out of reach.

My butterfly gut was prophetic,
I told you so, but my twig arms
cannot break your fall.

Now in its fourth incarnation, four fresh Faber New Poets pamphlets have been released in the ongoing partnership between Faber and the Arts Council.

First launched back in 2009, the Faber New Poets series aims to identify and support emerging talents at an early stage in their writing careers. Created by the innovative publishing house Faber & Faber and funded by Arts Council England, this year sees the arrival of four new poetry pamphlets from four exciting new writers; making up the 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th pamphlets in the ongoing series.

The writers who rose out of the whopping 900 manuscript submissions are Elaine Beckett, Crispin Best, Rachel Curzon and Sam Buchan-Watts. Loyal and longstanding Popshot readers may remember Sam Buchan-Watts’ beautiful poem ‘Temping’ which graced our fourth issue, The Modern Living Issue, a few years ago. Former Faber New Poets include Fiona Benson, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Heather Phillipson, Jack Underwood, Joe Dunthorne, Annie Katchinska, Sam Riviere, Tom Warner, Rachael Allen, Will Burns, Zaffar Kunial and Declan Ryan.

You can pick up copies of the newly released pamphlets from the Faber website and can see the poets on tour here.

A beautifully imaginative flash fiction piece by Kirsty Logan, written in response to the death of her father. Illustration by Ricardo Bessa.

It began with the Christmas tree lights. They were candy-bright, mouth-size. She wanted to feel the lightness of them on her tongue, the spark on her taste buds. Without him life was so dark, and all the holiday debris only made it worse. She promised herself she wouldn’t bite down.

The bulb was sweet and sharp, and it slid down her throat with a feeling of relief; an itch finally scratched. She came to with a shock. At the realisation of what she’d done, she tangled the lights back into their box and pushed them onto the highest shelf. The next day she pulled down the box and ate the rest. The power cable was slippery as licorice.

She got hungrier as the days passed. A lightbulb blew; she went to change it but ended up sucking on it like a lollipop. She enjoyed its gobstoppery taste, and had soon eaten the rest of the bulbs in the house. Lamps mushroomed up from every flat surface — and there’s no good in a darkened light. Each day she visited the hardware shop and walked home with bags full to clinking. Her eyes were always full of light; with each blink she caught gold on her eyelashes.

One night she opened her mouth to yawn, and saw that her path was lit. Up she jumped, pyjama-ed and barefoot, and followed the light across streets and playgrounds, fields and forests, all the way to the edge of the land.

She paused on the rocks, between the trees at her back and the black of the sea. This is where he left, and this is where she could find him again. She stretched her body to the sky in readiness, then opened her mouth to outshine the stars.

She spat out the bulbs — one, two; nineteen, twenty — in a runway from trees to shore. She spread herself out on the sand. A perfect starfish, a fallen body. An X, so he could find his way back.

 Illustrator Thomas Danthony and animator Christopher van Wilson have teamed up to bring the cover of our new issue into animated form.

Following the launch of our Adventure issue a few days ago — find out more about it here — we’re proud to release a smart animation courtesy of Thomas Danthony and the very talented animator & motion designer Christopher van Wilson. Celebrating the arrival of our fifteenth edition, the 40-second short brings Danthony’s gorgeous illustration to life as the cover gradually builds around it. Place your eye sockets on it above and find a slightly shorter, 15-second version over on our Instagram.

To get your hands on a copy of The Adventure Issue, you can buy a single issue for £6 + p&p or subscribe from £10 and get the new 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.

The Adventure Issue is here, featuring a sterling line up of illustrated fiction and poetry that travels from the moors of Yorkshire to the surface of the moon.

Arriving fresh off the press, accompanied by the heady aroma of uncoated paper drenched in ink, we’re pleased as punch to unveil our latest issue — The Adventure Issue.

Comprising twenty short stories and poems, illustrated by talents such as Adams Carvalho, Stephan Schmitz, Marie Bergeron and Peter Locke, it’s another issue that we’re very proud to be putting out into the world. In true Popshot tradition, we’ve unearthed an ineffable raft of writers; a handful of whom are being published here for the first time. Spread across the pages of the new issue, expect to find an alluring collection of writings 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.

For a better idea of what lies within, browse through a few images below and have a flick through some spreads here. To get your hands on your own copy, you can buy a single issue for £6 + p&p or subscribe from £10 and get The Adventure 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.

Pre-orders and subscribers’ copies will be landing on doormats all over the world from tomorrow, with the new issue hitting British newsstands from the beginning of next week. Bookshops across Europe and the rest of the world should find Popshot on their shelves by mid-April. If you would like your copy sooner than that, simply order or subscribe direct from this very website. We’re off for a sit down.

A spirited poem by Alexander Blustin, written to mark the end of a despondent period and the beginning of a better one. Illustration by Brandon Loving.

Sweep up the debris, the wreckage of life;
Tear down stubborn cobwebs of threadbare dreams.
Pack up the pills and the noose and the knife;
Burn all the novels on miserable themes.
Turn off the box in advance of the news;
Take mourning clothes to the jumble sale.
Silence the record that’s stuck on the blues
And abandon your hike on the Misery Trail.

Take vagrancy to the end of the scale:
To the ends of the world, to the end of your tale,
To the end of the signpost that’s wrecked in the gale,
To the end of the line between wrong and right,
To the end of the longing that grows in your dreams,
To the triumph of passion. Stride into the night.

Gain an exclusive first read of Shadows, a tense short story from our impending Adventure issue following two astronauts lost on the moon. Written by James Hatton and illustrated by Plantmonster.

The lunar rover bumped across the surface of the Moon in its one-sixth gravity, tilting sometimes in a way that made him feel it would tip up and he would go floating off into space. A quarter of a million miles away, the Earth was rising like a blue marble out of the darkness, so different from the Moon where, if there was beauty, it was in the stark, sun-bleached hills.

He was on his way to collect samples when he saw the impossible — tyre tracks in the dust. He double-checked the map to make sure he hadn’t come off course but there was no way he could have strayed so far. The other Apollo missions had landed hours away.

The tracks disappeared into the shadow of one of the hills. He followed them and on the other side saw, bewilderingly, another NASA buggy, an astronaut aboard, as still as the shadows that pointed east.

He slowed, frightened, then stopped. He waited, trying to think, trying to settle his nerves, then climbed down and walked over in the unwieldy spacesuit. He saw the Apollo insignia on the astronaut’s arm — Apollo 17, his own. He felt sweat begin to run down his back.

He reached out to touch the astronaut, knowing already that he would be dead, knowing already that it would be him, but at that moment everything went dark.

He lifted the shutter. Bright light filled the module.

‘Sleep OK?’ he asked Gene Cernan who was sitting in the cramped space next to him.

‘Like a baby,’ Gene replied, but Jack heard something in his voice that made him suspect that, like him, he hadn’t.

After putting on their spacesuits, they opened the hatch and climbed down onto the disturbed surface of the landing site. Their mission had been scripted far in advance and they had rehearsed that script so many times that they hardly needed to think about what they were doing. Immediately, they began to collect samples, barely taking the time for a breath, to stand back and look at where they were. They set off small detonations to loosen the rock, always in regular contact with Control back on Earth.

It was like a stage production and Jack put down the apprehension he felt to first-night jitters. But after each explosion he felt paranoia worm into him, a feeling that they were disturbing something, even if only the perfect silence of space.

In contrast to Jack’s seriousness, something wide-eyed showed through every now and then in Gene.

‘Would you just look at that,’ he said, facing the earthrise.

‘Seen one, you’ve seen them all,’ Jack responded without missing a beat, the tight-lipped humour being his way of keeping reality in check, just as Gene’s show of being awestruck was his.

They set about digging and collecting; setting off the small detonations. Then after a while, Gene called over to him.

Jack turned, expecting to see Gene with one of the sparkly pieces of rock that kept catching his eye, but it was something else. He was pointing at footprints going south towards one of the white hills. Like in his dream. In the shell of the spacesuit his racing heart drummed in his ears.

‘Ours?’ Gene asked.

‘No, not ours, Gene.’

‘Bob,’ Gene said, addressing the Command Centre. ‘We’re just going to take a look at some interesting surface disturbance going off towards the hills.’

‘Affirmative, Geno,’ came the crackled reply.

In the buggy, as they followed the tracks, Jack kept blinking and screwing up his eyes; trying to focus them, trying to see properly through the reflections of the visor. Half the time he could see only his own face reflected back at him. The landscape was playing tricks on him. He would look out across the flat plain and the light didn’t make any sense. There were slight discrepancies, unusual effects due to the low angle of the sun, the lack of atmosphere. He looked at the long shadows and imagined you could get lost in them. It came to him that in some lunar craters light had never shone, it was just permanent shadow where there was believed to be ice dating back to the origins of the Earth.

The footprints went on for several miles and climbed an incline to the rim of a crater. They stopped the buggy and looked down at the footsteps trailing away into the darkness.

‘We have a deep crater here, Bob,’ Gene said to Control.

There was a pause, the sound of conferring voices, then a Texan voice replied over the comm, ’Can you take a core sample, Gene?’

They clipped the buggy’s safety cable to the harness on Gene’s suit and he climbed down into the darkness. The light from his flashlight coned out in front of him, illuminating the grey, fine-grained soil.

After a few minutes Jack could see only the glow of the flashlight. A few minutes later, not even that. Visual contact was gone but under his gloved hand he felt the movement of the cable and could hear Gene faintly breathing in the comm.

‘Gene, what are you seeing down there?’

‘The crater levels off a little, perhaps to fifteen, twenty degrees.’

‘Be careful of your footing in there.’

‘Do you have an estimate of the size of the crater, Jack?’ came the priestly voice of the Command Centre again.

‘Hard to say — the size of a football field I guess.’

‘I should be coming to the centre now,’ Gene said.

‘Is the floor disturbance still apparent?’ Jack asked, speaking in code.

‘Affirmative, Jack. I can still see it.’

In his ear, Jack listened carefully to Gene’s breathing for signs of stress. Under his gloved hand the cable jogged slightly now and then. His flashlight reached into the shadow ten, maybe twenty yards; beyond was complete darkness.

The low glare of the sun hit the Moon’s surface and turned the hills white. Beyond them was the black, impersonal expanse of space. The dark inside the crater was different, claustrophobic.

Suddenly, the cable dropped to the ground, falling in slow motion in the Moon’s low gravity. He moved back to the buggy where it was secured to the frame and began to reel it in. It came easily, weaving in the light cast by his flashlight. Finally he saw the clip. Gene was nowhere to be seen.

He stared into the darkness.

’Gene, do you read me?’

He could hear nothing on the comm, and then a moment later perhaps a faint breathing.

‘Bob, I’ve lost radio contact with Gene. Are you getting anything your end?’

‘Negative, Jack. What’s happening up there?’

‘Gene’s come loose from the cable.’

‘Can you confirm that you said the cable, Jack?’

‘That’s right, Bob. I’m going to follow him in to try to see where he’s at.’

‘OK, Jack. Stay in contact.’

He clipped the cable to his own suit, took one last look at the sun-bleached hills, then began his descent into the crater.

There were two sets of footprints now. He took it slow but had soon descended to the point where the light his flashlight threw out was the only light there was. He was descending into a black hole.

The thought came to him out of nowhere that whatever he found in here, be it Gene’s corpse or something else, was the truth of this place.

He turned for a moment and pointed the flashlight behind him to look at the three sets of tracks leading back, his crumb trail out. Then he pressed on.

‘Gene, do you read me?’ he said. His voice sounded eerie in the dark, alone.

‘Bob, I’m following the tracks in,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how far I’ve gone, some way, but I still can’t see Gene.’

There was no answer.

‘Bob,’ he said again before realising he’d lost radio contact with the Command Centre.

He could have turned back then, but he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself if he had.

In the darkness, with the light coned out in front of him, he began to feel movement all around as if he was moving through water. Now and then it stirred uneasily around him.

‘Gene?’ he said again. He heard his own voice in the mask, then the silence of the crater — no, not quite silence; he could hear something in it, a faint soughing.

Suddenly he came to an area of darkness that the flashlight couldn’t penetrate. He walked cautiously forwards, not sure of what he had found — black rock perhaps. Then in the torchlight, he saw it was a crevasse. He pointed the flashlight down and saw its vertical walls, a ledge on one side leading into it. The footprints, in a muddle now, continued along this ledge.

‘Do you read me, Gene?’ he said. ‘Bob, you there?’

He hesitated, then began his descent. It was steep and the temperature dropped quickly inside his suit. When he finally reached the bottom both footprints suddenly disappeared. Perhaps it was because the soil was coarser-grained here, he thought, too coarse to leave a print — but before he had time to investigate further, the battery of his flashlight died. He stared into the darkness. He looked up and couldn’t see even the faintest light.

‘Gene?’ he said. ‘Bob?’

He was unsettled by the darkness but after a moment, calmed himself enough to be able to think things through. If he continued his search for Gene he would have to stray from the opening. And who knew how big this crevasse was. There could be tunnels to get lost in. His best bet was to follow the cable back up, retrieve another flashlight from the spares on the buggy and come back down. If he worked fast, he would still have enough air.

That was the decision he had made when he felt around behind him for the cable and realised that he too, like Gene, had become detached. He felt real panic for the first time. He stood still.

‘Gene?’ he said. ‘Bob?’

He would have to feel his way back, but when he felt around for the rock face to guide him back up the crevasse, he couldn’t find that either. Somehow he had moved away from the ledge without realising it. Carefully, he began to explore the space around him, taking pains to keep his bearings. He took three steps forwards then three steps back, adjusted his angle and stepped forwards again, so as not to stray from his original position. He held out his arms in front of him, but felt only empty space. Finally, he increased the range of his search, going four, then five paces in each direction before retracing his steps to his starting point. It was hard in the spacesuit and he began to accept, after a while, that his efforts to find the ledge must have taken him even further away from it. God knew where he was now.

Out of desperation, he walked for fifty paces in the same direction, then another fifty, thinking that he must at least come to something in the end. When he didn’t, panic finally took control of his reason and, not thinking clearly, he just kept walking, not even counting his steps.

When at last he got a grip of himself and stopped, he was completely disorientated and realised he had no choice except to follow his instinct, going first one way then another in an effort to find the crevasse wall and somehow feel his way back to the ledge.

He wandered like this in what he thought were straight lines for an hour or more, gradually becoming more and more lost in the crevasse, more and more panicked by his situation. He thought of his wife who would be watching a TV perhaps, waiting for a mission update from the Command Centre.

‘Gene?’ he said every now and then. ‘Bob?’

The only reply was his own ragged breathing.

He became colder and began to shiver. He battled the fear that the spacesuit might be failing him, or that he had torn it on the way down.

Eventually overcome by cold and exhaustion, he lowered himself down and put his head slowly back, resting his helmet against the ground. He closed his eyes and found that there was no difference when his eyes were open or closed. He wanted to sleep but knew that if he did, he would die. The darkness around him moved, he thought, shifting his body, pulling against him, as if he was lying at the edge of the sea.

When he saw a glimmer of light, he wasn’t sure if he was asleep or awake.

It got brighter and brighter. Then behind it, a faint shadow, an astronaut.

And then he heard a voice. ‘Jack, buddy.’ It was Gene. ‘My God, I thought I’d lost you. What happened?’

‘I came down to look for you,’ Jack said.

Gene laughed. ‘It’s the other way around, buddy. I came down here looking for you.’

Together, they climbed out of the crevasse following the footprints lit up by Gene’s flashlight. Jack counted them, then recounted. If what Gene said was true, there should have been three sets of prints — his and Gene’s, plus the prints they had followed into the crater. But there were four. He stared at them, trying to understand what the hell had happened.

‘Look at the prints, Gene,’ he said. ‘How many do you see?’

‘I know, Jack, I can’t explain it.’

‘I watched you walk off alone into the crater,’ Jack said.

‘Jack, you went first. I watched you go. Then I went in to find you. Thank God for the prints.’

As they reached the rim, Jack felt a mournful feeling, a cry of loneliness from deep within the crater, and felt distinctly that they had left someone alone in there.

In honour of World Poetry Day, read Helen Mort’s poem on writing poems, inspired by a rejection letter sent to her friend. Illustration by Yulia Yakushova.

When they ask you to send tamer poems
what they want is the ocean in a pint glass:
a sample of the flint-pale sea, scooped up
and shown off on a coffee table.

There! Beside the tasteful magazines
it makes a girdled centrepiece. Your friends
stoop to admire: we must get one ourselves —
a single rose is so passé…

But in your living room, the ocean’s
tideless and undrinkable, a moth
caught in a jar that gives up battering
against the sides, and rests.

So while they watch, take up the glass
as if you meant to hold it to the light
then throw it hard against the wall,
stand back to watch the paper darken

at the sea’s least touch, the glass
go shivering to the floor,
then put your bleeding hand
up to your mouth and taste its salt.

Inspired by cliff landslides in Whitby, Angela Readman’s poem talks of the close bond between our homes and our history. Illustration by Paul Garland.

The cottage slips a little each day,
closer to the cliff, we picture it as a boat,

drifting off in one piece as we carry
out spoons, china cups, and stand back.

It should leap into the sea, skinny dip
like a woman realising she can dive.

Yet it slides slowly, glacial, pools
of one man’s fingertips in the gloss

of skirting boards hold it back, strands
of his hair fasten floorboards that keen

for our losses. Mother’s face is a gable,
a peel of wallpaper still hanging on, plaster

ducks on the wall winging it, pointing
out all this sky. There is nothing to do

but stare as the roof tips its hat, and bricks
buckle up for that slide into ocean, free-fall.

Launching in two weeks’ time, take a look at the cover of our forthcoming Adventure issue, illustrated by the ever-stylish Thomas Danthony.

After Issue 5, 13 and 14 consecutively sold out last month, we’re even more pleased than usual to announce the imminent arrival of our new issue: The Adventure Issue. Going to press this morning, we can now reveal the cover artwork for our fifteenth edition, created by Thomas Danthony.

The new issue can be pre-ordered for £6 + p&p, or you can subscribe from £10 and receive Issue 15, 16 and 17 over the coming year plus complete access to the digital edition of Popshot, containing every issue we’ve ever published. That’s over £25 of Popshot heft for just £10; our little way of rewarding the loyal.

Keep your eyes on our Facebook and Instagram to see snippets of the new issue before it launches on March 31st and make sure you reserve your copy here.

A father watches his ocean-loving daughter embark on a perilous deep sea expedition in Dan Coxon’s fretful short story. Illustration by Luke Waller.

In 2031, with the discovery of the Fais Crevasse, mankind turned its eyes back to the sea. Fifty-seven miles long, the Crevasse ran along the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Nobody knew quite how deep it went, but drones had registered depths of over 40,000 feet. In its midnight waters, the public imagination was held captive.

It took two years, four months and five days to build the Aronnax. In total, it was estimated that over thirty-two million Euros were spent, making it the most expensive international deep-sea project ever. The end result was a seven foot by ten foot capsule, designed to withstand pressures of over eight tons per square inch. Onboard computing systems would control the descent and ascent, monitoring and — if necessary — treating its single occupant, while external cameras, lights and robotic arms could examine and interact with the lifeforms it discovered. Piloted drones had been down to similar depths, but no living person had previously drawn breath so far beneath the surface of the ocean.

On June 15th 2046, my daughter Bethany would be the first.

Beth had always loved the sea, ever since she was young. While Alice was still alive we’d spend a week each year down in Devon, exploring the countryside and the unspoilt coastline — before the seas rose and swallowed half the county. She tolerated our trips to cider farms and fudgy gift shops, but all she wanted to do was pick up her net and spend her day trawling rock pools. We’d gather tiny crabs as they scuttered over the sand, darting fish the size of matchsticks, gelatinous anemones, coiled shrimp. Before we drove back to our rental cottage she’d return them to their habitats, taking care to place each one back where it belonged. With Beth, it was always about the discovery.

A month before the Aronnax was dropped into the ocean, Beth came round for dinner. I cooked chilli dogs on the grill and made homemade coleslaw, peach cobbler and custard; her childhood favourites. She told me as we ate that the other scientists were focused on drawing lessons from the tidal data she’d bring back, trying to understand the ocean’s currents. Parts of Kent were considered under threat now and the East Coast of America had lost three cities in five years. If there was any hope of holding back the rising tides, maybe it lay in understanding the deep. But I could tell from the tone of her voice that she didn’t include herself among them. She had always been about the wildlife, the joy of discovering living things in the least likely of places. She didn’t have to say it out loud. I knew that she wanted to find out what might live in such an inhospitable place. It was in her nature.

I couldn’t go with her when the expedition pushed out to sea. With the amount of equipment they had to carry, spaces on board were limited. They welcomed me into their laboratory instead, and even paid for a hotel room. My daughter was the hero of the hour, which made me royalty by association. As they neared the release point — directly above what they thought was the centre of the crack — we gathered in front of a bank of screens. I recalled the Apollo launches from my youth, before mankind turned its gaze away from the stars.

Beth stayed in video contact while they lowered her into the waves. Emotion swelled in me as my little girl’s face filled the screens, pride and fear struggling for control. There was no turning back now. Maybe there never had been. The first part of the descent was simple enough, a voyage undertaken so many times that it barely registered as travelling at all. Beth had checks to make, readings to monitor, but the atmosphere was light-hearted. The music playing in the pod could be heard over our speakers, crackling tinnily across the miles. When Rolling in the Deep — one of her childhood favourites — came on the playlist, there was a knowing chuckle among the technicians. This was what they did. Just another day at the office.

It was when she hit 36,000 feet that the expedition began in earnest. You could see it in the focused expressions, hear it in the terse radio conversations. They had done their best to boost the signal from the pod, leaving a trail of beacons behind in its descent to relay the pictures back, but even I saw that it grew grainier as she dropped. I could still see the joy in her smile as she encountered one of the trench dwellers, sending back blurred pictures of what looked like a string of pulsating fairy lights. To Beth, this was just one big rock pool.

They lost video at 39,000 feet, but radio communication remained open. As she passed the lip of the Crevasse she let out a triumphant whoop, the miles between us translating it into a fuzzy burst of static. Three minutes later, the radio died too.

One of the technicians offered to get me a coffee. They’d expected this and Beth had warned me: where she was going, there wouldn’t be phones. A tiny red light on one of the displays still monitored the pod’s descent, deeper than humankind had ever gone before. Another programme tracked her heartbeat, her blood pressure. My little girl reduced to a scrawl of wriggling lines.

And then those stopped too. I could feel the atmosphere in the room change, a drop in pressure caused by fifty people all sucking in their breath. We waited for the pod to come back online, but there was nothing. The murmurs gradually gave way to silence. We stood and watched, helpless, willing her back into existence.

After three hours, someone suggested that I return to my hotel room. The waiting was turning frantic now, as everyone looked for someone or something to blame. They’d call me, they said, when there was news. Who knew what might be going on down there, what she might have encountered. We shouldn’t give up hope. The pod was designed to be habitable for up to two days. They could still bring her back.

In my hotel room, among the characterless greys and beiges, I felt numb. Someone had warned me to stay away from the media coverage, but I couldn’t help myself. The lab was closed to visitors, and the TV panel was my only lifeline. Beth was the talking point of the moment, the valiant hero who had risked everything for the betterment of mankind. They didn’t start to talk about her in the past tense until well into the second day. On the third morning, I started receiving condolences. After a week, they stopped paying for my room. I packed my bags and returned home, alone.

It was almost a month later that it happened. I might have missed it if the TV hadn’t still been murmuring in the corner of the kitchen. It had become a habit, that murmur. I couldn’t make it through the day unless there was the hum of voices in the background. It was the only lifeline I had left.

The daytime presenter was interviewing a rising young actor when they interrupted. A news story was developing fast, they said. They’d tell us more when they could, but it appeared that there had been an occurrence at the Aronnax laboratory. Most reporters had long since departed, but someone must have left a skeleton crew behind. There was a shaky handheld shot of the room we’d stood in, the bank of screens that still appeared sometimes in my sleep. A few technicians were huddled, some holding hands to their mouths, others staring slack-jawed at something off camera. The image panned across and there it was. The pod, the Aronnax, returned to us.

Details gradually trickled through, hidden in the recaps of Beth’s bold drop into the unknown. I tried to get through to the lab but it rang out. After a couple of hours, all I got was the dialling tone. From what I could gather, flicking from channel to channel, there had been no warning. One minute the room had been empty, the next the pod had been there. Dry, unmarked, intact. There was no explanation, no language to even describe what had happened. The experts they called in to explain the phenomenon were as clueless as the rest of us. The word ‘miracle’ was uttered more than once.

It was early the next morning, as I sat on the bed staring at the flashing lights on the screen, that a representative from the lab finally called. It took me a few seconds to realise what the ringing sound was. Yes, she said, the TV reports were true. In what she called an ‘unprecedented occurrence’, the Aronnax had reappeared in the lab, without warning or explanation. Yes, they had opened it. My daughter was inside. She was alive, somehow. No, they had no official explanation of what had taken place. It was, as far as they could tell, completely impossible. Modern science had nothing to offer.

‘Can my daughter not tell you?’ I asked. ‘Can Bethany not explain where she’s been all this time?’

There was silence for a moment.

‘Your daughter is not entirely unscathed,’ she told me. ‘She seems to have lost the ability to speak, or write. She hasn’t tried to communicate with us at all, she just wants to stare into space. We don’t know quite what to make of it.’

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care. Of course I did. What parent wouldn’t. But the fact that my girl was still breathing trumped everything. The sea had taken her, but someone — something — had given her back to me. Let the scientists worry about the rest.

I finally saw her nineteen days later, in a secure facility in Greenwich. They were monitoring her, with little success. All the data said she was healthy. But she looked thin, and hollow, the victim of some unknown trauma. She was eating, they said, but only the bare minimum. Just enough to stay alive. When I stepped into the room she looked up, briefly. Then she went back to contemplating the wall. I held her hand for an hour, just to feel her, to convince myself that this was better than nothing.

Tomorrow she comes home. The scientists say they’ve exhausted every avenue. They’ve monitored and tested her until, finally, they’ve had to admit that they’re floundering in the dark. When she gets here, I’m going to load up the car and drive us out to the coast. I have a beach in mind, in North Devon, one of her favourites when she was a child. I’ve already packed two pairs of wellies, a net and a bucket. We’ll see what we can find.

Coinciding with Mother’s Day, Barbara Wojtowicz’s short poem reflects on the role reversal between a mother and her child. Illustrated by Sara Netherway.

You made me out of clay, coal and sugar.
Wrapped me in cotton and fairy dust.
Locked me in a glass snowball.
Protecting me against evil, rain and your mistakes.
Now I am standing in front of you.
Made out of concrete, diamonds and salt.
I want to wrap you in cotton and fairy dust.
Lock you in a glass snowball.
Protect you against evil, rain and my mistakes.

A family forges new bonds as they battle a monstrous rat in Valerie Martin’s short story, taken from her kaleidoscopic short story collection, Sea Lovers.

Lily’s hair was her mother’s pride. In the afternoons, when she came home from school, she sat at the kitchen table, her head resting on the back of her chair, while her mother dragged the wooden brush through the long strands. Lily told her mother what had happened at school that day, or she talked of her many ambitions. Her mother, preoccupied with her work, holding up a thick lock and pulling out with her fingers a particularly tenacious knot, responded laconically. She looked upon this ritual of her daughter’s hair as a solemn duty, like the duties of feeding and clothing.

One afternoon they sat so engaged, conversing softly while outside the rain beat against the house. Lily’s mother observed that she couldn’t take much more rain, that it would surely rot her small, carefully tended vegetable garden, that it seemed to be rotting her own imagination. Lily agreed. It had rained steadily for three days. Her head rose and fell, like a flower on its stalk, with each stroke of her mother’s care, and each time it did she lifted her eyes a bit, taking in a larger section of the tiled floor before her.

Her mother shouted and threw the brush at the stove.

Lily sat up and looked after the brush. She was quick enough to see the disappearing tail and hindquarters of a rat as he scurried beneath the refrigerator. These parts, Lily thought, were unusually large, and this notion was quickly confirmed by her mother’s cry as she clung momentarily to the edge of the table. “Good Christ,” her mother said. “That’s the biggest rat I’ve ever seen.”

Lily drew her legs up under her and watched the spot where the rat had been. Her mother was already on the telephone to her father’s secretary. “No,” she said, “don’t bother him. Just tell him there’s a rat as big as a cat in the kitchen and he needs to stop at the K&B on the way home for a trap. Tell him to get the biggest trap they make.” When she got off the phone, she suggested that they move to the dining room to finish Lily’s hair. “It’s the rain,” her mother said as she closed the kitchen door carefully behind them. “The river is so high it’s driving them out.”

Lily sat at the dining table and pulled her long hair up over the back of her chair. Her mother resumed her vigorous brushing. It was strange, Lily thought, to sit at the big dining table in the dull afternoon light. The steady beating of the rain against the windows made her drowsy, and her mind wandered. She thought of how the river must look, swollen with brown water, swirling along hurriedly toward the Gulf of Mexico. She had never been to the mouth of the river, though she had gone down as far as Barataria once with her father. It had not been, as she had imagined, a neat little breaking-up of water fingers, the way it looked on the map. Instead, it was a great marsh with a road through it. There were fishing shacks on piers, wood, and other odd debris scattered in the shallow areas. She remembered that trip clearly, though two years had passed and she had been, she thought, only nine at the time. They had stopped to buy shrimp and her father had laughed at her impatience to have hers peeled. That was when she had learned to peel shrimp, and she did it so well that the job now regularly fell to her.

Her mother had not stopped thinking of the rat. “I can’t get over his coming out in broad daylight like that,” she remarked as she pulled the loose hairs from the brush.

“Who?” Lily asked.

“That rat,” her mother replied. “I don’t even want to cook dinner with that thing in there.”

Lily could think of no response, so she stood up, turning to her mother and fluffing her hair out past her shoulders.

“That looks lovely,” her mother said, touching Lily’s hair at the temple. Then, as if she were shy of her daughter’s beauty, she drew her hand away. “Do you have a lot of homework?” she asked.

“Plenty,” Lily said. “I guess I’d better get to it.”

When her father arrived that evening at his usual time, it was with chagrin that his wife and daughter learned he hadn’t gotten their message and had come home trapless to his family.

“Well, go out and get one now,” her mother complained. “I don’t want to spend a night in the house with that thing alive.” “It’s pouring down rain,” Lily’s father protested. “I’ll get one tomorrow. He’s probably moved on already anyway.”

“Give me the keys,” she said. “I’ll get it myself.”

Lily stood in the kitchen doorway during this argument, and she stepped aside as her mother came storming past her, the keys clutched in her angry fist. Her father sat down at the kitchen table and smiled after his affronted mate.

“Did you see this giant rat?” he asked Lily.

“Sort of,” she said.

“Are you sure he wasn’t a mouse?”

“I think it was a rat,” Lily speculated. “His back was kind of high, not flat like a mouse.”

“When have you ever seen a rat?” her father asked impatiently.

Lily looked away. She had, she realized, never seen a rat, except in pictures, and she knew that if she said, “In pictures,” her father would consider her to have less authority than she had already. “He was big, Dad,” she said at last, turning away.

When her mother pulled the trap from its purple bag, Lily felt a twinge of sympathy for the rat. The board was large; the bar, which snapped closed when it was set, was wide enough to accommodate Lily’s hand; the spring was devilishly strong and so tight that her father forced the bar back with difficulty. He tested it with a wooden spoon, and the bar snapped closed, lifting the board well off the floor. Her father baited it with a slice of potato, and the family turned out the lights and settled in their beds. Lily lay with her eyes open, listening for the snap of the bar, but she didn’t hear it, and while she was listening she fell asleep.

The next morning the trap was discovered just as it had been left. Lily’s father gave her mother a cold, skeptical look and sprang the trap again with a spoon. Her mother concentrated on cooking the breakfast, allowing the matter to drop. When he had gone to work, she turned to Lily as if to a conspirator and said, “I’ll get some poison today and we can try again tonight.”

Lily didn’t think of the rat again during the day. Her schoolwork was oppressive, but at lunch break, for the first time that week, the students were turned out of doors. The clouds had cleared off, leaving a sky of hectic blue, a sun that beat down on the wet ground with the thoroughness of a shower. Lily and her best friend sat on the breezeway, watching the braver students, who sloshed through the puddles in search of exercise. They discussed their summer plans and confided in each other their mutual fear that they would be separated the following fall.

“If I get that grouch Miss Bambula,” Lily’s friend said, “I think I’ll die. She looks just like a horse.”

Lily wondered which would be worse, to be with her friend and have Miss Bambula or to be without her friend and Miss Bambula. One of the boys in the yard hailed the two girls, holding up for their long-distance inspection the squirming green body of an anole. Lily stood up and went out to him. She liked anoles and this one, she saw at once, was of a good size.

That afternoon, when her mother brushed her hair, the rat didn’t appear. “Maybe your father’s right,” her mother said hopefully. Later, after she had practiced piano, Lily rejoined her mother in the kitchen to help with dinner. She sat at the table with a large bowl of green beans, which she proceeded to snap, throwing the ends into a small bowl, the fat centers into another. Her mother stood at the counter, peeling potatoes. They worked without speaking, and it was so quiet in the room that they heard the scratching of the rat’s claws against the floor before they saw him. They both turned, looking in shocked silence at the refrigerator. His ugly face appeared first; then he took a few timid steps forward and stood before them. Lily saw that his black lips were drawn back over his teeth and his cheeks pulsated with his nervous breathing. She sucked in her own breath and dropped the bean she was holding.

The rat made a sudden dash for the stove, moving so quickly that Lily’s mother let out a little cry as she jumped out of his path. “Mama,” Lily said softly as they both bolted for the kitchen door. Her mother held the swinging door open and wrapped her arm protectively around her daughter’s shoulder as she passed through. In the dining room they stood together and Lily allowed herself, for a moment, the luxury of closing her eyes against her mother’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, baby,” her mother said. “I got the poison this morning; we’ll get him tonight.”

Lily’s father was incredulous when they told him of the intruder’s boldness, and he smiled in disbelief when Lily, holding up her hands, estimated the creature’s true dimensions. “She’s not kidding,” her mother said angrily. “He’s really big. We got a good look at him this time.”

“All right,” her father said. “We’ll put out the trap again. I just wish he’d show his face when I’m here.”

“Christ,” her mother replied. “That’s not my fault. If he’s still here tomorrow I’ll take his picture. Would you believe that?”

“That’s not a bad idea,” her father said.

That night, before they went to bed, the family gathered in the kitchen and laid out their arsenal. The trap was baited and placed near the wall; the poison, which was inside a plastic box with a hole at one end, was placed near the stove with the hole turned toward the wall.

“Can he get in that little hole?” Lily asked.

“I hope so,” her mother replied.

Alone in her bed, Lily slept, then woke, then slept again.

Toward morning she opened her eyes abruptly, with the sensation that she had cause to do so. She raised herself on one elbow and looked out into the darkness of her room. She could see nothing, but she heard distinctly a scratching sound, the sound, she knew at once, of claws against wood. She fell back and put her hands over her mouth, as if to hold in a scream, though she made no sound. Her heart pounded so furiously that she could hear it, and she felt in her legs, which were drawn up now beneath the sheet, the sudden ebbing of strength that usually follows a nightmare. The sound continued, and it seemed to her that it became louder, closer, as the moments passed. She consoled herself with the thought that the rat would doubtless find little to interest him in her room and would soon opt for the swift or slow death that awaited him in the kitchen. If only she’d put a trap in her room, she thought.

The scratching was very close and then, when it sounded as though the creature was under the bed, abruptly it stopped. Lily breathed uneasily, afraid and unable to move. Then she heard a sound she was never to forget, the metallic protest of the bedsprings as they received the weight of the animal’s body. Lily’s eyes burned into the humid dark air and she opened her mouth, but still no sound came. She had begun to perspire; her gown clung wetly to her narrow chest. Again she heard the squeaking springs, and this time she knew exactly where the sound came from. The rat was just behind her head. Though she couldn’t see him and didn’t have the strength even to turn her head so that she might see him, she felt the nervous twitching of his snout, the horrible inhalation of his breath, as he pulled himself up over the headboard of the bed and looked down upon the paralyzed young girl before him.

For a moment the animal contemplated her, and then, as if they were one, both moved. The rat sprang forward, his front legs stretching out before him as his back feet propelled him out into the air. Lily, finding her strength and her voice at once, sat up, throwing her hands over her head and screaming “No!” — but it was too late. Her left hand encountered the rat’s side and inadvertently she slapped him toward her own back. He landed squarely on the top of her head, and as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and rose to her feet, he slid down her back. His body was enormously heavy. In his panic he clawed at her hair, tangling himself and enraging Lily so that she threw herself against the wall, thinking to crush him. This gave him the leverage he needed to pull free of her hair. He slipped down over her buttocks and dropped to the floor. He was running when he hit the wood, scrambling back toward the bed. Lily was already in the hall. Now, she thought, she could run until she dropped. But she only ran to her parents’ door, throwing it open before her with a scream. Her mother was raised up on her elbow looking at her; her father sat on the edge of the bed fumbling for his slippers. It was to her father that she ran, but not for comfort. She caught him by his shoulders, forcing him to fall back across the sheets, and she held him down there, her hair falling wildly about her as she screamed into his astonished face, “You kill him, you kill him now! Go and kill him now!”

Her mother sat up, pulling back Lily’s hair, feeling her neck and shoulders frantically. “Did he bite you?” she asked. “Are you cut?” Then Lily turned on her mother, thinking that she would strike her, but when she was folded into the eager, smothering embrace, she gave in and clung to her mother’s neck, hugging her close. Her mother glared over the girl’s shoulders at the still prostrate form of her husband and repeated to him the injunction his daughter had just given him. “Go and kill him now,” she said. “Don’t leave this house until that animal is dead.”

Lily’s father sat up and resumed fumbling for his slippers. Lily and her mother lay locked together and neither watched him as he shuffled off toward the bathroom. They clung to each other, pulling the sheets up and adjusting the pillows so that they could sleep as they had when Lily was a baby, with their arms around each other. Outside, the rain began, softly at first, punctuated with the low rumble of thunder and flashes of lightning that radiated like nerves across the sky. Lily’s father had turned on the light in the hall and she could hear him in the kitchen, opening the refrigerator, running water in the sink. The rain grew more intense; it beat insistently against the window in her parents’ room, and she thought of how it must be outdoors, beating the flowers down into the already waterlogged soil, beating the leaves back on the trees. She thought especially of the big plantain tree in the side yard, of how it bent down in the rain, its great leaves shiny and smooth, like sheets of brilliantly painted plastic. The rain washed over the house and seemed to carry great waves of sleep with it, impossible to resist.

In the morning Lily and her mother found her father asleep at the kitchen table, his arms spread out before him, his cheek pressed against the wood, his mouth slack from weariness. He had prepared himself a cup of coffee, which sat on the table near his left hand, but he had not drunk half of it.

Lily’s mother woke him impatiently. He lifted his head, rubbed his eyes, and looked sleepily at his wife, then at his daughter. He put out his hand to Lily and drew her toward him. “Are you OK now, baby?” he said. “Are you sure it wasn’t a dream?” Then, as she was about to protest, his face changed. He looked across her shoulder and Lily knew, without turning, what he saw. Her mother followed his gaze and her expression changed from aggravation to horror. Lily turned and saw him. He had come out silently and stood, calm, though, as always, poised for flight. He moved his ugly head back and forth, watching, sniffing, and Lily could hear again the horrible sound of his breathing. He confronted them and they couldn’t look away, for his boldness was as wonderful as his size. Lily’s mother reached back suddenly, took the half-full coffee cup, and threw it with all her strength at the animal. He was gone before the cup hit the ground.

For two days and nights the rat was under siege. The animal sensed the change in his situation and responded with the obsessive wiles of the hunted. Traps and poison failed to entice him, though he made frequent appearances in the vicinity of both. The family spent the weekend in an ecstasy of determination, baiting all possible hiding places with poison. Lily’s parents moved the stove and refrigerator out from the wall. Lily helped to seal off any holes they discovered, along the baseboards, in the window casings, holes Lily thought much too small to be of use to the large creature that had glared at them so balefully. Her father assured her that it was in the power of rats to make themselves fit into small places, that they were like yogis who know the secret of folding themselves down into suitcases. Lily plugged the holes with spoons of wet plaster. Now that her father believed in the creature’s existence, he seemed unable to give it enough credence, and she had been elevated from the position of hysterical visionary to that of reliable reporter on the natural scene.

On Monday morning her father called his office to say he wasn’t coming in. The sky was black with clouds, and flood predictions were ubiquitous; he used this as his excuse. Lily’s mother called the school and said that she was ill and needed Lily at home. This easy lie shocked Lily, though she was glad of it. Then the three sat at the kitchen table and discussed their plans. They had sealed the rat in the kitchen; they were sure of this. And when next he appeared, he wouldn’t find it easy to escape. The pots and pans sat out on the floor in little groups; all the food was in boxes in the dining room. The cabinets stood open and empty. If he showed his face again there would be no place left to conceal it.

But though they sat at the table scanning the room for the better part of the morning, he took them by surprise. He appeared inside the cabinet beneath the sink, and none could say where he came from. Lily’s father, who had armed himself with a hammer and a small ax, leaped to his feet and raced to the animal. By the time he had crossed the room the rat was gone. He fell on his knees and inspected every inch of the cabinet with his hands. “How the hell does he do it?” he said, and then, “Oh, this is it.” Lily and her mother joined him and they all looked with wonder at the hole, which was really a broken flap in the plasterboard at the back of the cabinet. Behind it was another hole, smaller, ragged, and deep. It opened into darkness, and the outside edge of it was lined with half an inch of wood.

“Do you know what it is?” Lily’s father asked.

“Why is it so dark?” she said, for it seemed to Lily that such a hole should open into daylight.

“Because it’s inside a drawer,” her father replied. He seemed immensely pleased with this pronouncement, like a detective who has discovered the long-sought final clue.

“The old dresser?” her mother said.

Her father stood up, gripping his gleaming ax, and started out the back door for the porch. Then Lily understood. On the porch there was a dresser in which, as a baby, she had kept her toys. It backed up against the house, against, she realized, this very cabinet. The rat had disappeared into the dark hole, but the dark hole was the inside of that dresser. Lily and her mother exchanged looks of mild surprise; then they too rushed out onto the porch. Her father stood poised before the dresser. “He’s in there,” he said. “I can hear him.”

“Which drawer?” her mother asked.

“The middle, I think.”

“What are you going to do?” Lily cried. She was suddenly desperately frightened.

“I’m going to open the drawer just a little and try to catch him in it.” As he said this he squatted down, laying his ax near his feet, and pulled the middle drawer open an inch. Lily could hear the scratching of the animal’s claws against the wood. Another inch, she thought, and they would see his dreadful face. Her father pulled the drawer out carefully, leaning back a little so that his face wouldn’t be near the opening. Now he could see into the drawer. Then, abruptly, he pulled the drawer all the way out and threw it down on the porch. Lily saw her old metal tea set scattered across the bottom, and a plastic strainer she had once used for sand flew out of the drawer and rolled in a dizzy circle toward the screen. Except for that, the drawer was empty, and the space in the dresser where the drawer had been was empty as well.

“Did he go back in the kitchen?” her mother asked. The hole that had allowed the creature’s easy entrance into their lives was now visible, and they stood looking into it as their greatest oversight. They heard a scratching, then a thudding sound that came distinctly from the top drawer. The rat was trapped at last and he was frantic. Lily’s father turned toward them. “Get back,” he warned. Then he pulled the drawer out slowly, carefully, an inch, then another. Inside the drawer the rat was still, crouched, silent, as light flooded his last dark refuge.

Lily grasped her mother’s hand and found it cold but willing to hold her own. Her father leaned over the dresser, placing one hand against the front of the drawer while with the other he began to pound on the top. Still there was no sound, no movement from inside the drawer.

“Is he in there?” Lily’s mother asked. Her father turned his head to answer his wife, and in that moment the rat made his move. He hit the front of the drawer with such force that her father’s hand fell away, leaving the crack open and unprotected. In the next instant the creature flew up before them, straight up; his legs battled the air like wings, his teeth were bared. He leaped straight at Lily’s father, who staggered backward and put out his hands to stop this attack. But the rat caught him at the base of his throat, sinking his sharp teeth into the flesh and clinging to the shirt cloth with his sharp claws.

Her father made a gasping sound and whirled around, clutching the animal at his throat. Lily saw his face—his eyes opened wide in shock, his teeth bared too now, in such fury as she had never imagined possible. The rat clung to him as he fell to his knees, dropping one hand for the ax while the other closed over the animal’s face. His fingers went inside the rat’s mouth, prying the teeth from his flesh, and when he had pulled them free he raised the gray body over his head and dashed it to the floor. Then the rat screamed. It was the only sound he had made in the struggle, and his voice was high, clear, terror-stricken. Lily saw the oily edge of the ax blade as it came down through the air. She remembered how her father had sharpened and oiled it that morning in preparation for this blow.

The edge came down and Lily turned to her mother, who was too stunned by what she saw to look away. There was the soft sound of flesh giving way, of small bones cracking, and it was quiet. When Lily looked back, the rat was in two pieces, his head and forequarters on one side of the ax, his back legs and long tail severed completely and thrown a foot away by the force of the blade. Lily’s father stood looking down at the sight, clutching his throat with one hand. He knew he had won the contest, but his rage, Lily saw, was not yet under control. Her mother rushed to him, throwing her arms about him with a passion she had never shown him before, and he held her against him tightly. Lily looked away, allowing her eyes their fill of the curiously rewarding sight of the rat’s bisected body. His blood oozed out upon the boards from his wounds and from his open mouth, which was already stiffening with death. The wonder of his death afflicted her. A moment before he had threatened everything; now his harmless body lay before her, bereft of horror, only dull, large, gray, mysteriously still. She turned away from them all and went back into the kitchen. Her hands were sticky from fear and she washed them at the sink.

That night Lily slept fitfully. When she woke she could think of nothing but the rat, of how she had lain and listened to him as he came closer and closer. She sat up and looked about the room. Didn’t she hear the scratching of his claws against the floor; wasn’t that hushing sound his rapid breathing? She lay back and turned to face the wall.

Her mother had kissed her when she went to bed, and her father had held her for a moment with warm confidence. She had touched the bandage on his neck tentatively. The doctor had suggested that the wound would become more painful before it began to heal. A rat bite, he told the family, was no joke, but there was no reason to expect complications. Her father had astounded the doctor with the story, keeping, as he talked, one hand resting protectively on his daughter’s shoulder. He had, he was convinced, done what was necessary to set her fears at rest.

But now she was as full of fear as ever, and she knew she wouldn’t sleep. She got up and turned on the light in her bedroom; then she looked under the bed and in the closet. But not seeing anything didn’t give her the rest she sought. At length she decided to go out, to take the plastic bag out of the garbage can and look again on the remains of her enemy. She slipped on her robe, turned off her light, and went stealthily down the hall, passing her parents’ bedroom door without a pause.

She opened the kitchen door, unlatched and opened the screen, and stepped out on the porch. The rain had stopped, and through the swiftly moving clouds the moon cast its desultory beams. Lily accustomed her eyes to the light and to the unexpected beauty of the scene before her. She focused her eyes on the moonflowers, like pools of milk among the dark leaves that covered the fence. The roses nearby raised their thorny branches, holding out papery leaves and flowers, gray and black, toward the sky. Her mother’s vegetable garden fairly hummed with life, and, as she stood there, Lily thought of her mother and of how they had worked together one day, preparing the soil for the seeds.

Her mother had turned the soil with a shovel, and Lily, crouched barefoot in the dirt, came behind her with a garden spade, breaking the big clods down with childish energy. She stopped, then stood up and stepped forward into the rough dirt her mother had just turned. As her foot came down she noticed that the soil was warm; it invited her to press her toes into it. Lily looked at her feet and smiled, overcome with a delicious sensation. “What’s funny?” her mother asked, and when Lily looked up she saw that her mother was smiling on her in the same way she smiled sometimes on her roses, with undisguised admiration.

“It’s warm,” Lily said. “Underneath. You should take off your shoes.”

Her mother’s smile deepened and she indicated her shod foot, which rested on the wing of the shovel, with a look that explained her dilemma: She couldn’t dig barefoot. Then she bent down and pressed her hand into the dirt near Lily’s feet. She dug her fingers down and came up with a handful of the dark soil. She studied it intently for a moment, sifting it through her fingers. She had lectured Lily that morning on this chore and made it clear that the preparation of the soil was the most important work they would do that day. Everything, by which Lily understood her to mean the future of the garden, depended on its being done right. Now it was Lily’s turn to smile, for she saw that her mother couldn’t take her mind off the importance she attached to doing this work correctly. It was true, her fingers told her, the soil was warm, but her fingers asked a more penetrating question: Would it yield?

Examining this memory as she stood on the porch in the warm night air, Lily paused and shook her head affectionately at the thought of her mother’s passionate gardening. The fruit of that passion stood before her: tomatoes and eggplants heavy on their vines; lettuce like great balls of pearl, luminous in the darkness; the airy greens of the carrots, rustling continuously with the movement of the air; the black tangle of the green peas, climbing skyward on their tall tubes of screen. The scent of the mint and parsley bed rose to Lily, and the sweetness of the air drew her out toward the steps. She looked down at the drawers of the old dresser, which lay scattered on the porch. Her mother had washed them furiously, as if to wash away the evidence of a desecration.

Then Lily thought of the rat, and she looked toward the garbage can with a sensation of dismay. It would be, she thought, foolish and unnecessary trouble to pull out his corpse now. She could consult her memory for a fresh, distinct, and detailed picture of his death; she could see, in her mind’s eye, the blood darkening around his mouth, the dullness of his dead eyeballs. She wasn’t certain that he wouldn’t seek her out again, but she thought he would never again seek her in that particular form. His menace had quite gone out of that form; she had seen it with her own eyes. Her father had discarded the pieces of the rat’s body without anger; he had even commented on the creature’s remarkable size, taking, Lily had observed, some comfort in having defeated so formidable an enemy. Now that he was a danger to no one, the rat possessed the power to be marvellous.

Lily turned away, pushing her hair back from her face. She had told her mother she wanted her hair cut off and, to her surprise, had received no objection. But now this seemed an unnecessary precaution. She returned to her bed, possessed of a strange fearlessness; it was as insistent as her own heartbeat, and as she drifted off to sleep it swelled and billowed within her and she understood, for the first time, that she was safe.

‘The Consolation of Nature’ is a short story taken from Valerie Martin’s short story collection, ‘Sea Lovers’, published by Serpent’s Tail. Pick up a copy of the book at the Serpent’s Tail website.

Spoken word artists Benjamin Zephaniah, Hollie McNish, Joelle Taylor and Dizraeli cast a new light on some classic, canonical page poems.

Created as part of the Poetry Society’s Page Fright project — which uses hip hop and spoken word to introduce canonical poetry to young people — four of today’s most prominent spoken word artists have taken to the studio to bring new life to four well-established and venerated poems.

As well as Hollie McNish’s take on The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson above, Benjamin Zephaniah has performed Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas, Dizraeli has tackled Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Joelle Taylor has shown a new side to Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen.

As well as encouraging us to look at the classics differently, each writer has also performed a piece of their own and given an interview about their writing, and their chosen poet’s influence on their work. To watch all of the films, head over to the Page Fright section of the Poetry Society’s website.

Patrick Griffith’s surreal short story tells the tale of a despondent artist who encounters his creativity in its real, physical form.

My brain hadn’t been very kind to me for at least three months. You would have thought, after Lu left and Tojo died, after everything we had been through, that it would have at least been a bit more compassionate, a bit more helpful than giving me an increasingly painful headache and an abject lack of creativity. My paintings were grey. Dull. Devoid of life.

On one of those many days I sat hunched over a pristine sheet of paper, staring at it, as though an image might miraculously appear. Cherry-red dots of blood fell onto the paper creating a pattern infinitely more artistic than anything I had produced for days. As I reached for a nearby cloth and held it to my nose, I noticed something moving in the splatters of blood. A tiny brown lozenge, an insect-like cocoon, maybe a centimetre long, wriggled violently before the casing split and the wriggling ceased, replaced by slow, deliberate movements. A peculiar prickly, creamy-white creature gradually emerged. It wasn’t like anything I had ever seen; it wasn’t an insect, at least I didn’t think it was, and as the spindly thing slowly stretched it began to look more like…well, a tree. A minuscule, ghostly, thorny, leafless tree. It sleepily unfurled four relatively large branches from its trunk that resembled two arms and two legs, and a bulbous growth that can only be described as a head emerged – complete with two pinprick eyes and a tiny mouth that I swear showed a hint of a smile.

I barely noticed that my nosebleed had stopped because, gloriously, so had my headache. Was this tiny monster the cause? Was it somehow lodged in my brain? It didn’t seem to matter at that very moment because I was transfixed by the increasingly animated thing stretching, apparently acclimatising to its environment. Then, before I had a chance to react, it ran along the length of my desk, slid down the table leg, scampered across the floor and disappeared behind the mess of books, boxes and pieces of paper, stacked in the corner for future attention. I looked for it, thoroughly, I thought, for some time but I found no sign of it. Confused, I convinced myself that I must have been hallucinating. Maybe I was lightheaded after my nosebleed. I was certainly extremely tired. And having a wonderfully clear head for the first time in months, I didn’t need a lot of persuading to float straight to bed.

After a glorious night’s sleep I awoke fresh, revitalised, filled with an energy I hadn’t felt since I don’t know when. I returned to my desk, eager to get to work, but I was immediately confronted with yet another surprise. Laid out on the tabletop was a painting – a magnificent abstract portrait of a beautiful woman with a haunting glare. I didn’t remember doing this. It was my style, my brush strokes, the kind of thing I would paint back when I was in that happier, more productive place. But it wasn’t, couldn’t have been mine. I examined it in awe. The paint was still wet in places and in the corner was my signature. Did I paint this, somehow, unconsciously? In my sleep? I found the notion ridiculous but what other answer could there be?

The strange little visitor was a distant memory. Perhaps it was a dream rather than a hallucination. Clearly, strange things were happening in my sleep, I thought, and after a day impatiently reconnecting with an old art dealer acquaintance, I went to bed that night with a smile on my face, waiting to see if my unconscious self could conjure more wonders.

Sure enough, the next morning a new painting was waiting to greet me. It was, if anything, better than the portrait of the previous morning and, once again, I had no recollection of painting it although it was clearly my work.

This went on day after day. Morning after morning I would wake up to these masterpieces, and in the daytime I would replenish my supplies to make sure that everything was there for me if and when I needed it. It’s a routine that worked; an odd routine, you might think, but why mess with it? I was on top of the world and other pieces of my broken life very quickly fell into place. I started feeling healthier – I exercised and stopped eating junk. I started socialising again and my friends were clearly glad to see the return of a more confident, happier soul.

But it was after a night out that the memory of the spindly thorny thing returned. My angry fat bladder woke me up at around 4 a.m. but on the way to the bathroom I was distracted by a noise in my studio. I poked my head around the door to see my desk lamp illuminating a half-finished painting. Although it was a little larger – maybe three or four centimetres in height – and its evidently tougher skin was a deeper brown colour, the same figure with the same pinprick eyes and tiny mouth that I had convinced myself was the product of a very vivid dream, was scurrying back and forth, grasping a towering paintbrush, swishing left, right, and centre, with impressive dexterity. It was the artist. It was the one producing these paintings. Being very careful not to make a sound, I watched it as another amazing portrait gradually materialised. After a short while I returned to bed, lying awake, perturbed, as it all started to sink in.

The next day I stared at the completed painting, once again boasting my signature. I knew I wasn’t so drunk that I could have imagined it all. I saw the tiny creature create this. I screwed it up in frustration, laid a new, clean piece of paper down on the desk, and started to paint. Grey. Just like before. Nothing had changed. I made several attempts, all with the same dull, bland outcome.

That night I got up again, this time with the express intention of catching the thing in the act. Sure enough, at 4 a.m. there it was again, this time wielding paint-stained knives and sponges. The piece was inspired, its best to date. I watched it quietly at first but intrigue got the better of me and, as it appeared it was finishing, I walked over to the desk. I assumed it would run away but it didn’t. It just continued as if I wasn’t there, putting the finishing touches to the painting as I sat towering over it. It scrawled my signature and then disappeared down the table leg and behind my filing system as it had on the day it first appeared.

The next night it was there again. I was waiting for it this time and I watched it work from scratch, alternating between wild brush strokes and amazing microscopic daubing, dot after dot, line after line, like a miniature humanoid printer, being careful not to press its little branching feet into the coloured liquids. It continued as if I wasn’t there, completely untroubled. I attempted to talk to it, ask it who or what it was, why it was doing what it was doing, but there was no response at all. At one point I picked it up. It wasn’t as hard as I expected – it was fibrous but flexible – more like a moist liquorice root than a dry tree branch. I put it down on the other side of the table and it just ran back to its previous point and continued working as if nothing had happened, like some kind of single-minded worker ant.

I just let it get on with things. There was no point in trying to paint myself – it just didn’t work – and there were no signs of getting any closer to my old days, let alone the quality of these new pieces. I started sleeping longer and longer hours, going out most nights, watching droll programmes on the new gargantuan TV I bought with the money I made from several sales. I watched the nimble shrub now and then but the novelty soon wore off. I just took its paintings, my dealer loved them, and people were buying them.

There was a big exhibition of ‘my work’ at a trendy gallery in Mayfair. Not a single bad word was uttered all night and, believe me, I was doing my best to listen out for them. People were falling over themselves with compliments like I was some kind of artistic genius, the next big thing. Critics were excitedly scribbling notes, buyers were pulling out their chequebooks. I was quaffing as much champagne as my body would let me.

In a somewhat inebriated funk, I watched it again that night, the agile, busy, pico-Picasso. I picked it up and moved it a few times, only for it to predictably run back and continue painting. Then I lightly flicked it across the desk, shaking off a few microscopic yellow leaves that were beginning to grow on its arms, but it got up without any bother and returned to work. I flicked it harder and it flew off the table but, with remarkable dexterity, it scaled the table and continued painting. I put a glass over it and it just kept running into the transparent wall, falling down, getting back up and unsuccessfully running towards the painting again and again and again. It was relentless. I threw the glass against the wall, smashing it into a hundred pieces but the thing just ran to the painting and continued its work as if nothing had happened. I picked it up, squeezing it tightly in my fist and stormed through the kitchen, hurling it into the bin and closing the lid tight behind it before I went to bed to sleep off the champagne.

The completed painting was waiting to mock me in the morning. It was beautiful. I tore it up and threw it away.

The next night I just stared at the ugly, arrogant devil for hours, unsure what to do. And then, less in anger and more in a daze, I went through similar motions to the previous night. I held it back. I pushed it off the desk. At one point I casually picked it up with a pair of sausage tongs and held it over the flame on my hob. Not a sound. It just wriggled, its creepy little smile never diminishing. It got free and hobbled across the kitchen at speed, back into my studio and, somehow, up onto the desk, managing to balance a paintbrush against its chest even though it was unable to move one of its charred black arms. Its disability didn’t affect its performance. The results were, if anything, even more impressive.

My mind wandered. I remembered that night when it first appeared. My joy at finding that first painting. The riches I gained from its work that just got better and better and better and better. Did it matter that, as much as I tried, I still couldn’t be that artist I used to think I could become? This tiny thing came from me. It was me. It was me.

I put it in my mouth and swallowed, washing it down with a glass of water as if it was a large, oddly shaped, slightly sharp pill. I felt it squirming a little against the sides of my gullet until it presumably plunged into my gastric acids where it would squirm no more.

There were no more paintings waiting for me in the mornings after that. And my paintings, the paintings by my own hand, were still grey. I had no money, I had no ideas, and I had an increasingly painful bellyache.

A radical protest group looks to put an end to the tradition of timekeeping in Emile Carson’s thought-provoking short story. Illustrated by Ray Oranges.

No one is quite sure how long ago the last clock was smashed into a million little pieces. Most people know the approximate date but since then, it’s been deemed futile to track a time that no longer exists. A select few attempted to keep count, holding onto the minutes by chanting to sixty ‘chimpanzees’, ‘elephants’ or ‘battleships’ before resetting, but in the absence of any equipment remotely capable of timekeeping, that too was deemed futile. The slightest loss of concentration or interruption could cause the exact time to slip, which thanks to inevitable human error, it did, and many of the purists soon began to question the purpose of counting inaccurate seconds in the name of an outmoded tradition.

It all began on the 8th of September. A radical and powerful protest group, who had amassed an impressively influential following, decided that after a few millennia, timekeeping had got out of hand. Where once it was used as an approximate mechanism for ensuring gatherings were attended, and determining when work should begin and end, it was decided that it had been taken too far. Working weeks had now hit the absolute maximum, with seven out of seven days being worked by most people without a second thought. Where only a few decades earlier, five out of seven days was deemed an unjust distribution of one’s time, seven out of seven had become the standard. Full-time quite literally meant full-time. Those who worked any less than seven days a week were considered part-timers. As society became increasingly enslaved by time, the radical group – named Stop All The Clocks (SATC) in reference to W. H. Auden’s poem – had begun smashing up clocks in protest. Although governments and wealthy businessmen had attempted to stop them at first, they became too powerful too quickly, effortlessly recruiting disillusioned workers who, enslaved and exhausted, were easily convinced into joining them. ‘Join in or burn out’ was the party line.

Soon enough, almost every single person involved in the keeping of time had been captured and placed into solitary confinement to erase any memory of the exact day and time. No violence was necessary, they were simply locked in cells with no access to daylight. Even the most skilled of timekeepers quickly lost the ability to recognise what day it was, let alone what hour.

The Shepherd Gate Clock at the Royal Greenwich Observatory was the first to be dismantled, with Big Ben and The Grand Central Terminal Clock following suit soon after. Within the space of two weeks, every public clock across the globe had been dismantled or destroyed. Any that were left standing, mainly for aesthetic reasons, had the hands permanently turned to seven o’clock – a subtle reference to one of the few times of day where the majority of people wouldn’t be at work.

Slowly but surely, the concept of time became increasingly ambiguous. As more and more watches, clocks, computers and phones were stripped of their timekeeping abilities, the perception of time between people became a little hazy. One man’s five minutes was another man’s ten. With so many people still tightly bound to the concept of time, the radicals remained tireless in their endeavours and within a few years, seconds dropped out of general use. Due to the constraints of the sun and the moon, it was impossible to eradicate the concept of days from certain countries, apart from Scandinavia, Russia and certain parts of the USA and Canada where midnight sun and polar night blurred the lines between which day was which. In Britain, dawn, midday and dusk were judged the best times to arrange meetings.

Industry soon took a massive hit. Attempting to plan ahead was tricky since few people could agree on what day it already was. Whilst some people believed they knew the real day and month, human error and Chinese whispers meant that an equal number of others disagreed and eventually, no one could be absolutely sure whether it was a Tuesday, a Thursday or any other day. In the end, work was completed ‘as soon as it’s finished’ or within a certain number of days. At the suggestion of the radicals, arrangements could be made according to the number of ‘sleeps’ between now and then although it didn’t really catch on, especially with insomniacs, night workers and recreational drug users. That said, the radicals were starting to win out. Timekeepers were almost a thing of the past, apart from a select few who were either dismissed as being inaccurate, stuck in old ways, or more often than not, ratted out. Whilst it would have made sense for them to stay quiet, there was little point in keeping time unless other people were going to keep it too. So, in an unfortunate catch-22, they would break their silence, only to be reported, captured and placed in solitary confinement, rendering their timekeeping forever obsolete. After that, few of them tried to keep time and faced with imprecision, gave up on it altogether.

As predicted, society became happier. Stress, although still existent, had lessened in intensity and the old notions of doing something up until ‘the last minute’ or ‘bang on time’ faded into the history books. When people became tired, they slept, and when they became hungry, they ate, no longer bound by universally accepted times for doing things. The strain on healthcare organisations dropped dramatically. Society, as a whole, became more patient. Public transport was no longer able to run to a timetable, so trains and buses only departed when they were full, or full enough. Although this initially caused resentment towards the radicals, some clever propaganda soon highlighted the benefits to people – appreciating your surroundings, conversing with fellow passengers, using the time to think of what made you happy and so on. Global marketing campaigns helped to hit the message home. The leisurely and sedate were celebrated, whilst the brisk were chastised. The multi-taskers and mindless rushers of yesteryear had been slowly outlawed.

The work of SATC was done. Despite being feared in the early days, they were now held up as heroes, the saviours of a civilisation that was going down the pan. Much like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King almost a hundred years before, the tale of SATC’s fight against time went into the history books. It was taught in schools and used as the finest example of the power of social movement.

However, as the generations ticked past, the legend of the radical group that put an end to timekeeping started to fade. Fewer and fewer people understood the relevance of the story anymore. Although a few clocks had been preserved for historical purposes, only a handful of academics had actually seen them. With clocks now obsolete, the story of the war against them had become obsolete too. Time eventually took over and washed the story out of the public consciousness forever.

Not long afterwards, two friends, frustrated with the large percentage of their lifespans spent waiting around, started to devise a system whereby they could divide portions of the day into more exact slots. They created an instrument, split into two sections, with water in one that drained through a small hole into the other. Once all of the water had drained from the first section into the second section, the weight flipped it and the process began again. Each time this happened, the passing unit of time was referred to as a ‘flip’. They calculated that during a day, the instrument would flip 37 times, and that if everyone who had one of these instruments made sure that they were perfectly synchronised, they could arrange to meet at any flip during the day.

Upon the discovery, the press were whipped into a frenzy with every major publication covering the story. The two friends were heralded as trailblazers, pioneers, masterminds. The coverage of their invention was unrelenting and soon after, the public started to adopt the new system. ‘Is this the greatest invention in history?’ asked one publication…and the overwhelming feeling was that it was.

A love poem by Benedict Freeman, inspired by the idea that our lives are the culmination of a long string of choices. Illustrated by James Richard Smith.

Every decision ever made,
every choice, every chance, every moment,
now trickles down into this one.

Stretched behind us,
twelve thousand decisions,
that somehow found you and I here,
in this place, at this time, with these people,
pupils locking together for the first time.

Stretched in front of us,
drunken dates and birthday presents,
shared shopping lists, merged bank accounts,
a mutual interest in horticulture,
the summer, autumn, and winter of our lives.

Not that we’d know it.
In this moment, just your body and mine,
in front of each other.

First published in our ‘Love’ issue, Gavin Bryce’s poem imagines the relationship between lovers as a living body. Illustrated by Ross McEwan.

We built a body together,
Made of the finest fabric.

From the fibres of laughter grew young hands;
Desire stretched arteries into arms;
Eager feet sprang from our travelled roads.

Kisses formed lips, and smiles made teeth.
Knowledge strengthened bones and words weaved skin.
Vulnerability created eyes; honesty opened them.

Love bore breath,
Spun to every cell by the beating will of our hearts,
And vows held them in strong fingers like ribs.

A poem by Luke Wright, presenting a beautifully truthful and progressive metaphor for marriage. Illustrated by Adam Batchelor.

A marriage is a boxless jigsaw puzzle
no guiding image and no guarantee
that pieces aren’t astray, no warranty.
Some soon decide it isn’t worth the trouble
when slotting parts together is no longer
enough. Some never see the bigger picture.
But patient couples, willing just to sit there
will find their intuition growing stronger;
until at last they know which fragments fit
and which to lay aside for later on.
They help each other find the missing parts,
piece dreams together; side by side they sit.
And if there are rules, they follow only one:
complete the frame, then work towards the heart.

Bringing focus to a less-considered side of homosexuality, Hayden Westfield-Bell’s poem looks at the life of two elderly lesbian lovers. Illustrated by Dilly.

All wings when hand in hand:
Arms flailing, connected lightly
At the joints but failing
To stop the flap-flapping
Caused by warm summer winds.

Benched, with knobbed knees
Twitching under long skirts,
They turn and kiss
With sandpaper lips; slipping
Together like wrinkled cogs.

At night, they tear their
Clothes aside and rest,
Hands on thighs, lying
Side by side exploring furrows
With nervous fingertips.

Max Wallis’s poem looks at love in the modern age and the ephemeral nature of our digital love letters. Illustrated by Agnese Bicocchi.

We send each other text messages at work. Discuss what we’re having for lunch.
Ether-joined by unlimited messages and pixel screens.
Two minutes after saying goodbye on dates our phones jangle, vibrate,
‘I had a lovely time tonight :)’.
The little xx means more from you. You give me fewer than my mum.
I look and linger at them, there, at the end of your miniature letters.
Save the sweet ones in a folder and read them when down.
‘These are the reasons I love you.’ ‘Do you want to go to the cinema at four?’
‘I’ve never felt this before.’ I smile when I see your name appear.
The lump is a plastic pebble in our pocket heavy with the weight of expectancy.
Linked to everything, almost sentient it throbs with the lives
of so many people a button press away: Facebook, e-mails, Google
and you.
When people are gone: vanished. Ephemeral ghosts that exist
but don’t. That breathe,
but don’t.
The wishing wells in which we shed our coins.
Our thumbs linger over ‘DELETE’ as though they’ll disappear from memory, too.
Punch. Gone. The love letters dead. Think that’ll make us feel better.
When our hearts turn red again, we’ll wish we had the numbers still
to say hello, hi, how do you do.

A poem by Miriam Johnson, embracing the freedom that comes with going beyond physical attraction into the hidden depths. Illustrated by Kee.

Untie your shoes, set them by the bed.
Peel down your pants, place them, folded, on the chair.
Roll down your sleeves, unbutton your shirt,
hang it back in the closet.

Pull down your socks, toss them into the hamper.
Slide down your briefs, throw them aside.
Singe off your hair, pluck your brows,
wipe the strays, ashes away.

Stand for a moment in your husk,
allow the goose bumps to rise
as the chill air kisses your skin,
then shave it off.

Unzip your muscles, unwrap your tendons,
wind them back on the spool by the needle and thread.
Unlace your ribs, seal your stomach, kidney, spleen
in ornate perfume jars, line the empty bookshelf.

Crack your skull, leave for me
the wrinkled, grey mess that’s left.
The only piece of you
I want to consume.

In the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, we’ll be publishing a poem a day that takes a less saccharine approach to the subject of love.

For many, Valentine’s Day sits at odds with the realities of love and its various expressions. It is rife with cliché and platitude, and the poetry that accompanies it often suffers from the same affliction. That’s why this year, instead of ignoring it altogether, we’re attempting to redress the balance with a collection of poems that look at the subject of love from a more sincere and candid point of view.

Over the next seven days we’ll be publishing a poem a day on our online journal, the first of which has been posted up today in the form of Miriam Johnson’s peculiar piece entitled Striptease. Pop in every day to read the next piece in the series or follow us on Facebook or Instagram to receive them straight into your feed.

Ignited by the 1915 film of the same name, Cathy Bryant’s poem addresses the ugly reality of how nations are formed. Illustrated by Peter Strain.

We’d like to picture brave explorers
mounting ridges and coming upon valleys;
lines making maps of sturdy pioneer faces
as wagons roll in, and the building begins,
and the settling, planting, trading.
But most nations are born with a flag
dipped in blood, weapons and a desperate
or arrogant idea. See Europe’s countries
re-draw their lines and change their names
like hemlines and hairstyles – ra-ra skirts,
tucker boots and teabag tops with Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia and the CCCP, through grunge
and back to leggings and ballerina flats
and the Balkans remade in sweatshops
and reshuffled into torn remnants of
cultural identity and angry patriotism.
And with every change, death and suffering.
Nations born not in sunshine on wagons;
birth always, always a bloody battle where
cords are torn and children scream.

Following the closure of literary submissions last week, we have now chosen the poems and short stories that will be published in the ‘Adventure’ issue.

A huge thank you to every single writer who took the time to consider, compose and send in their work to our ‘Adventure’ issue throughout December and January. With the standard of writing increasing every issue, our shortlisting process is getting more lengthy every time — a great indication of the salubriousness of today’s short fiction and poetry.

The authors of the chosen pieces have now all been notified so if you submitted to this issue but haven’t received an email from us in the last 12 hours, your work hasn’t been selected on this occasion. Our apologies for not being able to be more personal in delivering the news and thanks again for your time. If you didn’t submit to the ‘Adventure’ issue, we’ll hope to see you send something in for our next issue.

The Adventure Issue will launch on April 1st with literary submissions for our sixteenth issue opening up in June. If you would like to see your writing in the next edition of the magazine, get a better idea of the work we publish by picking up a copy. Subscribers get three print issues delivered to their door plus complete digital access to every issue we’ve ever published for just £10. Take advantage by heading to our subscribe page.

A recently retired lion tamer struggles to come to terms with his quiet new life in Stuart Snelson’s short story. Illustrated by Vidhya Nagarajan.

Retired, no longer required, the lion tamer hung up his whip.

Post-retirement, the circus buzz lulled. It was hard to explain such thrills to those who had never experienced them; his head ventured tentatively into the lion’s yawning jaws, his skull teasing puncturing curvatures of teeth; the actions of a death-wish dentist. He excelled in quelling roars, reducing wild beasts to controlled ferociousness. Now, his life on the road had reached a terminus. Within the dread embrace of a caravan’s carapace, he shrunk from the world. In a Formica furnished corridor, alone, he would watch his movements slow, experience his memories disintegrate. His life hadn’t prepared him for such dulled eventualities.

Permanently parked, his home sinking slowly into the earth, he faced the eternity of twilight years. Afternoons, into which previously he had struggled to squeeze tasks, now expanded exasperatingly. Fellow entertainers faded, became strangers. Life kept them moving, eternally unpacking their lives in provincial towns, every week deposited in some new circle of suburbia. Beyond their doors each day, new horizons. His own yielded nothing but his own dismal future. How, after a lifetime’s exhilarations, could he settle into torpidity?

With lions, the walls of his caravan were rampant. Memorabilia was everywhere – paintings, figurines – a pride of silent likenesses.

Each evening, serenity unsettled him. He missed the least likely of things: children’s screams, the backbreaking rehearsals, even the unsavoury smells. But more than anything, his majestic subjects. As show time approached, time slowed to a crawl. He was not ready for this early death. Regular retirement, he suspected, was not so hard-hitting, comprising as it did relocated boredoms. His own situation was one of too great a disparity, a seismic shift. Time previously lost in preparation was now simply lost: unoccupied days became swollen with unused hours. In his armchair, slumped, the thrills of his existence slipped from him.

Initially he had maintained rigorous standards; his moustache, waxed, parodic; his hair brilliantined to a mirrored sheen. Acknowledging show time, he would slip into his old costume and watch the one video he had of his old routine. Inside the machine, the tape wore down; looped viewings wore history thin.

His miniaturised life now consisted of scaled down dramas. As a retirement present, they had bought him a cat. This seemed to him a cruel joke, a diminutive echo. They developed a strange relationship. Quizzically it regarded his master’s efforts towards control, the thrust of a proffered stool. Sensing madness it would disappear through the cat flap, seeking the company of the relatively sane before he needed to eat again.

In his caravan, he felt imprisoned, captive, away from his natural habitat. His days were sprinkled with sawdust memories, the travelling carnival of their parade, their distractions unpacked to the delight of thousands.

In the local pub, bar-propped, he would regale regulars with his exploits. His figure would kick the drink to stand firm. Slobbering, jaw-dropped sops hung on his every word. Commanding roaring drunks was now the extent of his mastery. At the night’s end, he would return to his boxed life, a memory rush of adrenaline with no outlet.

That he should find himself alone at this juncture of his life came as no great surprise. For a living, he thrust his head into the mouths of lions. The opportunity to meet women seldom arose, his life providing excitements of the wrong variety. On occasion, there had been ill-advised liaisons, work romances uniting incompatible mavericks – flings with acrobats, high jinks with tightrope walkers – but thanks to the family like camaraderie, these had felt vaguely incestuous. No wife by his side, no offspring provided, his dangerous footsteps would remain unfollowed. Sometimes he had dreamt of an heir apparent. Toddling beneath a top hat, coattails trailing, a toothless smile beneath a felt-tip moustache: sweet, adorable, edible. But then which mother would watch her first-born fed to lions?

Within a cramped wardrobe: three red tailcoats ironed to perfection. At the drop of a top hat, he would once more be ready for the call. But no leonine logo beamed into the night sky would seek his re-emergence. He would protect his finery not from lions, but from moths.

He refused to resign himself to lapsed highs. Still reverberating, he heard the barrel organ pomp that fanfared his actions. Let the office drones shuffle from the coil in continued drudgery, he sought thrills. He doubted that he was alone in this scenario. He pictured a daredevil retirement home, a gathering of adrenaline casualties – stuntmen, fighter pilots, skydivers – pensioned off pleasure seekers refusing to leave wildness behind them. In rest homes, restless residents, unwilling to settle beneath tartan blankets completing jigsaws of the outside world. He visualized adventure centres for those of advanced years, activities for intrepid septuagenarians; nobody pursued the grey pound with such vigour. In insurers’ eyes: brittle skittles succumbing to tumbles. Why, as it neared, should they shrink from death defiance? He would not let ballroom dancing prove his weekly peak.

Whilst he acclimatised to confinement, the circus rolled into town. Upon abandoned shop fronts came hastily pasted posters. Queuing, he joined expectant spectators; through mud trundled tentwards. On opening night, beneath patched canvas, he endured pratfalls and acrobatics as he awaited nervously his main attraction. Watching another man tame lions, every inch of him twitched in his seat. The past made a marionette of him. He missed the stage-managed madness, the safety netted jeopardy.

Seeking continuity for his enthusiasms, he had anticipated a warm welcome at zoos and sanctuaries – a privileged insider, an honorary guest – direct access to his beloved breed. This proved not to be the case.

Gaining access to other people’s lions proved impossible. Nevertheless, trips to the zoo became more frequent, loitering around the lion enclosure, silently stirring. His pension, such as it was, found itself fractioned off into admittance fees, his life lived through turnstiles. Beyond perimeter fences – brooding, skulking – they proved too far removed. He wished to feel their warm breath upon his face; spur their unnerving purrs. It pained him to see them compounded. He observed their doleful circuits, sad-eyed and sluggish, the motions that space allowed, sullen skulks around film set jungles, patchwork habitats. Wrenched from sun-drenched savannahs to perform in this plangent pageant, did those born in captivity have any notion of their heritage? They seemed no more convinced by their surroundings than the public. He foresaw an evolutionary emergence, resplendent coats dulling over generations, blending with drab habitats, adhering to the municipal concrete greys of a captive palette. At least under his watch they were offered variety, he thought. Prowling listlessly, he mirrored their caged demeanour. Amidst children, licked lips hinted at wicked intent. Security staff were on hand to misunderstand. It was politely requested that he limit his attendance.

The drinks inched their way into daylight hours. Swilled whisky instilled a delicious heat that kept boredom momentarily at bay.

Plaguing hazy afternoons, this thought: he had trained his usurper. As the years advanced, an apprentice was found within the ranks: the son of acrobats. Forever off balance, he brought shame upon the family name. From conception he had been destined to swing on rings, was the first step towards a generational pyramid. But he didn’t walk until he was two. His prolonged toddling they took as a personal affront. He found himself more adept at the tame arts. Under his adopted mentor, he was trained towards betrayal.

Nursing the first of the day’s drinks, as the afternoon bloomed dark thoughts, he wished that he had instilled his charges with more sinister intent. At his signal, jaws clamped tight: a messy beheading for his successor. He was not alone, he imagined, among ousted retirees, in wishing his replacement ill. Patiently he awaited big top bulletins, anticipated the grapevine’s twitch, tales told of a savaged apprentice, lions having turned in the absence of their master. But there would be no bloodied communiqués.

Between performances, their caged menagerie had haunted grey roads. Travelling between towns, their spectacle speeding down motorways, he would lose himself in fatalistic reveries. What would happen if they crashed? He imagined jack-knifed lorries, impromptu cocktail shakers releasing angry, bewildered beasts: lions ranging the hard shoulder, puzzled tigers thrown by the unimpeded stampede of traffic, further pile-ups as rubbernecking motorists caught sight of their activities. Blaze raging, a fleet of tiny cars to the rescue, a conga of clowns dispensed to douse the flames with soda siphons.

Options limited, he considered other extremes. He had read about the illegal sales of dangerous pets, shadily traded black market beasts. Thus far, he had failed to stumble upon such backroom deals, exotic stock from the back of a lorry. Such hapless adoptions seemed rifer overseas. Like everything else, they could be sourced online no doubt, but it wasn’t just the logistics of acquisition that posed a problem. Where would the beast live? His caravan’s cat swinging dimensions were restrictive as they were. If he could persuade it to adapt to such a tin-canned life how would he conceal or clean it? A pre-dawn raid on the shower block to hose it down, to rinse its dirt-dreadlocked mane? His situation, he conceded, was not suitably accommodating.

Unexercised, he fattened, filled his home’s constrictions, struggled further with the condensed obstacles of his living space. About him, lion figurines shouldered dust. Oftentimes, unwilling to negotiate the convolutions of his bedroom’s canopy door – a squeeze at the best of times, but an acrobatic feat when full of the drink – he would awake on the floor having slunk drunkenly from the sofa. His alarm call: the lapping tongue of a tabby cat.

He no longer had the appetite to look after himself. Scooped from a tin though they were, his cat now ate more elaborate meals than he did. No longer did he sit at trestle tables, nestled between clowns and acrobats; his memories: deleted Fellini scenes. With the drooping antennae of his unwaxed moustache, forlorn, he made for a down-and-out Dali.

Confined, his mind turned to past events, a rush of candyfloss flashbacks. On a two-seater sofa, slumped, he summoned himself in all his pomp. Drink mired, he entered disorientating states, slipped addled between the past and present, reacted to roars that weren’t there. A rage surged through him. His caravan became a site of disarray, its floor a mosaic of smashed crockery and whipped figurines. His cat, fearful of being swung, departed.

Boarding a bus, he headed towards an out of town zoo, a place where he remained unknown. Through the turnstiles, familiar roars beckoned him. Half-heartedly he had conjured his plan. Evading security staff, he displayed a late grace and agility in gaining access to the lion’s enclosure. With what flourish he could muster, he whipped off his tired overcoat. Unconcealed he revealed his red coattails, donned a black top hat and slipped his whip from a deep pocket. Scrambling issues prevented further accoutrements: he would face his foe chairless.

An alien in this ersatz jungle, once more he drew a crowd. Panicked security guards, uncertain what to do, led the charge; tinny transmissions from walkie-talkies alerted visitors. Coaxing him from the enclosure – his imagined ring – would prove difficult. Such invasions did not tend to end well. Playing dead, perversely, would be his best hope of getting out alive. But he was in no mood to lie down.

Between Do Not Feed the Animal signs, spectators peered. As he approached the first lion, padded tentatively towards reasserting his dominion, the gathered crowd watched open-jawed. This would be his last hurrah, a final administering of his whip-cracking mastery. The lion roared. Behind a chain-linked fence, dumbstruck punters raised their phones to the spectacle. Zooming in, a hundred screens flooded red.

Written to coincide with the launch of her debut novel, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, read part five of Joanna Cannon’s serialised seven part short story. Part one can be read at Litro, part two at Bookanista, part three at For winter nights, part four at The Writes of Woman, part six at The Debrief and part seven at London Review of Books.

As I watched, tiny flakes began twisting through the air. At first, I thought it was just spray from the digging, a powdery mist that seemed to appear whenever the snow was disturbed, but when I looked up, I realised they were beginning in the sky. Far above anything I could see, floating down on us from nowhere. My father always said that the big, shouty flakes were harmless and melted easily, that it was the small, silent ones you had to watch out for. The ones that seemed quiet and innocent. Because, before you realised it, they had taken over everything.

‘It’s snowing again,’ I said to Tilly.

‘I know. Perhaps it will never stop. Perhaps we’ll never have to go to school again.’

And we laughed and held our mouths open, and trapped winter on the tips of our tongues.

The butterfly seemed to like Mr Dhillon. Perhaps it was his brightly coloured jacket, or the way he never stopped smiling, or perhaps it was because he spoke to it in a language only the butterfly could understand.

‘Maybe it’s because Mr Dhillon doesn’t question it?’ said Tilly.

I thought Tilly was right (although I try not to agree with Tilly too often, because it doesn’t do for a person to become too big-headed). Mr Dhillon didn’t tell the butterfly it didn’t belong in January, or ask where it had come from, he just accepted that it was there. He did, however, agree with Eric Lamb. It was a symbol of new beginnings. Of hope.

‘What kind of butterfly do you think it is?’ I shouted.

I had to shout, because we’d formed a production line. Mr Dhillon and Eric Lamb were at the front doing digging, then Thin Brian followed behind them with his sweeping brush. Tilly and I held up the rear, sprinkling salt and being supervised by Mrs Roper. Mrs Forbes had been sent back inside to make us all a cup of tea, and track down more cakes. The only person who didn’t have a job was Mr Forbes, whose hands had relocated from behind his back and into his coat pockets, because it appeared that Mr Dhillon didn’t need any directing after all.

I shouted again, because I didn’t think anyone had heard.

Mr Dhillon stopped digging, and the production line faltered and paused. We looked at the butterfly, and the butterfly looked back at us and waited to find out what it would be called.

‘I think it’s a Painted Lady,’ said Mrs Roper, and she smoothed down her blanket.

‘A Tortoiseshell,’ said Thin Brian.

‘It’s not even tortoiseshell coloured,’ said Mrs Roper.

‘It’s not even painted,’ said Thin Brian, but Mrs Roper ignored him and sprinkled a bit more salt.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, it’s a Red Admiral,’ said Mr Forbes, and his hands returned to the small of his back. ‘Or a Purple Emperor.’

‘Perhaps it’s a Dingy Skipper,’ said Mrs Forbes. And she smiled from behind a tray of Fondant Fancies.

Mr Forbes coughed.

Mr Dhillon cupped his hands together and blew into his gloves. ‘What do you think it’s called, Tilly?’ he said.

Tilly peered at the butterfly, and we all waited.

‘I don’t think it matters, does it?’ she said eventually. ‘Least of all to the butterfly.’

‘Of course it matters.’ Mr Forbes paced up and down at the edge of a drift. ‘Everything has to have a name.’

‘Why?’ said Tilly.

‘Because otherwise, we can’t call it anything.’ Mr Forbes stopped pacing. ‘We don’t know what it is.’

‘The butterfly is still a butterfly though, isn’t it?’ said Tilly. ‘No matter what we call it.’

I saw Thin Brian frown all the way down to his chin.

Mr Forbes did a little more pacing.

‘What I mean,’ said Tilly, ‘is it’s like animals and people and countries. We only think something is different, because we’ve decided to call it something different in our own heads. France could be England, for all we know. And apples could be bananas.’

Everyone frowned. Except Mr Dhillon, who smiled so widely, it took up his whole face.

‘I think you’ve earned yourself a Fondant Fancy,’ he said.

Tilly took the pink one, and I was sure that somewhere behind me, I heard Mrs Roper say bugger it.

‘The Trouble with Goats and Sheep’ by Joanna Cannon is published on January 28th by Borough Press, an imprint of HarperCollins. Pick up a copy of the book for half price at Waterstones.

Thanks to high demand, our latest issue is just twenty copies away from going out of print. Subscribe today to ensure you get hold of yours.

Despite ordering more copies than ever, we’ve now rattled through our entire supply of Issue 14, The Curious Issue, in just three months. Only twenty copies remain, which have now been removed from our single issues page and are available exclusively to new subscribers. So, if you would like to get your hands on a copy before they disappear altogether, subscribe from just £10 today.

Alternatively, if you would like to read our latest issue on a medium other than paper, find every issue we’ve ever published nestled neatly inside the Popshot app, supplied by our friends over at Exact Editions.

AE Ballakisten’s poem puts forward the idea that those considered mad may possess more wisdom than they are credited with. Illustrated by Analisa Aza.

Listen to the madman
who speaks at night,
for he alone has seen
the wonder beyond the drapes
black. Untangle his chaos that
rings of peacock feathers and
starlight bubbles, and wine black
spilled from roses red. Listen,

Listen to the madman
who has heard the distant voice,
who has read the unwritten lines,
and seen inside the empty chest.

Listen to the madman
as he implores us to take man
not as he is, but as he could be,
with spirit uncaged.
And while you re-cage him,
and clear his mess,

Listen to the madman,

for he alone speaks
with uncensored voice.

A poem by NJ Hynes, written following a visit to America’s Midwest where rights to the air were being sold thanks to a commercial interest in wind power. Illustrated by Tim McDonagh.

They are selling the sky and I wonder how –
by the yard, like bolts of silk, or in fixed amounts,
pre-wrapped in cellophane – (if you can’t see it, look again)

They are selling the long, flat sky that sails
over the freeway, billboards and telephone poles,
a picture rail for satellites and sparks from a solar kite.

They are selling the deep, lagoon-blue sky,
its breeze carrying thistledown, salt, a bird of prey,
folding a lake into waves, leaves into an autumn drain.

They are buying the sky’s voluminous wind,
its full-bellied breath turning wheels to spin the currents
that run this eager world, its streets of glistening light.

They are buying the sky and I grow afraid –
for the rise and fall of my chest, for inhaling doubt,
for what we will do when the sky runs out.

A child stumbles across a destructive secret that will change her life forever in Audra Kerr Brown’s compelling short story. Illustrated by Mitt Roshin.

I found my first secret during a thunderstorm in the back of my parents’ closet, curled up between the wooden file cabinet and the wall, its blackened eyes staring up at me, unblinking. I’d often hide during storms, cowering from the thunder and lightning variety as well as from the frequent screaming and shouting parental tempests that would swell to the rafters like a flash flood. Parting Mother’s housecoats, I’d tiptoe over shoes lined like hedgerows towards Father’s side of the closet, which seemed darker and deeper and therefore, safer. With flashlight in tow, I’d push past his suits, his woollen winter coat, his leather-armed high school letter jacket and wait, hunkered in a squat, until the rain stopped or the waves of anger calmed to a trickle of sporadic expletives.

While sitting out a ferocious spring storm, hugging my knees and savouring the smell of moth balls and cedar chips, I sensed I was not alone. Perhaps I heard a shallow heartbeat, or felt a flinty gaze, or maybe I picked up a weakened signal as if it were emitting a high-frequency pulse, drawing me close. But somehow, I knew something was back there in that sliver of space behind the file cabinet, living, breathing, and waiting to be found.

I aimed the dual beam of my flashlight along the baseboards, illuminating a sock, a rubber band, one of father’s silken ties, a dead fly, and then, with a great flash of lightning and accompanying thunder that shook the house and rattled the windows, I saw the secret. It curled defensively in the pale yellowed light like a dog bracing itself against the cold, its eyes trained on me, those darkened pin-prick eyes. How strange, I thought. How strange and yet, how astonishingly beautiful. (Only twice in my life have I experienced this odd mix of attraction and repulsion: that day in the closet, and on my wedding night, having set eyes for the first time on the naked, male form. On both occasions, attraction was the victor.)

Of course, at that time, I did not know it was a secret; I didn’t even know they existed. I’d learned childish rhymes to help identify and steer clear of possible threats such as poison ivy, leaflets three, let it be; coral snakes, red touching yellow kills a fellow; and black widow spiders, red hourglass, better run fast — all of which could cause bodily harm; but no one had ever warned me about the innocuous-looking creatures lurking in the back of closets and under beds, between mattresses, beneath floorboards, and inside toilet tanks. The kinds of things that can rip your world to shreds within the blink of an eye. I think of this often and with deep regret. If only I’d used my flashlight right then as a bludgeon to its ripened head; how very different my life might now be.

My fear of storms having been stolidly replaced with the exhilaration of discovery, I scooped the secret into my palm where it sat placid as a toad — and much heavier than I expected, quite like a lead paperweight. I couldn’t wait to show Mother what I’d found and as I headed down the stairs I took them with care, one at a time, as opposed to the usual sliding on my backside, the flashlight clenched between my teeth to navigate the way. Presumably, the lightning strike had knocked out the power and even though it was only late afternoon, the house was drenched in deep shadow.

I found Mother in the basement holding a candle to the fuse box. She balanced the baby on her slim hip and huffed loudly upon a cigarette which protruded from the center of her bright red mouth, her lips like a hibiscus flower, the cigarette poking through the petals as a phallic pistil.

‘Aren’t you the brave one?’ she asked, flipping a switch. The basement lights flickered back to life and the sounds of her favourite television game show showered down from the den: the audience laughter, the ticking clock, the raucous buzzers. ‘I didn’t expect to see you until after the storm,’ she said, with genuine surprise. She then snuffed out the candle and set it down. ‘What have you got there?’

‘Something I found.’

To gain closer inspection, Mother shifted the baby — also known as The Doppelganger because she looked like a smaller, balder version of me — and took my cupped hands into her silken palm, then drew it away quickly, as if burned. And indeed, she had been hurt. A pearl of blood pooled upon her fingertip. Mother’s face twisted in confusion as she sucked at the wound. ‘Where did you get that?’ she asked.

‘In the closet,’ I replied.

‘In your closet?’

I shook my head, bewildered.

‘My closet? You found that in my closet?’ she repeated, her voice rising like a thunderhead.

‘Behind Father’s file cabinet,’ I whispered.

She threw her cigarette onto the bare floor and stamped it with her shoe. ‘Take it upstairs,’ she commanded. ‘Take it upstairs, now.’

‘But, wh-what is it?’ I stammered as she took me by the collar, steering me toward the stairwell. ‘What is it, Mother?’

I spent the rest of the afternoon sequestered in my bedroom, studying the whorls in the wood grain of my headboard in an attempt to decipher a friendly shape, but seeing only the distorted faces of shrieking ghosts. The thunderstorm outside had abated but a new one, fiercer and more destructive than the first, arose when Father came home. As soon as he set foot upon the threshold, I heard Mother’s wailing, her shrill voice whipping like wind, her words pelting down like driving rain.

She’d shown him the secret.

Boldly, I raced to the kitchen and there she stood, her arm outstretched, holding it by its bristled tail, dodging its swiping claws and gnashing teeth. How terrifying it had become in her presence, how vicious in her grip. And yet, amid this raging squall, Father said nothing. His eyes remained level, and flat. Despite the lashing, the railing, the violence, he said nothing. Nothing at all.

Mother threw the secret in the trash, and we were sent away, The Doppelganger and I, to stay with Grandmother. Usually a pleasant adventure filled with sweet meats and storybooks, I was too distraught to enjoy either, spending the better part of two days pushing my food around my plate and sulking in her backyard, throwing rocks and kicking up clouds of dirt. Even the sound of her wind chimes seemed to sing a mournful funeral dirge. Finally, on the third day, we were allowed back home. I felt much like Jonah from one of Grandma’s stories — vomited from the fish’s belly, weak, hungry, and eager to make things right.

Mother greeted us at the door with bare lips and uncombed hair. I pushed her outstretched arms aside and ran through the house, out the back door to the alley. I wanted to find the secret, to put it back where I’d found it, to undo the destruction I’d caused. But as I kicked over the trashcan and began a desperate search through tin cans and coffee grounds, I knew that Father’s side of the closet was already empty. His suits, his winter coat, his letter jacket, the file cabinet — all of it, no longer there. Nothing left but a heap of wire hangers abandoned on the floor, like a pile of bones picked clean.

Inspired by her conservative grandmother who attempted to teach her to sew, Ellen Davies’ poem celebrates the advantages of ignorance.

Despite your lessons,
I never learnt to sew.
I could never master the fluid
movement required to darn a tear,
sealing it tight.
Could never emulate the steady rhythm
of your hands as you thread
the faint stitch through the lip
of the ripped fabric.
Your casual flick of the wrist.
The simple knot you tie with a gentle twist,
a bow formed from loose ends
and dangling cotton wisps.
Even now I bring you clothes.
Garments with gashes of flesh missing,
torn out by careless tumbles.
Blazers with burnished buttons slack
from too much wear.
I know what you will say.
I should learn to sew,
to seal up this gasping gulf,
but I bless my ignorant hands.

With just a handful of our limited edition A2 Giclée prints left, we’re now making them available for less than half price. Pick up yours from £16.

A couple of years ago, we launched The Print Shop, taking a small selection of six of the most powerful images we had featured in the magazine and making them available in large format limited editions of 150. Now, with the arrival of 2016 and just a handful of the prints left, we’re cutting the price of them from £45 to £16 to make way for a new print-related venture — which we’ll go into more detail on soon.

So, if you fancy adorning your walls with a beautiful Giclée print that weighs in at 550mm x 675mm, sunk into the finest Folex Fine Art archival papers from talented illustrators such as Sam Green, Mydeadpony, Tom Hovey, Devin McGrath, Esra Røise and City Abyss, head over to The Print Shop to get hold of yours.

With the arrival of 2016, there are just eighteen days left to submit your poems and short stories to our next issue on the theme of ‘Adventure’.

Until January 20th we’ll be accepting poems of up to 25 lines and short stories of up to 2,500 words that relate to the theme of ‘Adventure’. So, if you want to kick off the new year by getting your writing published, illustrated and read by thousands of people all over the globe, make sure it’s polished up and in with us before the deadline passes. As long as you retain full publishing rights to the work, writing can have been published before and we’re also open to simultaneous submissions.

If you’ve already sent in your submission for this issue, fear not, your writing is already under consideration. If not, make sure that you acquaint yourself with the submissions guidelines at our submit page and we’ll look forward to reading your literary masterpieces.

With 2015 drawing to a close, we reflect on the last twelve months and say a huge thank you to our readers and subscribers for their tremendous support.

Strangely, very few magazines actively talk about just how important their readers and subscribers are to them. It might be mentioned in an issue’s opening editorial every once in a while but that’s usually the extent of it. However, with a new year approaching and reflection mode setting in, we wanted to take the opportunity to thank every single person who has supported Popshot over the last twelve months; whether by becoming one of our adored subscribers, picking up a copy in a bookshop, ordering a copy online, submitting to us, following us on Instagram or Facebook or Pinterest, downloading our app, writing about us or talking about the magazine via good old fashioned word of mouth. Without this network, Popshot would quickly cease to exist. With no funding and no advertising, it’s our readership that enables us to continue publishing the magazine and building a platform that gets new fiction, poetry and illustration out into the wider world. And for that, we’re exceedingly grateful.

2015 has seen Popshot rise to a new height. Our thirteenth issue, The Outsider Issue, launched back in April and sold out in less than four months, prompting us to re-release it in a limited edition supplement-style format a few weeks later. Only 25 copies remain. Thanks to an increase in new subscribers over the last few months, The Curious Issuelooks set to follow a similar path with less than a hundred copies left. We overhauled our website after a year of talking about it, making it mobile/tablet friendly and allowing us to bring some of the poems and short stories from our print editions into the digital sphere. Over the next twelve months we hope to build on it by publishing more writing from other publishers too. Most importantly, we had the pleasure of publishing some of our favourite pieces of writing yet from some very promising literary talent and working with a selection of illustration’s finest — some of whom are represented in the image above.

As 2016 rolls into view, there are exciting plans afoot. We’re looking to bring out the magazine more often and, with some brand involvement, will try to turn our dream of properly paying our contributors into a reality. Here’s to a wonderful new year and once more, a massive thank you to our readers and subscribers. If you’d like to join them, subscribe from just £10 a year here.

Nancy Carol Moody’s poem reflects on the unintended fierceness of her face, which betrays the softness that lives behind. Illustrated by Maria Rikteryte.

When they ask about my face
I will say something about snow,
the skittered tracks of a hare,
just prior to the hush.

I will say wind bores
salt into sea-boards,
taut rope burns a furrow,
Leaf rust pockmarks autumn elms.

I will talk of hoarfrost bit by hob-nail,
a meadow after the scythe,
the dory’s barnacled hull,
a peppermint held
too long against the palate.

When they ask about my face
I will say that even a trodden carriage
leaves wheel marks in the stone,
that shrapnel can flare
a staggering tattoo,

that left to their own devices,
sparks of midnight fireworks
will carve ferocious trails
into the black wax of the sky.

Our fourteenth issue, containing a selection of poems and short stories that put oddity and curiosity at their heart. Led by some of the finest storytellers and poets, and accompanied by a selection of beautiful illustrations, we’ll travel to the deepest, darkest depths of the ocean; to the workshop of a fraudulent creator of abnormalities; and to the rowing boats of rosy-blooded explorers. We’ll happen across nighttime gardeners and dusty bookshop owners, discover a giant machine capable of attaining the answers to all of life’s questions, watch as dodos are reassembled, and find ourselves caught in a loop where generation after generation lives out a very similar life.

Words by Claire Booker, Georgia Oman, Danielle Carey, Katherine Venn, Alys Hobbs, Adam Battestilli, Nancy Carol Moody, Audra Kerr Brown, Lillian Sciberras, Ben Norris, Stephen Hargadon, Sharon Lask Munson, Finn Jackson, Dan Coxon, Rob Stuart, Sophie F Baker, Jane Wright, Rosie Garland, Christine Burns and J.S.Watts.

Illustrations by Jörn Kaspuhl, Joseba Elorza, Mathieu Persan, Matt Murphy, Joey Guidone, Phil Couzens, Anja Javelona, Maria Rikteryte, Mitt Roshin, Egle Plytnikaite, Kate O’Hara, Pedro Semeano, Luke Waller, Nevena Katalina, Taylor Nicole Pohlman, Matthew Brazier and Karolina Burdon.

Issue 14 has now sold out. Read it on screen courtesy of our digital edition and to ensure that you never miss another print issue, subscribe from just £20 for 4 issues.

Krishan Coupland’s flash fiction piece pictures a time where gravity’s longstanding reign starts to collapse. Illustrated by Señor Salme.

Gravity started reversing. It happened slowly, in increments day by day. At first you would hang for just a second longer than usual at the apex of a jump. Feathers and dust and the broken nibs of pencils refused point-blank to fall. Water wobbled slowly from the tap like golden syrup. I thought it was fun when I found that I could jump from the top of the stairs and drift gently down through the air like a seed.

Everything would change, of course. Everything. Mum and Dad argued about it in the living room. We glued down our ornaments and wore weights in our shoes. When the breakfast table hovered up off the floor, Mum fetched another bowl of sugar to pin it down. Our beds were unstable life rafts. Little Emily drifted up out of her crib like a tiny, gurgling balloon.

Sooner or later, said Dad, our heaviest shoes would not be heavy enough. When we fell it would be up, not down. Up into space, our house and our car and our apple tree falling with us. Emily giggled happily from the ceiling, playing with the water bubbles and the dust bunnies that collected there. Better to go of our own free will, said Dad. And so one day we packed a picnic — sandwiches pinned together with cocktail sticks, crackers and apples and boxes of juice — and set off across the fields. I took giant steps, leaping treetop high and flipping over in the air until I was dizzy and hot. At the top of the hill a white wind turbine stood silent, still as an upright snake.

Up we go, kids, said Mum. And up we went. Dad carried Emily on his back, and Mum carried the picnic basket. We would leap up, drift, find grip on the smooth metal skin of the turbine and push up again, as easy as swimming. At the very top we settled and waited, and Mum gave us sandwiches and fed mushy peas to Emily. We watched the sunset melting buttery into the horizon. Not long now, said Dad. As darkness fell we stood up and joined hands. I felt so light, like I was made of nothing but dandelion seeds and air. The sky was red. We kicked off our shoes and waited to see where we’d fall.

On the lookout for a gift for that literature-loving friend? Wrap up the search with a copy of Popshot for £6 or a three-issue subscription for £10.

With just two weeks left before the presents have to be wrapped and under the tree, the world has now fallen into a festive headlock. It even inspired us to create our first ever stop motion animation which you can see above. It’s only 12 seconds long but we had a lot of fun making it.

So if, like us, you’ve got a few more things to get before you can call it a day on the Christmas shopping, why not give the gift of illustrated literature? You can pick up a single copy from £6 plus postage or subscribe from £10 and get The Curious Issue as the initial copy (or any back issue of your choice), followed by our next two issues over the coming year plus free access to our digital edition which contains every issue we’ve ever published.

We can also send the first copy to you so that you can gift it in person. Just drop us an email straight after subscribing and we’ll set it up for you.

Our last posting dates for New Zealand and Australia are today; the USA, Canada and Europe are on December 15th; and copies within the UK will be dispatched all the way up until December 21st.

A charming little poem by Neil McCarthy, written for his nephew as an ode to the future and the footsteps once trodden himself. Illustrated by David Lemm.

How many times, singing, have I
untied your laces, pulled
off your shoes and held
one to my nose, pretending
to sniff some foul odour
if only to make you laugh?

As you grow older you will
forget such gestures; the
world as you come to know
it, an open envelope of
good news and bad. From
dependent to child to boy to
adult; an alphabet sung backwards.

Kirsty Logan presents an unusual version of an instruction manual for writers in her jocular short story, first published in our Imagination issue.

It begins in childhood, when you don’t know any better. You are little, so imagine being bigger. Imagine being smaller, longer, wider, inflatable, amphibian, in outer space. Make your Barbies into assassins. Make your GI Joes into the Loch Ness monster. Make a mess, make a fuss, make towers of blocks only so you can knock them over. Just make.

When you are medium-sized, forget. Concern yourself with whether boys or girls are icky or actually sort of interesting. Try lipstick. Try purple shoes. Try tying things to your bicycle wheels that make loud noises when you pedal. Abandon them. Fall off a swing and break your arm, or trip over while skiing and fracture your leg, or learn to play guitar and snap off all your fingernails. However you do it, break something. Do not worry about stringing words together any more than you have to.

Adolescence is the time for poetry. You may also try memoir – after all, though your years may seem scant you’ve learned enough to teach the whole world. You could solve everyone’s problems, if only they would listen. Free verse is the only real way to convey the anguish of your soul; formalism is fine but it’s just too easy to rhyme ‘woe’. Try to get your heart broken as much as you can. Heartbreak is excellent material for poetry. See also your parents, politics, city lights, empty fields, the shifting colours of your beloved’s azure-turquoise-emerald eyes, and the general unfairness of life. Keep all your poetry, but never show it to anyone, even if you think it is good. Especially if you think it is good.

Now you’re almost grown, at least in terms of height. You’ve done some making, some forgetting, and a whole shitload of poetry. Now do it all again. Imagine being dust-choked, mud-slipping, honey-submerged, explosive spinning indescribable; break your thumbs trying to launch a boat onto the blackened drunken lake; forget why you are even doing this whole stupid thing. Take at least six months. Now you’re ready for the poetry again.

Return to heartbreak, unfairness, and eye colours. Try not to rhyme. After you’ve produced fistfuls of emetic poetry, put it all away. Lock it in a suitcase, hide it in the attic. Burn it if you must. Now is the time for narrative. There are stories all around you; stories about lies and aeroplanes and veils and sleet and viruses and hippopotami. Do not write the stories yet; just listen to them. Listen to the people you usually ignore, because they are overflowing with stories in a way that you are not. Pay attention also to the narrative of your life: the time you got drunk on fizzy wine at New Year and had to stumble around the streets with your best friend until you sobered up because you couldn’t let your mother see you with such unsteady eyes; the time a scoundrel whispered platitudes to you over morning coffee and scrambled eggs, only to disappear with your iPod; the time you travelled halfway around the world and found a slip of paper on the bottom of your shoe that convinced you to go right home again. Be particularly careful not to write these stories yet. Just pay attention.

When you are tall and frantic and stuffed belly-high with stories, you may pick up your pen. Make sure that you stare at the blank page for a while; at least as long as it takes to drink several cups of something. Write your first line. Delete it. Write a different first line. Delete that. Write the first thing you wrote and delete it and write it again. Now stop fussing and keep writing. Think of the words behind you as a serial killer trying to catch you, or a burning fuse leading to the dynamite on your heels, or the things you are trying to forget. Let your hands make words faster than your brain can understand them. Keep writing until your eyes can’t focus and you have a blister on your finger. Forget to breathe. Now close your burning eyes, get to your feet, and go outside. Breathe in the air that is too hot or too cold; smell the bonfire or the brewery or the wet earth. Don’t put down your pen; keep it tight in your fist. It should stay there until your hand is cramped to its shape forever, until you don’t even notice that you are holding it. Words are shifting and elusive, and if you don’t write them down now, immediately, as soon as you think of them, they will disappear quicker than breath. When you go back inside, your written-on page will be gone. This is good.

Now you may start again. Grip the pen in the ache of your fist and force it into the shape of words. Do not think. Think all you can. Think about not thinking. The stories will come, but you have worked hard to ensure that they are buried deep. Now it is your choice: you can look away while they gradually float up on the floodwater, or you can get in there with a spade and dig those motherfuckers out. This is the first decision that you are making as a writer. The next decision is what order the words go in. Do not worry about any other decisions: trust that the stories are waiting for you.

You have now been scratching at pages for a thousand years. Your beard has reached the creases of your lap and your breasts are as long and flat as rolled dough and your hand is a claw and your cheeks are sunken and pitted from an excess of caffeine. Your pen has melted into your hand. Your veins lie flat and pale on the backs of your hands from all those times you had to use your blood for ink. This is good. This is good. Now fold up those stained pages and cram them in an envelope and go outside and squint in the sun – it’s summer again, and you don’t even know when that happened – and stumble to the fat red postbox and slot the envelope into its careful mouth. No need to write anything on the envelope; your stories know their purpose. Go home and lie on the couch and listen to the steady failing beep of the smoke alarm. Make a note to change the battery but fall asleep instead.

When you wake, your walls have become hedges of constellations and your ceiling a spyglass of thorns. Caterpillars have bivouacked along the arms of the couch. Someone is pounding at the door, and when you get up to answer it you will trip on your trouser legs. You have shrunk, you think, and then you remember the weight of the envelope you fed to the postbox. You reach up for the door handle and pull. Outside is an agent in a velvet hat with a huge cheque consisting only of zeroes. Congratulations! he shrieks, before picking a stray caterpillar off your shoulder and popping it into his mouth.

The next thirty seconds are an oil spill of activity. The art department pop out your eyes and squish them onto the cover. The line-editors make thousand of tiny nicks all over your arms and legs with kitchen scissors and pull the droplets into their fountain pen cartridges. The promotion department insert you into the doughnut-ring of a CT scanner and print photos of your innards. When they are done, they spill through the floorboards and you go back to the couch. The caterpillars have plumped the cushions for you.

Now your face is on magazine covers. Not proper magazines, of course; not ones that members of the public read. But ones for writers, ones only writers read, ones full of articles on how others can do what you have done, though somewhat differently. You are on one cover with your shirt off, holding a small and fluffy creature – this shows that you are badass yet sensitive, like all the great poets. On another cover, you are halfway through abseiling down a mountain while wearing black and staring at a lake – this is so that someone will give you a teaching job. You are photographed lounging on couches eating pomegranates, and wrapping an oiled bicycle chain around your throat, and slicing open birds’ bellies with your fingernails. You are getting sick of the proportions of your own face.

Your book is the first thing customers see when they walk into a bookshop. There are so many promotional stickers and quotes and flecks of blood on the cover that your name is nothing more than a series of bumps, the letters puffy and gold-painted. Sometimes you stand for hours with a fingertip pressed to the cover, trying to absorb some of it back into you, leechlike. You are still not sure whether you dug out that story or whether it’s still seeping up on the floodwater.

This is how it is done. There is no other way. Now go back to the start and do it again.

You are little, so imagine being bigger.

We are now accepting short fiction and poetry submissions for our forthcoming issue on the theme of ‘Adventure’.

After the resounding success of our latest issue (which is looking likely to become our bestselling one of all time) we’re even more excited than usual to announce that literary submissions for our forthcoming issue are officially open.

Through The Curious Issue and The Outsider Issue, our last two editions have focused in on the introverted and peculiar sides of humankind. For this issue however, we’re turning the tables and looking to explore the extroverts, the travellers and the adventurers to create a collection of short stories, poems and illustrations that will roar with energy and spirit.

For the full submission guidelines, head to our submit page and make sure that you send in your short fiction or poetry long before the deadline of January 20th. If you haven’t already, we would also recommend reading last week’s article by our editor which shines a light on what kind of writing we’ll be looking out for.

A poem by Daniel Sluman, providing a crepuscular vignette of a time spent on drugs. Illustrated by Devin McGrath.

We’re floored like snow angels on the carpet;
I show you how to roll a cigarette –
the delicate origami of tongues and fingers
reflected in the glitter-heaped mirror.

Lilly has met you in her dreams before –
paranoia or white witch, she has seen
your eyes fizz like coke in a clean glass –
your shower fun smile on display
and legs apart like your profile pic –

an invitation
to hold that slippery bundle of thighs
and slide a hand to the headboard.

A razor-fine line rushes
through arteries to the air eating heart;
a thousand drops of water burst onto skin –
flutter tattoos of light from the pores –
shadows flinging themselves on the wall.

In the dark the red of our roll-ups
swing from lips like fireflies –
she would hurl at the sight of our hands
whilst our feet stuck to the floor of the bar –
how I flicked line after heavy line your way.

With Christmas Day less than a month away, a copy of Popshot could be the perfect gift for the quintessential lover of literature.

Ah, the festive frenzy that is the month before Christmas. That wonderful time of year where you’re bombarded from all angles by people reminding you that the big day is approaching on the off-chance that you hadn’t already noticed. We would claim to be above this sort of behaviour but as the Christmas bandwagon goes trundling past, we feel it would be churlish not to hop on it.

So if you’re organised enough to already be thinking about it and have a friend or family member who’s partial to a spot of illustrated short fiction and poetry, a copy of Popshot might be right up their street.

You can pick up a single copy from £6 plus postage or subscribe from £10 a year and get our latest issue as the 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. If you’d like us to send the first copy to you so that you can gift it in person, just drop an email to subscriptions@popshotpopshot.com straight after subscribing and we’ll set it up for you.

To ensure that it arrives in time, our last posting dates for New Zealand and Australia are on December 10th; the USA, Canada and Europe are on December 15th; and copies within the UK will be dispatched all the way up until December 21st. Now, we’re off to go and cry at the John Lewis advert…again.

In advance of submissions opening for our fifteenth issue, our editor shines a light on what kind of writing we’ll be looking out for.

If you’ve never read the What Editors Want article on The Review Review, I can’t stress enough what a valuable piece of writing it is. It’s not a quick read but it provides some of the most measured and sage advice for writers submitting their work to literary magazines that I’ve ever read. What it understandably isn’t able to do is be more specific about the writing that each magazine is looking for — so with submissions for our fifteenth issue just around the corner, I thought I’d give a brief insight here.

When it comes to fiction, Popshot has built a reputation for publishing stories about the weird, the wonderful and the slightly macabre. In our latest issue the most popular story, entitled The Basement, told the tale of two mysterious aunts who raise their orphaned nieces whilst maintaining a fascinating secret that the nieces go on to inherit. In our thirteenth issue it was The Men Of Burr, the wartime story of a social outcast who through a unique skill becomes a local hero. In our eleventh issue it was The Memory Jar, a heart-rending short that drops us into the lives of a devoted couple who grow increasingly dependent on their vast collection of memory jars.

Why did we choose these stories and what is it about them that our readers have connected to? Firstly, they’re written clearly and aren’t fussy, allowing the reader to lose themselves in the story rather than try to navigate what’s going on. Arguably, the best stories are written in such a way that we forget a writer has even written them. Secondly, they capture your attention from the first line, providing enough detail to instantly understand the scene but not so much that the reader’s curiosity is met. If the first line makes you want to read the second and the second line makes you want to read the third, that’s where we stumble across the hallowed ground of ‘unputdownable’. Thirdly, we love a twist, an unexpected turn or something that will stir the emotion. If a story brings out our gooseflesh, we put it in the magazine. Those stories that hit us in the viscera — the ones that reallymake us feel something — are the ones we look to publish. Get out our gooseflesh and you’ll go straight onto the shortlist.

What we look for in poetry is much the same as with fiction — clear writing, being hooked from the first line, being emotionally stirred — but it’s much more a question of beauty. Not necessarily in terms of its subject matter but in the way it’s composed; the beauty in the language that’s been chosen and the ability to ensure that each word is weighed, measured and found to say much more than just the word itself. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who said that poetry is “the best words in the best order” and as hard as we’ve tried, it’s difficult to find a definition much more punchy than that. Perhaps the finest recent example of a poem that ticked every box we had was Aki Schilz’s piece If I Could Undo Any Mistake It Would Be You which was published in our twelfth issue.

Ultimately, if you would love to see your writing published and illustrated in Popshot, there’s no better way of understanding the work that we put in the magazine than by reading the magazine itself. We say it a lot but there’s a remarkable correlation between those that have read Popshot and those whose poetry and short fiction ends up being published in its pages. In the last four issues of the magazine, 50-70% of our contributors have either been print subscribers, digital subscribers or have read a copy of the magazine before. So, if you would like to increase your chances of getting in — whilst supporting Popshot at the same time — pick up a single copy from £6 plus postage or subscribe from £10 a year and get our latest issue as the 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.

If you’re interested in submitting, head to our submit page to find out what to do next. Here’s to reading some of the finest new writing yet.

— Jacob Denno, Editor

A young girl discovers that she has a unique and supernatural gift in Jane Wright’s transfixing short story. Illustrated by Matthew Brazier.

My grandmother taught me to read the cards when my mother left us.

She left us in the middle of summer. It was just after lunch one day, when the sun was at its highest and brightest. By the time the ambulance had reached the end of the road and turned out of sight, the house had fallen under a dark shadow, despite the sun still burning outside. My grandmother sank into the threadbare armchair in the sitting room, her hand across her eyes and her lips moving noiselessly as she recited some silent prayer, while I curled up on the sofa, arms tight around my drawn-up knees, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Upstairs, my mother’s room lay in shattered pieces. She had ripped the curtains from the rails and torn the paper from the walls, smashed the mirror and slashed her clothes. Her blood made a trail of red breadcrumbs across the room where it had dripped, firstly from her cut fingertips and then from her opened wrists. She had been ill for as long as I could remember, but just recently things had become so much worse. We did our best, the doctors did theirs, but we simply couldn’t help her any more.

We stayed in the sitting room for what seemed like hours until, with a sudden movement, my grandmother rose from the chair and took something from a drawer in the sideboard. I watched as she sat down at the table, unwrapped a cloth package and took out a tarot deck, her trembling fingers tracing the worn edges and rounded corners of the cards. As she started to shuffle them, I crept quietly over and slipped into the place opposite her, my eyes darting back and forth between the cards and her face as she laid them out and turned them over, intently considering their meaning.

Looking up briefly, she saw me watching. I met her gaze with wide eyes and it felt as though she looked right into my soul as she answered the question I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

‘It’s going to be alright, Birdy. It says so in the cards.’

In the following weeks, while we adjusted to life without my mother, my grandmother consulted the cards every night and I always sat watching her. One evening, she held the deck out to me, motioning for me to deal them instead. I took the cards and laid them out in a simple, slightly clumsy formation, and together we turned them over one by one. And with that, my education started.

At first, the nuances of meaning slipped out of my grasp as I tried to read them myself — but it wasn’t long before the subtleties of the tarot and their placements began to flow, and I was soon reading as though I’d been born with the deck in my hand. A natural, my grandmother said.

Some months later, one wet Tuesday evening, my grandmother told me to hurry up and put on my hat and coat. I did as I was told and together, we headed out into the twilight. It was raining hard and we splashed quickly up the high street, our feet wet through from passing cars, the relentless downpour seeping into our coats. Eventually, we turned into an unremarkable doorway, climbed a steep staircase and found ourselves in a dimly lit foyer. A few people were milling around but most of the bustle seemed to be coming from a brightly lit room off to the side. My grandmother took my hand and led me into the main hall. People were taking their places on rows of wooden chairs set out in front of a raised platform and my grandmother and I found two spaces at the back, shrugging out of our wet things as we sat down. I opened my mouth to ask her what was going on but she shushed me before I could get any words out.

‘Be quiet now, it’s starting.’

As she finished speaking, and a woman took the stage, my grandmother took my hand in hers and pressed it tight.

The woman on the stage was a medium and the audience watched, rapt, while she delivered messages to them from their loved ones. When the service was over we stood to put our coats on. My grandmother was hurrying, clearly hoping to slip out as unnoticed as we had slipped in, but as she was doing up the last of her buttons, a voice rang out nearby.

‘Sylvie? Good lord, is that you?’

A shadow flickered over my grandmother’s face but she quickly fixed a smile and turned to face the person who had called out.

‘Ruth! How lovely to see you.’

I could tell by her tone that it wasn’t particularly lovely, but my grandmother kept the smile on her face regardless. The woman turned to look at me.

‘And this must be…’

‘Birdy,’ my grandmother said.

‘Isobel,’ I added.

‘Isobel,’ my grandmother murmured.

They talked for a few minutes, awkwardly at first although I could sense my grandmother relaxing as the conversation went on. As they talked I looked around the hall, watching people gathered together in small groups, dunking biscuits into cups of tea as they chatted. I came back to the conversation as my grandmother brushed my hand with hers and said, ‘Well, we really must be going now. Birdy has homework to do.’

I smiled at Ruth then turned to follow my grandmother as she headed down the stairs and into the cool night.

We walked home in silence. I wanted to ask why we had gone out that evening but knew that I shouldn’t and my grandmother never explained. A couple of evenings later, there was a knock at the front door. I answered it and found Ruth and a gentleman that I vaguely recognised from the meeting standing on our step. I took them into the back room, where my grandmother was doing her daily crossword. She peered over her glasses as we entered and I gestured to the sofa, then she sent me off to make some tea.

A few minutes later, I carefully carried the loaded tray back to the room, stopping outside the door as I heard a snippet of the conversation.

‘I knew you were there before I saw you,’ Ruth was saying. ‘It was lovely to see you again.’

‘It’s been a long time,’ the man added. ‘We’ve missed you, Sylvie.’ When my grandmother didn’t answer, he continued. ‘Your granddaughter has something, you know. I could sense it as soon as she opened the door.’

‘She doesn’t have anything,’ my grandmother sighed. ‘She’s just a girl. A girl who’s been through a lot in the past few years.’

‘A girl whose grandmother and mother were both gifted,’ the man said gently. ‘A girl who could, if she wanted to, train her gift and learn how to use it properly.’

I pressed closer to the door.

‘Does she read the cards, Sylvie?’ Ruth asked. My grandmother didn’t answer but I guessed that she nodded, as Ruth carried on, ‘And she’s good, isn’t she? Intuitive? Deep?’

‘Look,’ my grandmother said firmly. ‘I stopped coming to the meetings because of what happened with my daughter. I don’t want the same to happen to my granddaughter.’

‘Then why did you come on Tuesday?’ the man asked. ‘And why did you bring her?’

My grandmother didn’t answer at first. ‘I don’t know,’ she said eventually, her voice small. ‘Because I miss him. I miss him so very much and I just wanted…’

Her voice trailed off.

‘You wanted some comfort,’ the man said. ‘That’s what we all want, Sylvie. Look, your daughter…things went wrong for her but the things she heard — they were nothing to do with her gift. Those voices were part of her illness.’

‘But how do you know?’ my grandmother asked. ‘How does anyone actually know that? All I do know is that she opened herself to something, she let it in, and then all that happened. I also know that it was my fault, because I encouraged her to do it.’

The tray was becoming heavy and I could feel the muscles in my arms starting to shake, so I pushed the door open, trying to look as though I hadn’t heard anything. My grandmother raised her hand to her face and I noticed the light glinting off tears still wet on her cheeks. I was shocked. I’d never seen my grandmother cry, not even at my mother’s funeral as she’d stood at the edge of the grave, her head bowed. No one was saying anything now and the atmosphere in the room felt charged. I sat down on the floor with my knees tucked underneath me, blowing on my hot drink and contemplating what I’d just heard.

Eventually, our guests finished their tea and stood to leave. My grandmother showed them to the door, exchanging hushed words of goodbye. By the time she came back, I was standing in the middle of the room, the tarot cards in my hand.

Ruth and Richard came round again the following night, and twice the following week. We went back to the meeting hall a fortnight later. This time, they were waiting for us at the door and walked us in, taking us to seats nearer the front. Ruth sat down on one side of us, Richard on the other. My grandmother had seemed very tired since their visits had started and I could hear her at night, restless in her bed and padding around the house. I knew now that we were there to hear from my grandfather, that my grandmother desperately wanted a message, a few words of hope. But they didn’t come. The medium didn’t pick her out and I could see her deflate as the rest of the crowd got up and left their seats at the end.

We stayed for refreshments this time, and Ruth kept patting my grandmother’s arm as we sat together at the back of the hall.

‘Maybe next time,’ Richard said, brightly. ‘Don’t give up hope, Sylvie.’

‘I used to be able to feel him,’ she said quietly, ‘but I haven’t felt him for ages. Not since…’ Her voice trailed off and I knew she was talking about my mother again.

‘He’s at home, Gran,’ I said suddenly.

I didn’t know where the words came from, I hadn’t planned to say anything but I couldn’t stop them from coming out. The three of them looked at me, slightly stunned.

‘He’s always at home. Don’t you feel him?’

She shook her head sadly.

‘I haven’t for a long time,’ she whispered, her voice thick with sadness. ‘Where… is he?’

‘He’s all over,’ I said. ‘He’s usually where you are, he likes to be with you. But sometimes he’s in the kitchen. I think he’s watching for the neighbour’s damn cat to make sure it doesn’t do its bloody business in the flowerbeds.’

I frowned in surprise as I said the last few words and my grandmother’s eyes widened. Ruth looked at my grandmother, then exchanged a knowing glance with Richard.

‘Birdy, what did you just say?’

‘I… I’m not sure.’

‘I remember Jim saying those words, Sylvie, more than once,’ Ruth said. ‘Those exact words. Would she have heard him, do you think?’

My grandmother shook her head.

‘He died when she was just a baby. I don’t think she would have picked it up. And, well, she’s never said it before.’

For the second time, we walked home from the meeting in silence.

I didn’t go to school the next day; I had a migraine and I felt oddly detached from myself. My grandmother was subdued all day too. She seemed lost in thought and I kept catching her watching me.

‘I’m okay,’ I lied. ‘I feel fine. It just came into my head.’

Ruth and Richard came to visit that evening. Richard perched on the edge of the sofa where I was lying.

‘Is he here now?’ he asked.

I nodded and pointed to the corner of the room. ‘He’s over there, I think.’

‘I can feel him too,’ he replied. ‘You’re right, he’s over there.’ He continued, ‘If you can feel your grandfather then you can probably feel other people too. Like the mediums you’ve seen. Would you like that? Would you like to learn more about this gift that you have?’

My grandmother stepped forward. ‘No, Richard, I don’t think that she –’

I cut her off. ‘It’s alright Gran. I do, I want to learn more. And I want to talk to Grandpa, properly.’

I saw my grandmother’s face fall slightly and I could tell she was uneasy, but I knew, suddenly, that I needed to do this.

‘And,’ I whispered, ‘I want to talk to Mum.’

Richard took a small booklet out of his inside jacket pocket and handed it to me.

‘Read this,’ he said. ‘It will get you started, explain how you can relax your mind and open it up to whoever’s out there. We have a group you can also come to, where you’ll be able to learn more.’

He got up to leave and turned to my grandmother, ‘Don’t worry Sylvie, it will be fine. Isobel has a special gift. Just like yours was, before you let it go.’

I took the booklet to bed that night and read it twice. When I turned out the light I lay in the dark practising how to relax my mind as I drifted off to sleep. As I slipped into unconsciousness, I heard my grandfather saying my name from somewhere close by.

I woke the next morning to a clamour of voices. I got slowly out of bed, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

‘Gran,’ I shouted as I went downstairs, ‘what’s going on?’ She didn’t reply so I opened the sitting room door to see who was in there. The room was empty.

‘Gran!’ I shouted again.

The voices seemed to be getting louder but I couldn’t work out where they were coming from. As they started to close in on me, it seemed as though they were splitting my head open.

My grandmother found me hunched in the corner of the kitchen, rocking back and forth with my head in my hands. As she knelt down beside me, I grabbed her arms and looked wildly through my tears, clinging to her and digging my nails into the soft flesh of her arms.

‘Please make them go away,’ I cried. ‘Please. I wanted to hear them, but I don’t any more, it hurts too much. Please Gran, make them stop talking. I can’t think straight.’

‘Oh, Birdy,’ she whispered as her own tears began to fall. She put her arms around me and held me tight as I sobbed into her neck. ‘My poor, dear, sweet Birdy.’

A light-footed poem by Max Wallis, addressing the day following a break up and the importance of the wallowing period. Illustrated by Peter Locke.

Allow yourself this one day
hungover from love. To sit in your sad cocoon
bed-lain on lemon bon bon sheets and sick with ache,
cuddling your bones. Let the day roll into night.
Do not fret about the red numbers in your account,
about deadlines and business worries; pick up three
books and do not read them. Wallow in coffee,
or simply nothing, as you tap-tap through Twitter feeds
and text messages and nonsense mad thoughts.
Let yourself reek with the unwash of sleep-sweats
and salt tears. Eat the mirror on your wall.
Play the unhappy songs that in bed you kissed,
had sex, made love to, that time, when sex became
heart-bare: skintouched, and those eyes.

Tomorrow you can sit in the warmth of a bath
clean your nails, pluck your brow, shave the fluff;
eat, drink, clean your room of your last meals
and bed-locked naked picnics. Tomorrow you can sail
in fresh linen and clothes, listen to happy songs
with no meaning but pop-tones, through a new day;
today is today, this day, my love.

Zelda Chappel’s short poem, taken from her debut collection entitled The Girl in the Dog-tooth Coat, whispers with elegance, yearning and fragility.

In the night I dream you are an orchestra of penny whistles
house martin chatter, gentle cawing of sea birds calling days
to their close. I map swift flight precisely, trust it knows its path.

I long for you to tell me how you still sing despite us, that you
still have things you want to say, that in the storm of our unending
noise you wish and long for louder lungs. We are all drowned

in the concrete sometimes, ears strained and searching for
your penny whistle songs. I swell with disappointment when I
cannot tune in, miss your well-strung notes and grieve.

Barry Charman’s short story leads us to the infamous wall of skulls and the old woman who lives in its secretive shadow. Illustrated by Bradley Jay.

The old woman lived alone in a land where nothing could live. The soil was dead. What few plants there were, turned from the sun and withered through choice. Where weeds sprouted, they were black and despairing like the ground that bore them. Nothing else grew in the shadow of the wall of skulls.

The young man dropped his satchel and stood awhile, staring at it, awestruck and terrified. In the village, when they heard the wind roaring across the land, they often said the wall of skulls was screaming.

As a boy, he had huddled beneath his bed sheets and trembled at the thought of those moaning dead. He remembered the first time that he and some of the other boys had gone to see it, how it had leered through the early mist, and emerged like one of his nightmares.

The others had run. He had stood, and stared. They had walked all night to reach it, and when he finally saw it, he wanted to truly understand it.

He remembered that first time, as he stood and tried once more to understand. The wall of skulls had always been there, so long that no one could tell him how it was built or by whom. There were old tales, passed down and told and retold, but no one ever spoke with the surety of truth. No one really knew.

It screamed into the sky, towering hundreds of feet above him. Black clouds rolled over it from the land beyond, the unimaginable land beyond. Had they built it? Whoever — whatever — lived on the other side? Did anything live there? The young man had no answers. So he simply did what he always did, halted and allowed himself time to ponder.

The old woman never came into the village; she needed a walking stick now and couldn’t make the journey. Twice a week, someone brought her food, sometimes the young man, sometimes his sister, sometimes someone else. The old woman unnerved him a little; she had strange ways. Why had she chosen to live out here, in her rundown shack, alone in the shadow of the dead? And why had she no family, who could provide for her themselves?

He crossed the desolate land and made his way to her hut, which stood alone and apart, the only thing built here that was not made from bone. On an overcast day, the land was as black as the sky; sometimes the moon separated the two like a blind eye.

His feet kicked up patches of strange white sand that always itched his nose. There was an earthy smell of rot that often followed the rain. His father told him there had been a forest here once, he wondered if its dry roots had survived, and yearned towards the raindrops. Was it that echo of life that stirred and smelt like some other place still living?

He knocked on the old woman’s ragged door, and stepped back as she opened it. She was thin, but you couldn’t call her frail. There was flint in her eyes, and a sharpness to her words that could cut through any foolishness. She took the package of food from him, muttered her thanks and turned to close the door.

‘I wondered-‘

The words slipped past his lips, but as she turned, he couldn’t finish the question. Instead, he glanced up at the wall. How many hundred feet? How many dead compiled from what war? Such a war that no one had committed it to memory or history book.

She followed his look, then darted him a hostile glare. ‘What?’

He took a deep breath. ‘I wondered if you knew who lived on the other side?’

She slammed the door without a word.

The young man shook his head, and started walking from the hut, taking a stroll by the wall — something he rarely did. Such a hideous thing it was, made of so much death. Bone lashed to bone, bound by thick rope and black mud. So much time had been given to it. He wondered if men had even died making it. Had they been given to the wall as well? He shuddered. Wandering close, he noticed something that he had never seen before; there were crude pieces of wood sticking out of some of the skulls, protruding from their sightless eyes. He pondered this for a while, before he looked up, and realised with a start what they were: holds, for climbing.

Later, with the wall still on his mind, he made his excuses to his parents, and returned to it. He found an overhanging rock that he could lie on, and watch the hut from a ridge without being seen. He waited, but nothing happened.

The next night he watched, and then the next. On the third night, the wind picked up, and he saw the old woman emerge stiffly from her hut. She pulled her heavy coat around her and walked a little way to the wall. Then the wind found the skulls and they sung her a woeful song. She stood a while, listening. Eventually, she slumped and returned to her hut, lighting a small fire for herself in the dark.

The young man had seen nothing to unnerve him. He thought of how he was wasting his time, fearing that the shadow of the wall had infected him with whatever macabre thrall had infected her. However, on the fourth night, he saw the old woman leave the hut again and walk to the wall. He watched as she stood at its base, and prepared herself. Then, she dropped her stick and began to climb. She used the pieces of wood to get started, then higher up, started to use eye sockets for grips instead. Up she went, climbing row after row of skulls, until she became a small dot in the distance, and disappeared over the top of the wall.

The young man was shocked. He didn’t know what to do. So he did nothing — he just watched, and waited for her to return. Shortly before dawn, he made out her figure, bent and weak but able to lower herself, slowly but surely. Eventually she made it to the ground, and he went forward, meeting her before she could reach the hut.

‘What is on the other side?’ he begged, years of curiosity rushing from him. Perhaps it would have been wiser to tell someone else what he’d seen, to not tell the old woman at all, but he could not bear it. Never had he heard of anyone climbing the wall, and never had anyone suggested what might be on the other side.

The old woman was tired, but she studied him, then told him. ‘The other side is a wall of flowers, white and glowing. Beneath and beyond, not far, is another village, not unlike your own. There was a war once; it cut down the young and the old, and the young and the old that replaced them. And when it ended, each side built the wall. One made a symbol of the dead, and kept to the truth of dying; and the other covered the dead with glory and beauty.’ Her face twisted at this. ‘I have lost sons to other wars since this, and when I think of them, I think only of the pain of death. The pain is as real, as the glory was a dream.’

‘So I chose to live on this side of the wall, where death was respected. Where death was a shadow made to be cast over life.’

The young man listened intently. When she finished, he stared up at the great wall in shock. ‘Do they know?’ he asked, ‘that this side is a wall of skulls?’

She shook her head. ‘Few do. Mainly mothers. Mothers without young.’

She told him then how she took food to some of her relatives, who lived over the wall, in the bright shadow of their adored dead.

‘It is a good climb,’ she added. ‘Every moment evokes life and death, and the memory of both.’ With this, she turned from him, and went wearily to her hut.

The young man stood there for a little while, then turned and looked to the wall. Ever since he was a boy, the great wall had appalled and terrified him. He’d imagined all those people dying, so long ago, and then their heads being assembled on the wall. Dragged and hauled into place. There forever, side by side.

Now, he imagined the white wall beyond; a high, endless, curtain of bright flowers swaying elegantly in the breeze, and everything beneath covered up, decorated, forgotten. Appalled anew, he turned away, and began the long walk back to his village.

A poem of youth, memory and the reinterpretation of the past. Penned by Claire Booker and first published in our twelfth issue on the theme of Time.

I remember your promise —
the meadow lands of Surrey laid out before us
like a picnic on best linen
and talk of wild parties;

the way the gravel bruised my feet,
a slew of cars silting the driveway
and how the chimneys shifted shape
with each new angle.

That night was full of door slam
and things half said, strangers touching
in corners, a girl draped in fox fur swaying
through a room of clocks.

We slept on the floor wrapped in patchouli
and other people’s snores,
oak butting my hips each time I turned
and you too spaced to go beyond the perfunctory.

As day slid out from under night I rose
in my Greek sandals, passed
waking lawns, the gate, and watched
an ancient hornbeam, black with crows,

fling hieroglyphs into the sky.
Now I see it was the last time we would spend wild,
and not wild enough
for a last time.

A poem by Katherine Venn, inspired in part by Old Testament prophecies about God replacing people’s hearts. Illustrated by Joey Guidone.

I woke to find God sitting on my bed. ‘This
is going to hurt,’ she said, reached into my chest

and pulled my heart up from its roots. Stumbling
to my feet I followed her downstairs, a trail

of blood dark on the kitchen floor, and out
into the moonlit garden. The breeze sang low

across my opened breast as I watched her plant it,
my heart: four inches deep, the depth

you’d plant a tulip bulb. She pressed the earth
down with her fingers, satisfied, then turned to me

and took a fold of seeds out from her pocket,
shook out one, two, three into a palm

and dropped them in the space my heart had been.
‘Sweet peas,’ she said, her fingers at my breast, and left.

Since then I wake at night to feel them stirring,
their roots stitched through my veins, their scent

a prayer. Outside, my old heart draws me
to the garden, to kneel and see if it’s put up a leaf.

Catherine Wong’s flash fiction piece tells of a blind man’s struggle to deal with the newfound miracle of sight. Illustrated by Bee Johnson.

‘Look look’, the first words after the gauze came off. I read about this man in a book, blind for forty years. In the dehumanizing clinical style of a case study, the book reduces him to two letters – V.I – and in the interest of privacy, strips him of even a name. Four decades of blindness, and then the brain scan, the miracle, one surgery to flip on a switch in the mind and lo, there was light. He reported new sight like a baby’s, unfocused and unclear. A beige blur hovers by his hospital bedside, a gash opens in it and there is speech. He realizes that this is a face, the face of his wife. I imagine opening eyes numbed by forty years of darkness into this world awash in colors, everything painted, sounds matched with newfound pictures. There are no laws of perspective, not yet. Every turn of the head brings another universe, all the colors shifting and swirling. The world was one of brightly-coloured patterns to be filed away in the mind, by a lifetime of tastes and smells and once imageless sounds. If this were me, I would ask for children’s books, candy-colored prints on the cardboard. I would beg for flashcards, photos, movies, paintings, and picture windows, even while the world was a mess of blurs, paint spilled all over my vision in great sweeping swaths of color. Never mind why the sky is blue, just let it be blue.

In this story, there is a window. From his hospital bed this man – the real one – counts cars, coloured confetti in his vision, taxis and school buses loud against the backdrop of black city streets. Little things make his breath catch in his throat; a flame dancing in its holder, the infinite illusion of a room in a mirror, the glint of a light on a glass of water, to be looked at once and twice and again. I imagine a room papered with eclectic patterns, stripes next to polka dots, a kaleidoscopic beauty to compensate for forty color-starved years. ‘Look look’.

Maybe the gauze came off too quickly. Maybe the world was like fire on his eyes, every waking moment a dream, joy melting into pain. Within one day, he was tired. Within one month, he wandered the halls of his home with his eyes closed, making soft sad moans. The sheer exhaustion of sight, this marvelous dream he had wished for since childhood, overwhelmed him. He had not imagined that vision had rules, that he might have to learn how to see. A cat was a thousand cats; without a mind trained to blend, to recognize that an object seen from every angle is still a single whole, his own pet was unrecognizable, a different image each time when seen from the front, or behind, or the side. Without an understanding of depth, the world became an obstacle course. He reached out a hand to touch houses that were, in reality, miles away. He stumbled into poles on the sidewalk. He had never been this disoriented, not even when he was blind, and groped his way through the world with his hands.

A few years later, something burst in his brain, the switch flipped back, no surgery to correct it again. Back in his hospital room, family members came sadly to his bedside. The nurses pulled a shade down over the window in mourning, veiling the city streets and the cars that he had counted. He was pronounced a tragedy, all his colours gone, and yet peace was restored, the permanent shroud thrown over his eyes, calming. He stumbled back into the world with a brilliant orange and white cane, deliriously happy to be returned to the familiar black cocoon of his blindness.

Read the first two chapters from Andrew Michael Hurley’s eerie debut novel, set in a wild and dangerous length of English coastline known as the Loney.

It had certainly been a wild end to the autumn. On the Heath a gale stripped the glorious blaze of colour from Kenwood to Parliament Hill in a matter of hours, leaving several old oaks and beeches dead. Mist and silence followed and then, after a few days, there was only the smell of rotting and bonfires.

I spent so long there with my notebook one afternoon noting down all that had fallen that I missed my session with Doctor Baxter. He told me not to worry. About the appointment or the trees. Both he and Nature would recover. Things were never as bad as they seemed.

I suppose he was right in a way. We’d been let off lightly. In the north, train lines had been submerged and whole villages swamped by brown river water. There had been pictures of folk bailing out their living rooms, dead cattle floating down an A road. Then, latterly, the news about the sudden landslide on Coldbarrow, and the baby they’d found tumbled down with the old house at the foot of the cliffs.

Coldbarrow. There was a name I hadn’t heard for a long time. Not for thirty years. No one I knew mentioned it any more and I’d tried very hard to forget it myself. But I suppose I always knew that what happened there wouldn’t stay hidden forever, no matter how much I wanted it to.

I lay down on my bed and thought about calling Hanny, wondering if he too had seen the news and whether it meant anything to him. I’d never really asked him what he remembered about the place. But what I would say, where I would begin, I didn’t know. And in any case he was a difficult man to get hold of.The church kept him so busy that he was always out ministering to the old and infirm or fulfilling his duties to one committee or another. I could hardly leave a message, not about this.

His book was on the shelf with the old paperbacks I’d been meaning to donate to the charity shop for years. I took it down and ran my finger over the embossed lettering of the title and then looked at the back cover. Hanny and Caroline in matching white shirts and the two boys, Michael and Peter, grinning and freckled, enclosed in their parents’ arms. The happy family of Pastor Andrew Smith.

The book had been published almost a decade ago now and the boys had grown up – Michael was starting in the upper sixth at Cardinal Hume and Peter was in his final year at Corpus Christi – but Hanny and Caroline looked much the same then as they did now. Youthful, settled, in love.

I went to put the book back on the shelf and noticed that there were some newspaper cuttings inside the dust jacket. Hanny visiting a hospice in Guildford. A review of his book in the Evening Standard. The Guardianinterview that had really thrust him into the limelight. And the clipping from an American evangelical magazine when he’d gone over to do the Southern university circuit.

The success of My Second Life with God had taken everyone by surprise, not least Hanny himself. It was one of those books that – how did they put it in the paper? – captured the imagination, summed up the zeitgeist. That kind of thing. I suppose there must have been something in it that people liked. It had bounced around the top twenty of the bestsellers list for months and made his publisher a small fortune.

Everyone had heard of Pastor Smith even if they hadn’t read his book. And now, with the news from Coldbarrow, it seemed likely that they would be hearing of him again unless I got everything down on paper and struck the first blow, so to speak.

If it had another name, I never knew, but the locals called it the Loney – that strange nowhere between the Wyre and the Lune where Hanny and I went every Easter time with Mummer, Farther, Mr and Mrs Belderboss and Father Wilfred, the parish priest. It was our week of penitence and prayer in which we would make our confessions, visit Saint Anne’s shrine, and look for God in the emerging springtime, that, when it came, was hardly a spring at all; nothing so vibrant and effusive. It was more the soggy afterbirth of winter.

Dull and featureless it may have looked, but the Loney was a dangerous place. A wild and useless length of English coastline. A dead mouth of a bay that filled and emptied twice a day and made Coldbarrow – a desolate spit of land a mile off the coast – into an island. The tides could come in quicker than a horse could run and every year a few people drowned. Unlucky fishermen were blown off course and ran aground. Opportunist cocklepickers, ignorant of what they were dealing with, drove their trucks onto the sands at low tide and washed up weeks later with green faces and skin like lint.

Sometimes these tragedies made the news, but there was such an inevitability about the Loney’s cruelty that more often than not these souls went unremembered to join the countless others that had perished there over the centuries in trying to tame the place. The evidence of old industry was everywhere: breakwaters had been mashed to gravel by storms, jetties abandoned in the sludge and all that remained of the old causeway to Coldbarrow was a line of rotten black posts that gradually disappeared under the mud. And there were other, more mysterious structures – remnants of jerry-built shacks where they had once gutted mackerel for the markets inland, beacons with rusting fire-braces, the stump of a wooden lighthouse on the headland that had guided sailors and shepherds through the fickle shift of the sands.

But it was impossible to truly know the Loney. It changed with each influx and retreat of water and the neap tides would reveal the skeletons of those who thought they had read the place well enough to escape its insidious currents. There were animals, people sometimes, the remains of both once – a drover and his sheep cut off and drowned on the old crossing from Cumbria. And now, since their death, for a century or more, the Loney had been pushing their bones back inland, as if it were proving a point.

No one with any knowledge of the place ever went near the water. No one apart from us and Billy Tapper that is.

Billy was a local drunk. Everyone knew him. His fall from grace to failure was fixed like the weather into the mythology of the place, and he was nothing short of a gift to people like Mummer and Father Wilfred who used him as shorthand for what drink could do to a man. Billy Tapper wasn’t a person, but a punishment.

Legend had it that he had been a music teacher at a boys’ grammar school, or the head of a girls’ school in Scotland, or down south, or in Hull, somewhere, anywhere. His history varied from person to person, but that the drink had sent him mad was universally accepted and there were any number of stories about his eccentricities. He lived in a cave. He had killed someone in Whitehaven with a hammer. He had a daughter somewhere. He thought that collecting certain combinations of stones and shells made him invisible and would often stagger into the Bell and Anchor in Little Hagby, his pockets chinking with shingle,and try to drink from other people’s glasses, thinking that they couldn’t see him. Hence the dented nose.

I wasn’t sure how much of it was true, but it didn’t matter. Once you’d seen Billy Tapper, anything they said about him seemed possible.

We first met him in the pebble-dashed concrete bus stop on the one road that skirted the coastline from Morecambe down to Knott End. It would have been 1973, when I was twelve and Hanny sixteen. Farther wasn’t with us. He had gone out early with Father Wilfred and Mr and Mrs Belderboss to look at the stained glass in a village church twenty miles away where there was apparently a magnificent Gothic Revival window of Jesus calming the waters. And so Mummer had decided to take Hanny and me to Lancaster to stock up on food and visit an exhibition of old Psalters at the library – for Mummer never missed an opportunity to instruct us on the history of our faith. It looked like Billy was going the same way from the piece of cardboard strung around his neck – one of the several dozen that made it easy for the bus drivers to know where he was supposed to be going.

The other places he’d either been to or might need to visit revealed themselves as he stirred in his sleep. Kendal. Preston. Manchester. Hull. The last being where his sister lived, according to the square of bright red card that was attached to a separate shoestring necklace and contained information that might prove invaluable in an emergency, with his name, his sister’s telephone number and a note in block capitals that he was allergic to penicillin.

This particular fact intrigued me as a child, and I wondered what would happen if he was given penicillin, whether it could possibly damage him any more than he had damaged himself already. I’d never seen a man be so unkind to his own body. His fingers and his palms were shattered with filth. Every crease and line was brown. Either side of his broken nose his eyes were twisted deep down into his skull. His hair crawled past his ears and down his neck which had turned sea-coloured with dozens of tattoos. There was something faintly heroic about his refusal to wash, I thought, when Hanny and I were so regularly scrubbed and towelled by Mummer.

He slumped on the bench, with an empty bottle of something evil lying on its side on the floor and a small, mouldy-looking potato in his lap that comforted me in a strange way. It seemed right that he should only have a raw potato. It was the kind of thing I assumed down-and-outs ate, nibbling at it bit by bit over weeks as they roamed the highways and byways looking for the next. Hitching lifts. Stealing what they could. Stowing away on trains. As I say, vagrancy wasn’t entirely without its romance to me at that age.

He talked to himself in his sleep, scrunching his pockets – which, like everyone said, sounded as if they were full of stones – complaining bitterly about someone called O’Leary who owed him money and had never given it back to him, even though he owned a horse. When he woke up and noticed we were there he tried his best to be courteous and sober, offering a grin of three or four twisted black teeth and doffing his beret at Mummer, who smiled briefly but, as she managed to do with all strangers, got the measure of him instantly, and sat in a half-revolted, half-fearful silence, willing the bus to come by staring down the empty road.

Like most drunks, Billy bypassed the small talk and slapped his bleeding, broken heart into my palm like a lump of raw beef.

‘Don’t get taken in by the demon drink, lads. I’ve lost everything ’cause of this stuff,’ he said as he held up the bottle and swilled the dregs. ‘See that scar?’

He raised his hand and shook his sleeve down. A red seam ran from his wrist to his elbow, threading its way through tattoos of daggers and melon-chested girls.

‘D’you know how I got that?’

I shook my head. Hanny stared.

‘Fell off a roof. Bone ripped right through it,’ he said and used his finger to demonstrate the angle at which his ulna had protruded.

‘Have you got a spare fag?’

I shook my head again and he sighed.

‘Bollocks. I knew I should have stayed at Catterick,’ came another non-sequitur.

It was difficult to tell – and he looked nothing like the ruggedly handsome veterans that popped up in my Commando comics all the time – but I guessed that he must have been of an age to have fought in the war. And sure enough, when he doubled up in a coughing fit and took off his beret to wipe his mouth, it had some cockeyed metal, military insignia on the front.

I wondered if that was what had set him onto the booze, the war. It had done strange things to some people, so Farther said. Knocked their compasses out of whack, as it were.

Whatever the reason, Hanny and I couldn’t take our eyes off him. We gorged ourselves on his dirtiness, on his brutal, alien smell. It was the same fearful excitement we felt when we happened to drive through what Mummer considered a bad part of London and found ourselves lost in a maze of terraces that sat shoulder to shoulder with industrial plants and scrapyards. We would turn in our seats and gawp out of the windows at the scruffy, staring children who had no toys but the bits of wood and metal torn off the broken furniture in their front yards where aproned women stood and screeched obscenities at the men stumbling out of corner pubs. It was a safari park of degradation. What a world without God looked like.

Billy glanced at Mummer and, keeping his eyes on her, he reached down into the plastic bag by his feet and brought out a few tatty bits of paper, which he pressed into my hand. They had been ripped out of a dirty magazine.

He winked at me and settled himself back against the wall. The bus appeared and Mummer stood up and held out her hand to stop it and I quickly stuffed the pictures away.

‘What are you doing?’ said Mummer.

‘Nothing.’

‘Well, stop messing about and get Andrew ready.’

I started trying to coax Hanny into standing so that we could get on the bus, but he wouldn’t move. He was smiling and looking past me at Billy, who by this time had fallen asleep again.

‘What is it, Hanny?’

He looked at me and then back at Billy. Then I understood what he was staring at: Billy wasn’t holding a potato, but his penis.

The bus stopped and we got on. The driver looked past us and whistled at Billy but he didn’t wake up. After another go, the driver shook his head and pressed the button which drew the door closed. We sat down and watched the front of Billy’s trousers darken. Mummer tutted and peeled our faces away from the window to look at her instead.

‘Be warned,’ she said, as the bus pulled away. ‘That man is already inside you. It won’t take more than a few wrong choices to bring him out, believe me.’

She held her handbag on her lap and looked straight ahead. I clutched the dirty pictures tight in one hand and slipped the other inside my coat and pressed my stomach hard with my fingertips, trying to find the kernel of badness that only needed the right conditions of Godlessness and depravity for it to germinate and spread like a weed.

It happened so easily. Drink quickly possessed a man and made him its servant. Father Wilfred always said so.

When Mummer told him about Billy later that evening, he simply shook his head and sighed.

‘What can one expect of a man like that, Mrs Smith? Someone so removed from God.’

‘I said to the boys that they ought to take note,’ said Mummer.

‘And rightly so,’ he said, taking off his glasses and looking at Hanny and me as he polished them on his sleeve. ‘They should make it their business to know all the poisons that Satan peddles.’

‘I feel rather sorry for him,’ said Mrs Belderboss.

‘So do I,’ said Farther.

Father Wilfred put his glasses back on and raised a brief, condescending smile.

‘Then you’ll be adding to his already brimming store. Pity is the only thing a drunk has in abundance.’

‘Still, he must have had an awfully hard life to have got himself into such a state,’ Mrs Belderboss said.

Father Wilfred scoffed. ‘I don’t think he knows the meaning of a hard life. I’m sure my brother could tell you as many tales as I could about real poverty, real struggle, couldn’t you, Reginald?’

Mr Belderboss nodded. ‘Everyone had it tough in Whitechapel,’ he said. ‘No work. Kiddies starving.’

Mrs Belderboss touched her husband’s arm in sympathy. Father Wilfred sat back and wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘No, a man like that is the worst kind of fool,’ he said. ‘He’s thrown everything away. All his privileges and opportunities. He was a professional, I believe. A teacher. What a terrible waste.’

It’s odd, but when I was a child there were certain things that were so clear to me and their outcomes so inevitable that I thought I had a kind of sixth sense. A gift of foresight, like that of Elijah or Ezekiel, who had predicted drought and destruction with such unsettling accuracy.

I remember Hanny once swinging over a pond on the Heath and knowing, knowing, that the rope would break, which it did; like I knew that the stray cat he brought back from the park would end up minced on the tube line, and that he would drop the bowl of goldfish he’d won at the fair on the kitchen floor as soon as we got home.

In the same way, I knew after that conversation around the dinner table that Billy was going to die soon. The thought came to me as an established fact; as though it had already come to pass. No one could live like that for long. Being that filthy took so much effort that I was sure that the same merciful God who sent a whale to save Jonah and gave Noah a nod about the weather, would put him out of his misery.

‘The Loney’ is the debut novel from Andrew Michael Hurley, published by John Murray. Pick up a copy of the book at the Hodder & Stoughton website.

A short but sweet poem by Mary Hayward, inspired by a return to the derelict farm where she grew up. Illustrated by Tim Laing.

It sags from the rafters, in the museum of the byre,
like he’d just shrugged it off, in the October of his life.
Spiders have spun, big hairnets of webs
on the collar and shoulders of his once best coat,
now spark-holed and cold, like snow-holes in thaw.
And inside his pockets, grass seed and nails.
Whispers of pipe smoke, return him to me
with his eye to the sky, his soul to the soil.