Adena Graham’s heart-rending short story drops us into the lives of a devoted couple who grow increasingly dependent on their collection of memory jars.

Most days they would add an event, however small, to the memory jar. At first, at the start of the year, the slips of paper – torn from napkins, Post-It notes, newspaper edges, feint-ruled notebooks, or whatever else they had to hand – would flutter down like promises, settling on the bottom. But by the end of the year, they would have to push the paper in, layering new memories thickly on top of old ones.

There was no real system for determining what got added to the jar, simply that it had to mean something to both of them. Sometimes, it was a small memory, something that anyone else might regard as inconsequential: sitting on a bench enjoying an ice cream, or finding a stretch of beach with nobody else on it.

Often, the note would make little sense to an outsider, such as Archie’s cryptic ‘Hash browns all round!!’ or Didi’s ‘Page 98 mastered!’ – which referred to her finally nailing the recipe for Archie’s favourite short crust pastry. Other events were huge. A ‘welcome to the world Hannah, 7lbs 2oz’ type huge. The only rule they had for the jar was that they weren’t allowed to look at their notes until it had been filled with a year’s worth of memories. Then on the anniversary of the first jar-filling – August 30th, some forty years before – they would sit down and unfold the notes from the previous year.

As the pieces of paper unfurled, their hearts and minds would follow suit. Things they hadn’t thought about for twelve months – small events they might otherwise have forgotten – were relived, and their languorous meanderings down memory lane would draw them even closer together.

Visitors to their home always commented on the glass jars scattered about the place. Didi had never really gone in for ornaments, and those old cookie jars and jam jars were her own peculiar way of breathing life into the house. She often commented that they were more colourful than anything she could hang on the walls or place on a shelf anyway – because, inside, nestled a myriad of technicolour memories.

Although they weren’t permitted to open their current jar before the year was out, Didi and Archie did allow themselves to sort through old jars. Some nights they would turn off the television and select a jar at random, dipping their hands excitedly into the wispy mess before extracting a sliver of paper yellowed with age. Then they would walk down paths that had been lost in the chaos of time, re-treading routes that made them feel young again and full of possibilities.

Archie had entirely forgotten about a brief yet fun-filled weekend in the New Forest when they were in their early thirties – and when he saw Didi’s delicate handwriting proclaiming, ‘My Archie and I are in pony-heaven. If I died today, here in the New Forest, I would die happy’, a tear rolled down his cheek. Because, now, Didi really was dying. Not her body though. In fact, Archie might have been able to tolerate that better; a disassembling of her physical self, thwarted by something ‘knowable’ such as cancer or kidney disease. No, it was her mind that was dying. Slowly, day by day, little by little. Some mornings he would wake to find her staring at him blankly, her brain struggling to catch up with the reality that, beside her, lay her husband of fifty years. Then, gradually, her eyes would lighten with the remembrance of familiarity and she would smile at him and grasp his hand beneath the tangle of their bed sheets.

Of course, his main worry was that one day she would wake and wouldn’t remember him at all. Not even as the minutes and hours ticked by. Indeed, it seemed he was losing her more and more lately, and those blank morning-eyes of hers were becoming common during waking hours too. It scared him, because if she lost him, then he would lose her also. After all, what was Didi without Archie, and what was Archie without Didi?

On one occasion, he had walked into the kitchen and Didi had spun round, startled, as though unaware that there had ever been another presence in the house. She stood silently, dangling a teaspoon over one cup of tea (having forgotten there was a second cup to be made, for another person) and, although she showed no alarm at his existence (indicating, on some level, that she realised he ought, rightfully, to be there), her countenance was one devoid of any love or memories.

So Archie did the only thing he knew how – he began filling the memory jar more. As Didi’s brain emptied out its latest recollections and tossed them aside, he replaced them, one by one. He gathered together all that was left of her and distilled it into a large glass receptacle. For when Didi was there – present and herself – she was, as she had always been, truly there. His Didi lived in the moment. She laughed readily and, even on aging legs, danced whenever she could. He would whisk her around the room, muttering into her hair, ‘Remember. Remember, my love’. And there, in those moments, he felt he adored her more than ever. For as her recollections faded, his became sharper and came quicker – he was remembering for both of them.

Soon, the jar became too full – the first time that had ever happened – so he started another. Now, those elements of their life together which had seemed so mundane became relevant. Precious even. A breakfast spent nibbling on toast, slathered with Didi’s homemade apple jam, was a veritable feast. Something worth noting and popping into the jar. Remember how that toast crumbled, Didi, sending a trickle of butter down my chin that made you laugh out loud? Remember the sight this morning of that first crocus bud poking through and how you patted its small head like you would a child’s? And do you remember how William, our grandson, threw a toy at the cat which sent her sulking under the bed for two hours? Do you remember? Do you remember? Do you remember?

Do you remember. It became like a prayer to Archie, a refrain that he would repeat, both to himself, and to Didi. And she would remember. Sometimes, just as he felt he was losing her, he would take her hand and sit her down, opening the jar and reading those memories out loud. Then, her eyes would become clear and she would nod, eagerly, basking in that ability which had come so naturally before – to journey through one’s own history.

Eventually, despite his best efforts, Didi succumbed entirely to the foggy tendrils which clawed at her brain, and as though defeated, her body followed suit. She grew frail and her breathing laboured. When he sensed the end was near, Archie loaded the car with all their jars and set off with Didi in the passenger seat, staring blankly ahead.

The New Forest opened up like a verdant oasis and, on seeing it, Didi’s eyes brightened. Whether it was with the memory of it, or the sheer joy of a fresh experience, Archie couldn’t tell. They had a final three months together there, in a rented cottage, and each day, however hopeless he felt, Archie made sure he added something new to the jar – for nothing could be more precious than the memory of something he sensed he was about to lose.

On the day Didi finally died, it was surrounded by an array of glassware, inside of which, was the story of their life together. It had, he hoped, been good enough for her.

A few hours after she had taken her final breath, Archie wrote one last note – the only note he’d ever written alone. ‘Goodbye my love, and thank you’. Folding it tightly, he added it to the jar. Their journey together was over, there were no more memories to be made.

As the sun slipped lower in the sky, turning the glass a deep orange, Archie’s hand reached for the first jar they had made, when they were young and breathless with excitement at where their lives would take them: two adventurers starting out on life’s big journey.

It was time, now, to retrace those steps.

To mark National Poetry Day 2015 and its theme of Light, read Maria Apichella’s vehement poem, Fire. Illustrated by Rosie Gainsborough.

The card says ‘light a candle
to represent your prayer.’
Twenty pence for a wick,
a flame and a quiet corner.
Let your suffering go
up in silence like smoky lavender.
Let your pain melt
down into waxy little stalactites.
Tomorrow morning it will be grated
off the iron rack by the Verger.
I don’t have time for candles.
Stand back.
Open both the doors.
Clear the Altar.
I’m coming up the aisle
dragging an uprooted oak,
a can of paraffin.
My prayer          will burn          for days.

After years in the making, a new film about today’s UK illustration and graphic arts scene, entitled Made You Look, is now hitting screens.

We first heard about Made You Look a year ago when its creators were seeking funding on Kickstarter to help finish off the film. Despite not quite hitting their £30k target, the funding was found elsewhere and the film has been screening for the last few months in the lead up to its general release.

Focusing in on the UK illustration and graphic arts scene, Made You Look aims to create a snapshot of creativity in the digital age, discussing the triumphs and trials that accompany life in the commercial arts and providing a rare behind-the-scenes peek into the work of some of the UK’s top creative talent. Among those interviewed in the film are Anthony Burrill, Kate Moross, Will Hudson (It’s Nice That), Sam Arthur (Nobrow) and former Popshot contributors, Spencer Wilson and Ben The Illustrator.

You can watch the trailer for Made You Look above and if you’d like to find out more about the film, including extra interviews and clips, head to its dedicated website for more details.

Jessie Greengrass’s short story takes the protagonist back to his hometown to seek absolution from the events of his childhood past. Taken from Jessie’s latest collection, An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It.

My parents were grocers. For twenty-five years they owned a shop with a green awning and crates of vegetables on the pavement outside, and they worked hard with only Sundays off to go to church, and even on Sundays they went through the accounts after lunch. On bank holidays and early- closing days when other people put on their best hats and went visiting my parents would check stock: sorting vegetables, pulling wilted cabbages and rotting carrots from the bottoms of sacks and setting them aside to be sold as swill. They could judge weight with their hands but they were not educated people and had little time for the things which interested me, for books or for numbers beyond imperial measures and the columns of pounds and shillings and pence. I was their only child, and I have never been sure if I was a source of pride to them or a disappointment, because it is true that I was clever, that I was quick with my mind, but the academic life that I have chosen could not possibly be the one they would have thought of for me, and there is no reason to say they would have judged it better. I showed no interest in the shop, ever: quite the reverse, or perhaps they wouldn’t have sold it.

Two months after my eleventh birthday I passed the exam to go to the grammar school. There I found that the fathers of the other children were not shopkeepers. Instead they were men who rose each morning to walk up the hill to the station and take the train to city jobs. They worked in banks and offices, places whose interiors were unimaginable to me. They didn’t have breakfast in their shirtsleeves before walking down the stairs to put the trays of apples out, or go next door for a pint of bitter in the evening while the dinner cooked. They drank wine from stemmed glasses. The mothers of the other children didn’t work at all. They sat on committees and collected things for the Save the Children fund and their nails were coated with shellac, not dirt from the potato barrel. I loved my parents and I didn’t want to hurt them, but I found in a moment of pre-adolescent revelation that I was ashamed of them; and because I was ashamed of them I found that I was ashamed also of myself, and this muddle made me sly. I told lies, or half lies. I said cruel things to my friends about my parents in order that there might seem to be a greater distance between us, and to my parents in turn I was sullen and I refused to speak about school or about the friends I had made there, other than to point out by mean comparison the respects in which their lives were superior to my own; and then afterwards I would be ashamed and my shame would make me angry and resentful: I felt that it was not my fault that I had been put into such an intolerable position.

Sometimes after school or in the holidays my parents would ask me to mind the shop for them. They had very little time to themselves, and I see now how nice it would have been for them if they had been able to go out together sometimes on a sunny afternoon, for a walk down through the fields past the church to the river; but the thought that my friends might see me in a grocer’s apron twisting shut a paper bag of apricots or cherries appalled me. I considered it insensitive of my parents to ask, to not know how busy I was, how I had better things to do with my time than mind their shop for them. It is easy now to say that what hurt I inflicted with this attitude was not my fault, that I was a child: but I knew quite clearly how I wounded when I refused them, and so I am unable to escape with such glib sophistry the twisting hook. To my further shame I refused my parents in a way which was evasive, and perhaps it is for this reason that it still sits so ill with me, because I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth, which was that I thought their shop beneath me. Instead I told them that I had homework to do, that I needed to spend some time thinking about an essay or that I must go and see this friend or that friend who had a book that I must read; but the truth was not well hidden and it must have been obvious to them. I made my refusals in a lofty tone, as if to suggest that my parents couldn’t possibly understand the sorts of pressures I was under when I had to write five hundred words on the repeal of the corn laws by Monday. Then I would put on the tweed jacket they had bought me and I would walk out of the shop, and in case someone I knew should see me I would try to look as though I had been thinking of buying something but had decided not to; and then because really there was nothing at all that I needed to do I would go and sit in the long grass beyond the boundary of the cricket pitch to watch the aeroplanes make white trails overhead.

After a while my parents stopped asking for my help, and when I was fourteen they sold the shop and, having been quite old already when I was born, retired to live by the sea. Shortly after that I won a scholarship to a boarding school and then my two lives could be quite separate. At school I didn’t need to mention the grocer’s shop but only the slightly more respectable address of my parents’ new bungalow, avoiding any more direct enquiries regarding my home life with evasions that had become through practice habitual; and when I went to stay with my parents in the holidays there was no one I knew in the town and so I didn’t need to feel ashamed of them and could go back to loving them simply; but by then it was too late.

If there is such a thing as original sin then I think that this is how it comes upon us, it settles over us in moments of carelessness, and this is why we are taught to act decently as children, to be good and to be polite, because not to do so is to court that instant when one becomes other than one wants to be. For years I had been unable to think of the school and the shop and the town except with pain because of the way my pride had prevented me from helping my parents when they asked for it. This small act of refusal became in retrospect the prism through which the rest of my life was split, laying bare the flaw at the heart of my character, the way that I am neither wholly kind nor wholly honest but at best half-good and in addition evasive, a wriggler-out of situations. Then one Friday evening some months ago I passed through a large railway interchange, and as I stood on the concourse waiting for my train to be called the announcer called instead the name of the town where the shop had been and the names of the towns that surrounded it and which I had not thought of for years. It was a summer evening and there was an end-of-term feeling, a feeling of devil-take-us, and suddenly I was filled with such a powerful desire to abandon my own journey and embark instead upon this other one that I began to move towards the platform; and perhaps I would have gone further still if it wasn’t for the crowd of people between the newspaper stand and the flower stall who slowed me and gave me time to realise how futile such a journey would be, all of my ties to this place being after all ties to the past; but still the station names were so familiar and they had such associations. I could taste holidays when I heard them. I could hear the rattle of the old trains, I could smell the polish of the wooden carriage floors and the dusty fabric of the seats. I could feel the satisfying give of the elastic in the luggage racks when I slung my suitcase into them and how much of a struggle it was to fetch it down again. The thrill it was to walk past the smoking compartment to the buffet car.

Through the weeks that followed I was unable to rid myself of the idea of going back to the town, of seeing once more the market square and the shop and standing again in the streets which in memory still seemed so familiar. The faces of my parents, now long dead, hovered in front of me, and my shame at the condescension with which I had treated them felt fresh. I told myself that I could gain nothing from such a return, that it could not alleviate any shred of my guilt but only cause me further pain by showing clearly all the ways that things had changed but how the past itself could not be changed; but I was unable to make myself believe it. I found myself considering such a journey as one might a pilgrimage, its attendant discomforts a scouring; and then I was appalled, and told myself how foolish, how grandiose, to think in such a way about a day return on the East Midlands Railway and an afternoon’s stroll about a market town. It was pointless anyway, I thought, to hope that such a journey might allow me in some way to escape the shame I felt over my behaviour towards my parents: a penance is not a penance that is undertaken for reprieve, and if I hoped for absolution it wouldn’t come. Such an exercise could be on my part only a further kind of evasion, a small compounding of an existent sin. In this manner it went on and to every argument I was able to find a counter-argument; but still the thought of making the journey wouldn’t leave me. It began to interfere with my work. I was unable to concentrate on other things; my mind drifted always back to the grocer’s shop, and in the end this was why I went: not with any hope of gaining respite from the past, but only to alleviate such irritations in the present, and because I was tired of thinking about it, tired of the internal arguments, and would have relief at least from them.

I set the date of my journey for a Wednesday, because it was convenient, but travel in the middle of the week always makes me feel as though nothing good can come from it. I did not look forward to the day, and when it arrived I made my way to the station not with hope but with stoicism, as in the direction of a thing to be endured. It was both wet and cold, summer having, while I vacillated, given on to autumn, the fine days to a solid equinoctial grey. All through the morning rain slid down the windows of the intercity train and at the stations the wind blew it through the open doors in gusts. At Crewe I bought a cup of coffee and a sandwich which I didn’t eat, and changed on to the branch line. My surroundings were by then familiar, but because this familiarity was not complete I found in it a further source of discomfort. Things were not as I remembered them. The fields, the hedgerows, were meaner than they had been presented to me in recollection, the colours more muted. They were neither pretty nor engaging and they were not that pastoral ideal in which, on Saturday afternoons, I thought my better self had sometimes played, but only working land, churned up to mud by the passage of machinery. I began to regret in earnest that I had come. Once again the arguments against my journey were rehearsed and seemed irrefutable, while those for it appeared both tenuous and coy. The things which had seemed from a distance to be so large – the figures of my parents and myself, the looping dramas in which we had been contained – seemed, the closer I got to my destination, ever more insignificant, until as we drew into the station I wondered if my past had the capacity to mean anything at all.

I had thought that I would visit on arrival those places which I best remembered: the school, the cricket pitch, the church, the fields where I had played and where my friends had played. Now, such an itinerary seemed trivial. These places had never in themselves meant much to me and would now mean even less; besides which I had no desire to see how it had all become so much diminished. I found that what I wanted, now that I was here, was only to stand once more in front of the grocer’s shop, to see what parts of it might have endured and to see also if I could find there any trace of my parents, or of myself. I walked out of the station and down the hill towards the market, and as I went I looked at little, trying not to notice the places where terraced cottages had given way to cul-de-sacs or how three pubs had been knocked down. Although I remembered clearly the route the distances felt wrong, the turnings came in unexpected places; and I thought that it is strange how memory retains the structure of things and the details but so little in between. I felt as though I had on a new pair of glasses and through them the world appeared peculiar, bent out of shape, and I was no longer any judge of depth but must be careful where I put my feet. I felt as though, with each step, I might fall; and I would have turned around and gone straight home, were it not for how foolish I would have looked to myself afterwards.

The market square at the corner of which my parents’ shop had stood was busy in spite of the rain. There had used to be a stall stacked with trays of eggs and above the eggs a row of plucked chickens strung up by their feet, and there had been a fishmonger selling halibut from a table piled with ice and a man who made his own sausages; but now it was all antiques and bric-a-brac, mirrors and candlesticks and broken iron mangles. A woman in a wonky turban sat by a pile of rag rugs and I could, if I had wanted to, have purchased any number of hand-sewn cushions. Dodging through the middle I found that the building where our shop had been was still there, and although until that moment I hadn’t thought that I minded, yet to see it was an overwhelming relief, and I knew that if it had been gone I would have been distraught. It was no longer a grocer’s. The awning had been taken down and the shutters, and the old bottle-glass windows had been replaced, but up above it looked just the same, the dirty red brick and the tiled roof, the bay window where our sitting room had been. Now the shop sold children’s clothes at what seemed to me to be remarkable prices. Through the new plate windows I could see racks of miniature Breton jumpers and bright yellow anoraks. I wondered if I should go in; unable to decide, I hovered on the pavement, getting in the way of people rushing from one dry place to another. After a few minutes it began to seem as if to go in now would be more peculiar than not to do so, and nor could I just walk away; besides which, I felt a kind of peace standing on the cobbles in the rain. I felt as though perhaps I had hit entirely by accident upon the only right thing I could have done, and so in the end it was all that I did: I stood outside the shop all afternoon while people jostled past me, and as I stood I thought of myself and of my parents, and of how we are all formed perhaps more by carelessness than by design.

My coat was a city coat, not meant for more than the rush from doorstep to bus stop, and soon I felt the rain soak through it to join the stream running downwards from my neck. I didn’t have a hat, and my hair plastered itself to my skull. Annoyed by my continued obstruction of the pavement, shoppers muttered and tutted. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the bored stallholders, distracted from their work by the spectacle I made, gathering together to watch me. Inside the shop, a woman in a navy suit reached for the phone and I wondered if perhaps she was calling the police. Someone asked me without obvious compassion if I was all right, but not being quite sure one way or the other I offered no answer. I knew that people were laughing at me but the injury to my pride no longer caused me any pain; I found in my gathering humiliation a kind of joy, to see how little after all it mattered what people thought of me, and it saddened me that I had for so long felt myself to be governed by imagined opinions, I was sorry for it, and I was sorry too for the gap it had caused between me and my parents: I was sorry even though being sorry could do no good, even though it could bring about no reconciliation or reprieve, and I felt that for this brief spell, my regrets being not conditional on my pardon but genuine and deeply felt, I had been granted the charism of contrition. It occurred to me for the first time that my parents themselves had been as proud as I was, too proud to acknowledge my slights for what they were or to try to cross the distance which had grown steadily wider between my life and theirs. I thought that if they had been more humble then perhaps I also might have been, and things might have come out better for us, overall; and such a thought no longer seemed to be a way of eluding blame, but only a thing that was at once both true and sad, and past, and done.

I stood until the market had packed up and gone and until the light had begun to fade and the rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, and then I made my way back to the station. On the train I sat, dripping steadily, in a carriage empty except for myself and some schoolchildren who nudged one another and giggled at the sight of me, but their laughter no longer chafed. The train started and the announcer ticked the stations off, backwards now, and I thought that it was a relief to be returning home and to have the whole thing over with at last, although I wasn’t sure if I meant by that the trip only or the worry or something else again, an arc that had drawn down finally to its long completion. I couldn’t say if I was changed, apart from being wetter; I still felt myself to be overly fussy, to be half good, half stunted and half grown, given to settling on the easy route, but perhaps I had gained some measure of understanding; and I felt that regardless of whether anything was different because of it, still what I had done had been satisfactory, and I hoped too that it might in some way have been expiatory, and that I might have made amends; and perhaps after all I had been afforded some measure of absolution.

Our brand new issue, exploring the theme of ‘Curious’, is fresh off the press and available to buy as a single issue or through a subscription.

Containing a compelling selection of short stories, poems and illustrations that put oddity and curiosity at their heart, The Curious Issue has now arrived and is on its way to doormats and bookshop shelves as we speak.

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.

Browse through a few images below and have a flick through a few spreads here. If you’d like to get your hands on a copy, you can either buy a single issue for £6 + p&p or subscribe for £10 a year and get The Curious Issue as your initial copy, followed by our next two issues over the coming year, plus free access to our digital editionwhich contains every issue we’ve ever published.

Karl Mercer’s short story takes us to a mysterious man who spends his life on a park bench, waiting and waiting and waiting. Illustrated by Tom Haugomat.

To look at him, you wouldn’t think him special, and in some ways he is completely average. Sitting on the park bench in dull, well-worn clothes, thumbing a wedding ring, he looks completely normal. Yet, if you were to walk into the park the next day, you would see him again, in the same drab, unassuming clothes, thumbing that same wedding ring. And the day after. And the day after that. And the week, the month, the year after that. The same clothes, the same action. He sits and waits. Every aching day, he waits. Always. If he were immortal he would wait until forever runs out.

The park is isolated from the world. Perhaps it is his entire world. When the world ends, perhaps all that will be left floating through the cosmos will be him, the bench he sits on, and his waiting. Children don’t play in this park. It is barren of laughter and love. Actually, there is love, but it’s an obscure version of it; it’s a longing love, the kind that weeds amongst flowers have. A love that yearns to be expressed, given, and taken. Yet the weeds wait in futile hope, for no one cares about weeds. And it is hope that makes the sadness of waiting so utterly profound. This man has hope and it is his hope that keeps him bound.

He watches hours erode. He watches the acid spill of the morning sun melt away shadows. He watches cold stars burn in distant space. He sees all and says nothing. He never seems to eat. Somewhere, in a dictionary of obscure sorrows, there is an ageing photograph of this man and some paltry words to describe his waiting. But even in this dictionary, there is no mention of what he is waiting for. His eyes, impassive icebergs, keep his motives hidden beneath the surface.

This man is an insidious germ. His waiting is infectious. Others want to know what he is waiting for, so they stop and wait. He has a small following. People sit beside him and wait wordlessly with him. He is the unwitting messiah of his own cult. No one waits for long though, and even those who stay the longest are an infinitesimally small fleck of paint in the canvas of his waiting. They all leave, eventually. They leave him on his own, the horizon encircling him — an eternity to an eternity in every direction.

I don’t know which joke is more cruel: that he waits until the very end of time for something that never comes, or that he gives up waiting one day and misses that same something. One day I expect to walk past his bench and see a fully clothed skeleton, or a wedding ring sitting atop a heap of bone dust.

Yesterday, I walked past him as I always do on my way to work. He was sharing his bench with a young track-suited mother and her little girl. The mother was talking loudly down her phone, taking breaths only to puff on the white bone of a cigarette, which she held expertly between her yellowing fingers. Ignoring her child, she didn’t notice the little girl, radiant in an apple green dress, grab the hand of the man as he thumbed his wedding ring. For the first time ever, I saw an expression on the man’s face. It was like watching a stone being sculpted at light speed. His face, usually so stoic, displayed an emotion I didn’t recognise and have certainly never felt. It was so delicate that I didn’t dare breathe for fear of bursting it. The girl pulled his hand towards her face and examined it with such seriousness. She seemed like a rapt entomologist studying the almost nonexistent patterns in the wings of a foreign beetle. Her eyes were so close to his hand that her eyelashes touched the aged parchment of his skin, almost as if she were reading the secrets buried within him, or written upon him, for anyone bold enough to look so close. How long had it been since those hands touched another? How long since he had felt skin, other than his own, upon those palms? I realised that I was waiting. Just like him, I was waiting for…something. This moment was like a cave by the sea sucking water into its cavernous maw. It was magnetic. Still oblivious, the mother cackled hyena-like down her phone at some unknowable joke as her daughter held the man’s hand.

There was no ceremony when the girl took the ring. She just took it and he let her. He said not a word. Not one discernible syllable. Even when her mother, still prattling, dragged the girl ignorantly away, he said nothing. His face was a lost language, utterly indecipherable, as he sat and watched his ring, enclosed within a tiny fist, ebbing away from him forever. A stillness so deep that it threatened to smother, stole upon the world. I could almost hear the grass breathing. Each frost-choked blade gasping voicelessly for air. Then, as quickly as it began, the stillness flew out of existence; as if a black hole had swallowed all motion and vomited it out just as quickly. Distant sounds of traffic, the hoarse crowing of birds and, perhaps for the first time ever here, the sound of children playing all came rushing back in a dizzying whoosh.

The man seemed caught in a reverie, still watching the girl walk away though she was long out of sight. I didn’t dare move. I wasn’t sure if he was even aware of my presence. I thought of him as a wild animal that I was spying on and I didn’t want to spook him. At that moment, I would have given my eyes to know what he was thinking. I would have given my lungs. I wanted to shake him, take him to some remote building and beat it out of him. Throw myself down and beg. I’d always been curious as to what he waited for but the ‘what’ was a pale shade compared to the ‘why’. Why now? Why this? Why her? Why? It didn’t even seem like a word anymore, let alone a question. It had become something more primal, an animal urge that needed sating. I was scared I would pin him down and drink in his reasons until I choked or drowned on them.

With a courage I’ve never been able to muster in even the direst of situations, I moved one leaden foot in front of the other until I sat beside him on the bench. And I waited. I don’t know how long I waited. I know that every now and again I would discover that I had been unwittingly holding my breath and would let out a gasp as quietly as my need for oxygen would allow me. I know that my waiting must seem ridiculous and that it was as pointless as the perpetual waiting of the human puzzle box beside me. But I had to do it — I had to for my own sanity.

After what could have been either minutes or hours, I felt a shaking. It was the slightest of tremors, almost imperceptible. I turned to the man and feeling my gaze on him, he turned to me. Tears were running freely down his face as his iceberg eyes slowly melted. And yet, he was smiling. Smiling broadly and fully; a smile so vast that I fell into it and found myself grinning inanely back. It occurred to me that all the long, interminable years of waiting could perhaps have been for this one moment. The moment a little girl took the ring from his hand. In the grand scheme of things, this moment is a single mote of dust in an uncaring universe. Yet despite this, it had more meaning than anything else I have ever encountered. Over the millennia, how many miniscule moments have occurred unnoticed by the world? Moments so desperately full of significance that they alter an entire world as the actual world keeps spinning senselessly through space, heedless of the bacteria multiplying, killing and dying on its surface. Wars have been fought for less.

Still smiling, the man heaved himself off the bench, took one last glance in the direction the girl had walked, then set off in the opposite direction. My hand wandered to the area in which he had sat never-endingly until now. The wood was smooth from years of use, his warmth slowly evaporating from it until there was nothing left to ever even hint that he had been there. With my hand still resting on this new found void, I looked out over the park to see a bruise-blue sky and frostbitten rays of sun shining weakly over the shimmering earth. The sun seemed a gaping wound in the flesh of the heavens, bleeding light and staining the swaddling of cloud which clung to its surface. Every single day, be there rain or snow, he had sat here looking at what I was looking at now, waiting. Just waiting.

I considered standing and walking away, leaving the bench unguarded for the first time in who knows how long, now the man had left his post. But somehow, this seemed a little perverse, so I didn’t. It seemed as though after all that had happened, something else would happen too. Something that would explain or quantify everything in a way I could understand. I couldn’t fathom what sort of something that would be but knew that maybe, if I stayed there awhile, that it would become evident — that something would come to me even though I didn’t yet know what I was waiting for. So I shuffled over to my left and felt the smoother wood beneath me, the last remnants of warmth still clinging to the timber. Sighing, I absentmindedly thumbed the buttons on my coat, turned my gaze inward and waited.

Catch a sneak preview of the cover of our new issue, The Curious Issue, now available to pre-order and launching on October 1st.

After sending our fourteenth issue off to print this morning, we’re delighted to unveil its cover artwork, illustrated by Berlin-based illustration extraordinaire, Jörn Kaspuhl. In the lead up to its release in just over two weeks’ time, we’ll also be revealing a few flashes of the writings and illustrations from inside the magazine over on our Facebook and Instagram.

The new issue can be pre-ordered at our single issues page for £6 + p&p, or you can subscribe from £10 and receive Issue 13 (in its limited edition, supplement-style format), Issue 14 and Issue 15 over the coming year, plus complete access to the digital edition of Popshot, which contains every issue we’ve ever published in electronic form. That’s how much we love subscribers.

Taken from our Outsider issue, Rafael S.W’s poem explores the corporeal restrictions between lovers. Illustrated by Sébastien Thibault.

My lover will one day be someone else.
Almost all of him. I’m reminded I own nothing,
and nor does he. This skin, our careful stamp album
of woundings. That will be a graft. Passed on
passport maybe. I’ve been in synch with his lungs
and they too will go elsewhere. Draw warm air
through strange lips. The deep sea creatures
of organs with uses I don’t know, they will
be bottled briefly, or netted from his sacred sacrum.
I hope I am dead before this. We should have
made a pact. It is not for loneliness, but rather
the fear of seeing him unzipped. And knowing
it was not me who lay claim to his heart.

Taken from his debut short story collection, The Dog, published by Penguin, read Jack Livings’ tale of divided relationships at a Chinese newspaper.

Someone had hung an enormous red banner across the back of the newsroom that read “Farewell and Long Life, Li Pai!” The man of the hour had positioned himself at a metal folding table directly beneath it. Young reporters came with his memoirs open to the title page, then solemnly presented letters of recommendation they had written for themselves. Li Pai signed them all. Ning had spent the morning watching from his cubicle as they filed by, so worshipful, so eager to drink from the font of the great one’s knowledge. The whole damn thing turned his stomach. Had anyone asked, Ning had no quarrel with him: Li Pai was a treasure. But Ning wasn’t one for celebrations.

There was to be a party that night at the Green Room. Just thinking about it made Ning cringe. He knew how it would play out. Fang, the economics editor, would kick things off by delivering a speech listing her own accomplishments and thanking Li Pai for his contributions to her stratospheric rise, and old Bang Wen would stutter his way through a selection of Du Fu’s poetry. The chief would grunt out whatever he’d written on his BlackBerry on the way over, while everyone, arms crossed, stared at the floor and listened for their cues to laugh. The toasts would go on so long Ning would begin to fantasize, like a man crawling across the Gobi, about a single drop of lukewarm beer. And by the time every editor in the place had said his piece, the drunks from the copydesk and production would feel compelled to chime in. But, much as he wanted to, Ning couldn’t escape it. He was the only one old enough to have known Li Pai from the beginning, and the chief’s assistant had been hounding him for weeks about his speech.

Like Li Pai, Ning was in his sixties, and for longer than he could remember, he had marked time by the various injustices the thoughtless world visited upon him, the speech being one. Another prime example occurred just after lunch, when one of Li Pai’s acolytes called across the newsroom, “Hey, Ning! Great news! You just got scooped by the Baby Reds!”

Ah, perfection, he thought. He’d taken some extra time to do some deep research, and here was his reward. If he’d been younger, he’d have hopped a bus over to the China Youth Daily’s dotcom operation and taken it out of the kid’s hide—he didn’t have to be told who’d stolen this story from him. He already knew. But he had a bigger problem, which was how to explain himself to the chief.

“Hey, no shame, no shame,” said the chipper young reporter in the cube next to Ning. He was wearing a necktie and had a pencil tucked behind one ear. He’d been on the job exactly one week, and he’d been a constant annoyance to Ning for the full length of his tenure. “I’m sure this happens to everyone from time to time,” the reporter said, his voice expectant.

“What a comfort,” Ning said. His phone was ringing but he ignored it. With some effort, like a man feeling his way through a blacked-out room, he located the story on the Youth Daily’s site and printed it before turning his attention to his neighbor. “To think. All these years without you. It’s a miracle I’ve been able to find my own dick without your sage counsel.” The reporter shrugged and rolled back into his cube, unfazed. It was perhaps the least offensive thing Ning had said to him all week.

Ning didn’t much care about good stories anymore, not his own or anyone else’s, and he’d given this one about as much thought as he would have the purchase of an umbrella during a downpour. It was about a security guard who’d acted courageously and had been stabbed nearly to death. The doctors had sewn him up, and he was on the mend, but because he’d refused to tell a white lie that would have harmed no one, his case was tangled in red tape and the hospital was refusing to discharge him. Ning had visited the guard, and as he’d listened to his story, he’d felt himself leaning in at one point, eager to hear more, but he’d lost interest again almost as soon as he’d left the hospital. Instead of filing the story, he’d burned the rest of the week doing research on thoracoabdominal penetrating injuries, and now he was going to hear about it.

Sure enough, before Ning had even had time to finish reading the story, the chief’s assistant arrived at his desk. Her blue cotton dress had red flowers printed on it, and atop that she wore an apple-green sweater buttoned up to the neck.

“Mercy,” he said. “Is it mating season for your species?”

“Don’t start with me, old man,” she said.

“So you’ve come down from your lofty perch just to subject me to this thing,” Ning said, pointing to her outfit. “I’m nearly blind as it is.”

“You don’t think I called first?” She had the face of a middle schooler, and though she claimed to be twenty-five and a college graduate, Ning had his suspicions. She was someone’s niece, or her father was in real estate.

“I didn’t hear it,” he said, his chair creaking as he leaned back.

“You didn’t hear it,” she said.

“Who can hear anything in here?” he said, waving a hand at Li Pai’s table.

“If you read your e-mail—” she said.

“I don’t read e-mail.”

“Of course you don’t,” she said. “How inconsiderate of the rest of the company to communicate in such a manner. I’ll draft a memo immediately and have a copyboy rush it down. Shall I have the little urchin rinse your inkpot and wash your brushes while he’s at it? Ning Wang’s wish is our command.”

“Tell me,” he said, “how exactly did you avoid becoming an infanticide statistic?”

She flashed her eyeteeth. “Please, at your convenience, grace us with your presence. I’m sure the chief will be happy to wait,” she said, and walked away, her dress cutting around her legs.

“I’m sure he will,” Ning yelled after her. He put up his feet to make clear that he didn’t take orders from anyone, least of all her, and began to read slowly through the Youth Daily story. He paused every so often to laugh derisively, loud enough so that the reporters near him could hear, and when he finished, he made a show of dawdling around his desk before sauntering out to the elevators for the ride up to the eleventh floor.

“Well, I’m here,” he announced when he arrived outside the chief’s office.

“He’ll be overjoyed,” the chief’s assistant said, picking up the phone to buzz the chief. She waved Ning in. “Always a pleasure!” she called after him.

Inside, the chief motioned for him to sit. “Took you long enough.”

“She’s as unpleasant as she is ugly,” Ning said, gesturing through the glass. “You really ought to kick her down to production. She makes me go soft every time I lay eyes on her.”

The chief didn’t answer. He was scribbling on a layout for a weekend insert, and Ning waited without saying anything else. When he saw the thick red pencil stop moving, he went on the offensive.

“I know why I’m here, and let me just go on the record as saying that it’s a hack job,” Ning said. “You know it, and I know it. This kid who filed it—I saw him at the hospital. Probably followed me there.”

The chief stared at him.

“Second of all, this is exactly why I don’t file to the Web. It’s nothing but garbage like this. I’ve seen better stories in school papers. I bet you haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing, have you? I have a printout right here,” Ning said, holding up the story. “This thing’s got so many holes, you can hear the wind whistling through it. Really, it pains me to read it,” he said, before doing just that, aloud and in its entirety. The chief reshuffled the layouts on his desk and went at a new one with his grease pencil. Ning read, pausing every so often to affirm his amazement at the reporter’s incompetence. He punctuated the end of the story with a hearty guffaw.

“You done?” the chief said.

“Just give me the afternoon and I’ll have a draft for you. For the sake of our readership,” Ning said. “For the sake of the historical record!”

“Since when have you cared about either of those things?” the chief said.

“The kid missed the whole point of the story,” Ning said, rattling the paper. “Why do you think I’ve been tied up with it all week? It would take anyone else two weeks to do what I can give you by tonight.”

“Is that so?” the chief said. He put down his pencil and pushed his glasses up to his forehead, where they sat atop his white brows like a second set of eyes. The skin on his big bald skull was as rumpled as a plowed field.

“I’ve been doing some thinking,” the chief said. “Li Pai’s last day and all. You’ve been on my mind, I’m sorry to report.”

“That can’t have been a pleasant experience,” Ning said.

The chief snorted. “I don’t spend a lot of time pondering the vagaries of the human condition, but I’ve made an exception in your case,” he said. “I’m of limited intelligence, but I’ve given it my best effort, and I’ve come up with a theory. You used to be a bull with sharp horns. But, now—” The chief made a puffing sound, his fingers releasing chaff into the wind.

Ning jumped in. “Youth Daily’s constantly doing things like this. Those goat fuckers. We’d never go with something this weak,” he said, shaking the printout. “You’ll see what I’m talking about if you read my file.”

“Where is it?”

“I can have it on your desk in a couple of hours. Maybe three.”

The chief’s expression softened just enough to change the air in the room.

“What?” Ning said.

The chief studied the dark ravines below Ning’s eyes. With age, Ning’s eyebrows had all but disappeared, his cheeks had sunk, and he wore a permanently severe, gaunt expression, ever squinting into a fire only he could see. At this moment his lips were pursed with impatience, as though he were dealing with a recalcitrant child. Not so long ago, the chief would have told Ning to get out of his office and file the story, but now he had his own job to worry about. The time had come.

On his best days, Ning was petulant, ill-tempered. His presence soured the mood in the newsroom, and he’d gotten worse in the weeks leading up to Li Pai’s retirement. The chief had been under assault from the desk editors, who’d banded together in a campaign to get rid of Ning. He told them he’d take it under advisement, but he really had no choice. If he didn’t act, they’d go over his head, and for good measure they’d see that he got tossed out on the street with Ning.

The chief was seventy-one, and he harbored few illusions about his own character. He didn’t deny his moral failings, but this one, this long-standing weakness when it came to Ning, was unpardonable. When he was covering the American War in Vietnam he had seen the same lazy sentimentalism in officers who got enlisted men killed by allowing them to talk their way into stupid, heroic-sounding missions. The heart had to be kept out of the command chain. Yet he’d utterly failed to obey that dictum, keeping Ning on purely out of loyalty, payment in return for years of service. That he hadn’t been able to discard Ning as he would have a broken car part troubled him. He preferred to think that he was coldly pragmatic, if not ruthless, when it came to assessing the utility of his reporters.

“Do you want to hear my theory now? You lost your will after Li Pai’s book came out. That’s my theory,” the chief said.

“You might have something there, Chief,” Ning said.

“You thought you deserved more than a footnote.”

“That’s possible.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” the chief said.

“What for? You didn’t write it.”

The chief laid his hands on the desk in front of him. “I’m afraid you’re done here,” he said.

“That’s a mistake, Chief. Story’s got legs.”

“You’re terminated, Ning.”

“How’s that?”

“Effective today, you’re no longer employed at the Guangzhou Post,” the chief said.

“Because of this?” Ning shrieked, holding up the story. On the other side of the door, the chief’s assistant looked up from her screen.

“Because I’ve got fifty kids down there, each one of whom files ten stories a day. Remember how that works? Report it, bang it out, next story! A guy jumps off a bridge, they’re not at their desks pondering the ethical implications of suicide. They’re bribing the cops so they can get a look at the corpse! Just like you used to do. For all your deep thinking, you haven’t filed anything worth reading in years.” The chief didn’t mind repaying Ning for all the grief he had caused. Loyalty be damned.

Ning’s mouth fell open. He knew he looked like a cliché, his hands lying in his lap like a couple of dead fish, unable to come back with something that would level the chief, or at least wipe that placid, self-satisfied look off his face. In an attempt to get ahold of himself, he fixed his eye on a photograph behind the chief’s head, a black-and-white of a PLA artillery crew posing in front of a Type 65 antiaircraft cannon. He’d seen it hundreds of times before, but instead of providing him a lifeline to all those nights he’d waited in that chair while the chief reviewed his copy, he felt as lonely and insignificant as a child who first realizes that, in his absence, his parents laugh and eat and sleep as restfully as ever. The walls of their house do not collapse. The paper without him would go on exactly as it had before. A rasping sound came from Ning’s throat.

It wasn’t fair. During those nomadic years after Reform and Opening, when the chief had hopped from paper to paper, Ning had followed him like a pack mule, and he’d never said no to an assignment. He’d nearly frozen to death chasing the Panchen Lama on his exodus across the mountains of Nepal. He’d roasted in the sun for weeks at Lop Nur waiting for a subterranean nuclear test. He could have stayed in the newsroom, pulled the Xinhua file off the telex and punched up the copy, but he’d insisted on being there in person to feel the ground tremble. It mattered to him to witness the story. What had all that come to?

It’s come to exactly what you always knew it would, he told himself. You’ve served your purpose and now you’re off to the slaughter.

It took an effort of will for the chief to keep from diverting his eyes. He forced himself to suffer this reminder of what happened when he got lazy. Keeping a reporter on past his prime didn’t do anyone any good, least of all the reporter. If he’d cut him loose five years earlier, on nothing more than reputation Ning could have landed at another paper. A new start might have energized him. But now he was finished, worn bald as an old tire.

The chief tapped his foot once against the concrete floor to signal that their silent communion had come to an end.

“If you’ve got anything to say, say it.”

Ning had sunk deep into his chair. He shook his head.

“Well, that’s a first,” the chief said. “Listen to me. I haven’t put this through official channels, so we can handle it properly, like gentlemen. Submit an official resignation letter to Personnel and you’ll keep your pension. If I have to fire you, no pension. Got it?”

“I’m lucky to have you looking out for me.”

The chief didn’t respond.

“Why would I resign?” Ning said.

The chief pinched the bridge of his nose. “How about in solidarity with Li Pai?”

“In solidarity with Li Pai,” Ning said.

“Yes.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Your choice,” the chief said. “How’s the speech coming?”

“You can’t be serious,” Ning said.

“You should add a bit about yourself. Put in something about how brothers always go down together. Allow yourself to save face. Do you hear me? Don’t turn yourself into a flaming monk.”

“It’s not enough to get rid of me, you’re going to put me on parade so everyone can see.”

“This isn’t a punishment. You’ve been with him since People’s Daily. No one knows him better.”

“I hardly know him at all.”

“Don’t give me that. You’ll do it, and maybe he’ll return the favor. You could benefit from a little character rehabilitation. Maybe he’ll write you a recommendation letter, too.”

“You’re a son of a bitch,” Ning said.

“We’ll all lift a glass to you at the Green Room,” the chief said. “I’m sure Li Pai won’t mind sharing the spotlight.”

“That’ll be the day,” Ning said. The chief held out his hand, but Ning didn’t take it. He went out to the waiting area, pulling the chief’s heavy door closed behind him with a sharp click. His lip curled at the sight of the assistant. Repulsive, the way she sat, her dainty arms poised over her keyboard like an insect worrying over the thorax of its prey. From day one he’d disliked this coun- try girl with the erect posture and sharp tongue, and he was relieved to discover that he hadn’t, due to his own misfortune, suddenly been visited by a newfound spirit of tolerance.

“What?” she said, her fingers still clacking at the keys.

Ning put his head down and walked out to the elevator bay.

“That’s the smartest thing you’ve ever said,” she called after him.

Back at his desk, he began to work up his resignation letter. Keep it simple, he told himself, but an hour later he had only just begun to air his grievances. He worked on it through the afternoon, and when he was satisfied that he’d communicated his opinions on the matters of the paper’s shortsighted appetite for gossip over real news, incestuous hiring practices, inability to recognize and promote talent, and reliance on the fame of its half-wit columnists, he signed it with a flourish and took it to Personnel. From there, he left the building, took a bus across town, and drank at a bar until nightfall, to no benefit other than a slothful heaviness in his legs. When he returned, it was to an almost empty newsroom.

A few stragglers were gathering up Li Pai’s gifts and stuffing them into plastic garbage bags, which they threw over their shoulders for the trip to the party at the Green Room. A corner of the red farewell banner had peeled off the wall. One of the young men deftly reached up and with a flick of his wrist yanked the entire thing down. He crumpled the heavy paper into a huge ball before jamming it into a gray trash bin full of beer bottles. Li Pai waved on his coterie and stopped at Ning’s desk.

Li Pai was as stooped as an old scholar, his posture the apostrophe’s hook and bell. His eyes were pricks of black suspended in rheum, magnified by the thick lenses of his stylish tortoiseshell glasses. Time had worn them both down, but Ning had no sympathy for his colleague’s fragility, and he’d lost his appetite for the wandering conversations that inevitably became lectures on Li Pai’s singular experience of the world. He couldn’t remember when he’d finally stopped admiring Li Pai and had given himself over to jealousy, a soothing contempt for everything Li Pai represented: self-promotion, egotism, shallowness.

“That sums it up, no?” Li Pai said, pointing at the trash bin where the banner was crackling as it unwound itself. When Ning didn’t answer, he said, “To the bar?”

Ning made a pained face. “Unavoidably detained,” he said. “I’ll be there when I can.”

Li Pai nodded gravely and gave Ning a pat on the back. “Hang in there,” he said, lingering. “You’ll find something else.”

“Ah,” Ning said. “Word’s out.”

“I hope it’s not a show of solidarity,” Li Pai said. Ning looked at him suspiciously. “Nothing like that.”

“I could find something for you at Beida. They’ve asked me to lecture in the School of Communications.”

“I think I’d rather not,” Ning said.

“Well, it’s a sad day for journalism. You and I are the last of a breed.”

“Maybe not such a sad day,” Ning said. He’d never considered Li Pai much of a reporter, and he didn’t appreciate the comparison. In his columns Li Pai had proved himself to be a writer whose self-regard far outweighed his concern for the subjects he addressed. He wrote about poverty and corruption only to make it appear that he was a friend of man, a compassionate soul with a tearstained handkerchief in his breast pocket. Ning had found it impossible to read him any longer after Li Pai held a contest inviting readers to spend a week shadowing him at the paper and three hundred thousand people had written essays explaining why they most deserved the honor.

“You’re not resigning because of what happened with your story? There’s no point in falling on your sword over a little thing like that,” Li Pai said in an avuncular tone that caused Ning to clench his fist underneath the desk.

Ning shook his head. “It’s time to move on. Simple as that.”

“I see,” Li Pai said thoughtfully. He waited for Ning to elaborate, and when he didn’t, Li Pai leaned in close, as if to speak in confidence, and said, “I heard the desk editors were after your hide. You know the chief’s lost all his leverage. There’s nothing he could have done.”

“He begged me to stay,” Ning shot back. He didn’t know anything about this business with the desk editors. He got along fine with them. They respected him.

“Of course he did.” Li Pai looked away stoically, with the air of a long-suffering mother whose sons had given her a lifetime of trouble. “A sad day,” Li Pai said, patting him on the forearm.

“If you say so.”

“You’ll come later?” Li Pai said as he walked toward the elevators.

“I’ll be along,” Ning said, fixing his eye on something beyond his cubicle wall. “As soon as I’m able.”

The chief was making his way across the newsroom, and Ning watched as though tracking a slowly accelerating avalanche, calculating the time until his imminent obliteration. When he got to Ning’s desk, he banged his fist on the laminate surface hard enough to make the keyboard jump, and loomed over the reporter like he had a load of brick on his back he was dying to drop right on top of him.

“Let’s go,” the chief grunted.

“I’ve got to get my affairs in order,” Ning said, gesturing at his desk.

“You’re not arranging a funeral,” the chief said.

“You’d think not,” Ning said.

The chief took in the wreckage of Ning’s desk—reporter’s notebooks piled high against the cubicle’s flimsy partitions, boxes of files, printouts of stories stacked like shale deposits on every available surface, newsprint melting over stacks of books, the plunders of a reporter’s raids on his fellow man. He drew a deep breath.

“Management defined by its unwavering dedication to mediocrity?” the chief said.

“Too much?” Ning said.

“Every time I let someone go, Personnel gets the same letter. It’s a terrible shame I’m never informed of the depths of my moral and ethical insolvency until one of you geniuses gets the boot. Think of the heights we’d reach if only someone would step forward and struggle against my incompetence.”

“I’m just a guy in the business forty years,” Ning said, “what do I know?”

“Funny how you didn’t mention your own contributions to this journalistic morass you accuse me of running.”

“I thought that went without saying. As you pointed out, it’s been years since I’ve written anything worth reading.”

“And now we know all along you were only saving yourself for a final shot.”

Ning shrugged.

“Sort yourself and get over to the Green Room,” the chief said.

“Or what?” Ning said. “You going to fire me?”

“You’re a real piece of work. You know what? If you don’t show up and give Li Pai the finest send-off in history, I’ll strip your pension, everything.”

“Here it is. My punishment for speaking the truth.”

“No one would ever accuse you of that,” the chief said as he shuffled off, leaving Ning alone in the bleached fluorescence of the empty newsroom.

Two of the TVs over by Metro were tuned to all-news channels, and the first thing Ning did was change one to a poker tournament from Macau. He put his feet up on his desk and leaned back into the posture of an untroubled man.

To hell with the chief. If he wanted a speech, Ning would give him one. But he wasn’t going to get in any hurry. No one rushed Ning Wang.

Ning shifted in his chair and crossed his arms. On the TV, the poker players wore sleek wraparound sunglasses. Some had hats pulled low over their eyes and wore beards like bandits’ handkerchiefs. Ning supposed he’d hold his own at the table with these men. They were nothing if you looked past their disguises. He’d once interviewed Johnny Chan, the world champion, and he could read Chan’s tells within five minutes of sitting down across from him. That was, in his own estimation, his greatest skill as a reporter, his ability to recognize a man’s true intentions.

He watched long enough for a fortune in chips to change hands several times. At the commercial, he reached down, slid open his desk drawer, and pulled out the speech he’d been working on for the last month. It was nothing more than a list of sentimental recollections and professional triumphs cribbed from Li Pai’s memoir, written in a style that approximated ground meat shooting into a sausage casing. He’d never been able to work out the introduction. “What can I say about Li Pai that hasn’t already been said?” he’d begun the latest draft. The line had been scratched through, rewritten, and scratched through again, the pen scoring deeply into the paper. The more he worked it over, the worse it got. He didn’t want it to be good, but he didn’t want to make a fool of himself.

He dropped the speech and slammed the desk drawer closed. He wasn’t going to fire sugarcoated bullets. Tell it straight or don’t tell it at all. Over the years, this stance had cost him friends, but he tallied those losses not as indicators of some failure on his part, but as the inevitable consequence of maintaining his ideals.

The poker game ended in what Ning could tell was a staged win, the victor thrusting his hands aloft as his vanquished opponent lowered his face to the felt. They’d probably meet in a hotel room later to split the winnings.

An F1 race came on next, and he watched, vaguely hoping for a crash.

A cleaning crew of blue-bibbed women wheeled their carts through the newsroom, dumping trash cans and chatting to each other across the cubicles, oblivious to Ning’s presence. He checked his watch. He supposed it was late enough, and he gathered a few mementos—a press pass from the ’08 Olympics, a sliver of Shenzhou 1’s heat shield encased in resin, a photo of him at the U.S. Embassy protests in ’99—and stuffed them into the pockets of his coat. He opened the desk drawer again and pulled out the speech.

When Ning got to the Green Room, he nearly turned around and went home when he saw who was posted at the door.

“You’ve got some balls,” the man said. He was called Baby Zhou. So painful an example was he of the shopworn convention by which hulking men are given petite names that Ning cringed every time he set eyes on the guy. Baby Zhou was, indeed, a man of infantile proportions—a perfectly round head, high, perpetually rosy cheeks that gave the impression he was always smiling, stubby arms that seemed to project from the sides of his neck. Because of that, Ning had always caught a whiff of cruelty in the name, the possibility that it had been bestowed as an act of retaliation. If that was the case, Zhou seemed blissfully unaware. Whatever the name’s origin, Ning considered it a sad commentary on human nature.

“Nope. Nope. Not a chance,” Baby Zhou was saying.

“I’m not going to tell you how to do your job, and you’d probably be right not to let me in,” Ning said.

“Not a chance.”

“But you might show some respect to a man twice your age,” Ning said.

“If I killed you and threw you in a ditch out back, do you think anyone would care?” Baby Zhou said, stepping closer.

Ning noticed that Baby Zhou’s eyes were incredibly puffy. “No, probably not,” he said.

“I’d get a cash reward,” Baby Zhou said. “Do you think anyone’s forgotten about what happened last time you were here?”

“That kid should have known better than to go shooting his mouth off,” Ning said. Just then the metal door screeched open, and he found himself face-to-face with Li Pai.

“You made it!” Li Pai said, throwing his arms around Ning. He was drenched in the sour musk of beer, and he slumped soddenly against Ning’s shoulder.

“Good grief,” Ning said, trying to back away.

A couple of young reporters Ning recognized from the newsroom came out after Li Pai. When they saw Ning, all joy drained from their faces.

“Ning,” Li Pai said, suddenly very serious. “I saw you through the window. Like a shimmering in the mist.” Li Pai looped his arm through Ning’s and announced, “My dear friend has arrived! Let the celebrations begin anew!”

“Yes,” Ning said. He’d meant to arrive late enough to miss the celebrations entirely, to give his speech to a nearly empty bar, but peering inside, he could see the place was packed.

Baby Zhou blocked the door. “Mr. Li, all due respect, I don’t know about letting him in.”

Li Pai tilted his head to the side.

“What am I supposed to do?” Baby Zhou said. This was a quandary. He sank a finger into his ear and rotated it a quarter turn, then back. Ning could practically hear the rocks banging around inside.

Li Pai said nothing.

“You’ll vouch for him?” Baby Zhou said.

“Who?” Li Pai said. “This man? I’ve never seen him before in my life.” He doubled over laughing.

“That’s helpful,” said Ning.

“Let’s say he is my best friend in the world,” Li Pai said. “Is that not enough? Here.” He pulled out a wad of cash and stuffed it into the breast pocket of Baby Zhou’s suit jacket. Baby Zhou gave the money back.

“Your word is enough, Mr. Li,” he said. Then he took Ning by the lapels and pulled him close enough that Ning could smell his mealy emanations.

“If you so much as raise your voice to order,” Baby Zhou said, “I’ll snap off your fingers. You blink wrong, I break fingers. You have a bad thought, fingers. I’ve been authorized. Got it? Won’t type so good then, will you?”

“You smell like a barnyard,” Ning said. He smiled grandly.

Li Pai pulled him through the door before Baby Zhou could remove his head from his body.

The Green Room was a long corridor about as wide as a boxcar. It had an arched ceiling that in the wet season condensed and dripped onto the patrons below. A hundred years earlier, it had been part of a club for English traders, and the walls above the chair rails had been upholstered in a rich green velour, but now only mold and cracked plaster remained. The wood floors were beer-soaked, and beneath that familiar sour smell was something else, earthy and dank, as though the entire place had slipped subterranean. Reporters loved it because it was the embodiment of condemnation, and hookers loved it because of the reporters. You could smell the disrepute for blocks.

Li Pai steered Ning to a table in a corner where a couple of kids from the newsroom and the chief’s assistant were seated. Ning had worked a story with one of the reporters, and he didn’t hate him. Ning allowed that someday he might be a decent journalist. He was an empty bucket, thick in the way the best reporters must be, incapable of developing a full understanding of anything he was being told without a complete and detailed explanation.

Ning nodded at him. “Here’s a man always ready with another question,” he said.

The kid ducked his head.

“One’s greatest asset as a reporter,” Ning said, addressing the table, “is stupidity. A reporter with a brain never knows when to shut up. He can’t stop answering his own questions. Not a problem for this one,” he said, gesturing at the young man.

“It’s late,” the chief’s assistant said. “I’d better be going.” She reached across the table to shake Li Pai’s hand. “Mr. Li, it’s been an honor.”

“The honor has been all mine,” Li Pai said.

“We’ll go with you,” the reporter said to the assistant. “Mr. Li, we’ll drop your presents off tomorrow.”

“That’s very courteous of you,” Li Pai said.

“It’s the least we can do.” Ning saw that the empty bucket was visibly moved. He had enfolded Li Pai’s hand in both of his own, and appeared unwilling to release him. “I became a reporter because of you, Mr. Li.”

“Be well,” Li Pai said with great import. “Be well.”

“Where’s the film crew?” Ning said to no one in particular.

“I don’t suppose we can trust you to see that Mr. Li gets home safely,” the chief’s assistant said to Ning.

Ning didn’t respond. He signaled the waitress for a beer.

“From the day I met you, it’s been a trial,” the assistant said, drawing her shoulders up. “In fact, it’s been a nightmare. I’ve never met anyone so awful. When I heard you were leaving, I wept with joy.” She was gaining courage from the power of her own words, and she stood and steadied herself on the table for another salvo. “You’re a rotten piece of shit, Ning Wang, and I hope you spend your remaining years alone, suffering for all you’ve done. After you’re dead I’ll find your grave and piss on it.”

One of the kids tugged at her arm.

“I’d piss on you now but I wouldn’t want to waste the beer,” she shouted as they pulled her toward the door. Some of the reporters nearby gave a rousing cheer.

“Well, wasn’t that something?” Li Pai said.

“She’s charming. Chief find her in a Vietnamese massage joint?”

“She’s a survivor, that’s for sure,” Li Pai said.

“Had a thing for me from day one.”

“You don’t say.”

“She’s young. She can’t handle how I make her feel. You’ve seen how I make her loins quiver.”

Li Pai, realizing that Ning might be serious, let it drop.

Ning felt around in his pocket for the speech. “I didn’t get you anything,” he said.

“I wasn’t expecting anything,” Li Pai said. “Your friendship has been gift enough.”

Ning frowned.

“Of course, you remain, as ever, a waste of humanity,” Li Pai said.

“That’s more like it.”

“What’ve you got there?” Li Pai said, nodding at the speech in Ning’s hand.

“Just some thoughts. I don’t think they’re appropriate.”

“I’d be disappointed if they were. Let’s hear them.” He rose to call everyone over, but Ning stopped him.

“How about a drink first?” Ning said.

Li Pai agreed, and they drank—or, Ning drank while Li Pai reminisced about old colleagues, friends lost to retirement and the grave. There came a point, after his third glass, when Ning felt something like comradeship rise up in his heart, even if it was only because he recognized all the names and beer made him sentimental. The bar was filled to capacity, the noise forcing them to sit closer than Ning otherwise would have chosen to. Every so often reporters would stop by to shake Li Pai’s hand. Then they’d drift back into the crowd, which, Ning found hard to ignore, was a forest of youth. The few old-timers looked like men adrift, mossy and damp, flapping jowls and eye bags thick as melted icing. It was during one of these scans of the crowd that he spotted the back of the chief’s mottled head. He was on a stool at the bar, hunched over his drink like an inmate protecting his bowl of soup. Ning spat on the floor, and when he looked back up, he saw the kid from Youth Daily sauntering toward their table. It was just one thing after another. The kid was hard to miss in his pink Izod golf shirt and knockoff Italian loafers. He was wearing a nice watch, an Omega, but it all looked wrong on him, as if he’d borrowed the ensemble from his older brother. He had given up a banking job in Hong Kong to become a reporter, and he had a hurt, angry look about him, as if he’d recently come to the realization that he’d made a terrible mistake, for the first time in his life double-crossed by his own desires.

“Here comes the great scribe,” Ning said.

“Who’s this?” Li Pai said.

“This is the retard who wrote my last story out from under me,” Ning said.

“Ah, one of the Red Guard,” Li Pai said.

The kid was at the table now, and he held his hand out to Li Pai, and then to Ning.

“You really put my balls in a vise,” Ning said.

“Sorry, sir?” the kid said.

“The security guard. That was my story.”

The kid turned red and rubbed the back of his neck.

“My editor was all over me to file it. I didn’t have any choice.”

“These things happen,” Li Pai said. “Editors are beasts.”

“Bullshit,” Ning said. “This kid saw me at the hospital and knew I was onto something.”

“That’s not true,” the kid said. “That’s not true at all.”

Ning grunted. He was enjoying himself. “It’s one thing to beat an old man to the punch, but you got it dead wrong,” he said to the kid. “When you’re a little older, you’ll have more respect for the undertones of a story like this one. You’ll see. There’s more to this business than facts.”

The kid bowed his head. Then he directed himself to Li Pai. “Mr. Li, you’ve had a great influence on me. I’m here today because of you.”

“You honor me,” Li Pai said.

“It’s a great loss to the profession,” the kid said.

“You’re too polite,” Li Pai said. “Mr. Ning is retiring today, as well.”

Without making eye contact, the kid bowed slightly in Ning’s direction. “Mr. Li, I wish you all the best.” He reached across the table, his armpit in Ning’s face, and shook Li Pai’s hand vigor- ously. Ning watched him go, and when the kid got back to his friends, he saw the heads turning to look at him, and he heard them laughing.

Li Pai saw it, too. “You remember Xiang Xue?” he said.

“Which one was he?” Ning was still looking at the back of the kid’s head.

“Rental tuxedo at the Reagan dinner.”

“Sure,” Ning said. “‘New Beijing style,’” he said. That had been Xiang Xue’s response to the American president when he’d pointed to the rental tag dangling from the sleeve of the reporter’s dinner jacket.

“You know he died last year,” Li Pai said.

“I hadn’t heard that,” Ning said.

“That young man reminds me of him. Same wardrobe problems. Perhaps a certain lack of self-awareness, but sometimes that can be a good thing. It can put people at ease.”

“He’ll never be half the reporter Xiang Xue was,” Ning said.

“Is that a fact?”

“No question.”

“What was it that our young friend missed?” Li Pai said.

“He missed the story. He got the facts and he missed the story.”

“What’s this deeply complex story about?”

“It’s just another story,” Ning said, pushing on the rim of an overflowing ashtray. “To the uninitiated.”

“It’s a shame. Your last one, and you never got to write it.”

Ning drew a deep breath. “There’s this peasant from Yunnan, probably grew up in a cave and went to school in a tree. When he gets old enough, he sets out for the golden shore. He has a trustworthy face and he gets on as a night guard at a building down near the International Finance Centre. Mostly he sits behind the lobby desk and reads comics. One night, he hears screaming. He looks up from his copy of Sui Tang Heroes and sees, just on the other side of the glass, a woman struggling with two men. One’s got the collar of her coat, and the other one has her arm. They’re dragging her away. At first he’s frozen with fear. But then honor asserts itself and he attempts to rescue her. No regard for protocol, which dictates that he phone the security team that patrols the outside perimeter. No, our hero goes it alone, and for his trouble he’s stabbed eight times and left for dead.”

“And the girl?” Li Pai said.

“No sign of her. Disappeared.”

“Probably a setup,” Li Pai said, rubbing his eyes.

“All for two kuai and a subway token.”

“People have done worse for less,” Li Pai said. “So that’s the story?”

“That’s just the first inch of it,” Ning said. “This noble boy winds up in the hospital. No money, no insurance, but his boss at the security company is a clever fellow. He walks up to the nurses’ station and signs the guard in under the name of another employee who’s covered under the company policy.”

“Clever,” Li Pai says.

“And it works like a charm. They wheel him into surgery, sew him up, prognosis excellent. All this kid has to do is lie in bed, flirt with the nurses, and answer to someone else’s name. But after a couple of weeks, he decides he’s tired of pretending to be someone else. He makes a stink about it. At first, the hospital refuses to recognize him by his given name. If he’s readmitted under his real name, they have to give back all the insurance money. But he insists. Then he calls the insurance company and fesses up. And now he’s liable for a hundred and fifty thousand in bills, and they won’t discharge him until he pays up.”

“This is the problem with heroes. Far too honest,” Li Pai said.

“The question you have to ask is, why? Why would he do such a thing? You see? That half-wit from Youth Dailydidn’t even bother to ask. What does this peasant think he’s going to gain? Now he’s trapped like an animal. Why would anyone behave that way?”

“You asked him?” Li Pai said.

“Of course I did,” Ning said, smacking the table with his open palm.

“And?”

“He says, ‘I woke up, and I’d forgotten who I was.’ That was his explanation. He forgot who he was.” Ning shook his head.

“How peculiar. A real-life existential crisis.”

“Hardly. Nothing more than pride, I’d say. He’s twenty-five hundred li from home, he’s broke, he doesn’t even have a change of clothes. He’s got nothing but his name. The only problem is, now he doesn’t even have that. How can he send home an article about his heroism when his name’s nowhere in the story? What’s a hero without his own name?”

“Or perhaps he’s just too virtuous for his own good.”

“I just wanted the damn story to ask the right questions,” Ning said.

“They don’t make them like us anymore,” said Li Pai, raising his glass. “To age and wisdom!”

“To age and wisdom,” Ning said. “These kids. They have no curiosity. They’re just happy little story factories shitting out copy all day long.”

Li Pai nodded slowly, as if digesting a sage truth.

“Even when I was their age,” Ning said, “I pondered the larger context. Even at People’s Daily, even when I knew there was no chance the truth might make it into print, I thought of the greater good. I wrestled with my conscience. I tried to behave honorably. We both did, didn’t we?”

“We did,” Li Pai said. “We reported for the greater good, not for selfish reasons.”

Ning narrowed his eyes, but Li Pai’s face gave away no irony, no sense that he was calling out Ning’s bloated self-adulation, or something worse.

“Maybe so,” Ning said. When they’d first met at People’s Daily, he’d never before encountered anyone more deeply resistant to the lures of ambition than Li Pai. He’d forgotten that. He’d forgotten his earnest face, his dedication to serving the People’s Republic. Li Pai had always been a model worker.

“We were all different then,” Li Pai said, as if reading Ning’s mind. “I remember you, brave boy. You scaled the mountain of swords, swam the sea of fire.”

“We all ate bitter,” Ning said, deflecting, but inwardly he was pleased at this recollection of his exploits.

“You even assisted with the People’s Daily Extra,” Li Pai said.

Ning stared at Li Pai. “How’s that?” he said.

“You collected the student flyers at Tiananmen for the Extra edition. Don’t be coy. You risked your life for the protests. You did your part to protect the students. You’re a hero.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ning said. He looked around to see if anyone had heard.

“Ning Wang. We’ve been friends for longer than either of us wants to admit. Surely you can grant an old man a final wish.”

“What do you mean?” Ning said.

“Tell me how you avoided the purge,” Li Pai said.

“I want to know who’s been spreading these lies about me,” Ning said. “I had nothing to do with the Extra. That was a band of revolutionaries who got what they deserved. They defied the Central Committee and were punished.” His breath was coming fast and he drained his beer in a swallow. “I had nothing to do with that.”

“No, I know you did,” Li Pai said, laughing. “Qian Liren told me so.”

“Why would you bring this up now?” Ning said. He leaned close to Li Pai. “What have I ever done to harm you?” he said. “Why would you bring this up? Someone will hear.”

Li Pai reached out and placed his hand firmly on Ning’s shoulder. From across the room it might have appeared to be a comradely embrace, but Ning understood Li Pai’s true intent. “You were a man of such bravery,” Li Pai said. “And yet when everyone else went to prison, you were spared. Such luck! So brave and so lucky.” His fingers were squeezing Ning’s shoulder.

“Yes, very lucky,” Ning said.

“Lucky boy,” Li Pai said. Suddenly he drew back and picked up his beer. “Let’s toast to luck, then,” Li Pai said. He held up his glass, unsmiling. Ning picked up his own empty glass and touched it to Li Pai’s. He made the motion of drinking from the empty stein.

“What are you toasting to luck for?” a voice said from behind Ning. It was the chief. “Toast to something appropriate, like senility or amnesia.”

“Indeed,” Li Pai cried, tossing back the last of his beer. The chief collapsed into the chair next to Ning.

“You look terrible,” the chief said, nudging Ning’s arm. “Cheer up. Your days of taking shit from me are over.” The old man was drunk. “Everyone’s waiting on your speech,” the chief shouted.

“Yes,” Li Pai joined in. “Let’s hear it.”

Of course it hadn’t been luck. Two men who said they were from the Ministry of Water Resources had been waiting inside Ning’s apartment one sweltering night a couple of weeks after the protests. Since the crackdown he’d been living like a man in a diving bell, waiting for his air hose to be severed at the surface. Colleagues had been taken away in broad daylight. He’d known they would come for him, too, and he’d decided. Once he’d seen all the empty desks in the newsroom, he knew he’d tell his inquisitors whatever they wanted to know. It’s pragmatic, he told himself. Either way, they’ll get what they want. Just give it to them and preserve your career.

That night at his apartment, they’d asked him to take a seat, and before turning on the lights, one of the agents had pulled the cord anchored on a nail at each window frame. The blinds had come whipping down, one by one.

The chief struggled back to his feet and, wobbly, turned to face the crowd. “Quiet,” he shouted. The noise died down quickly. “We’re here to see off a cherished colleague—a beloved colleague— our brother Li Pai. His contributions to the Guangzhou Post are unchartable. He has set a new standard for journalists in China. In all my years, I’ve never seen such an outpouring of sadness from the readership.” The chief looked back at Li Pai, and Ning understood that the old man had paused because he was genuinely choked up, flooded with longing to embrace Li Pai, to gather him up in his arms as one might a child. No one would have thought less of him—it was the right time for an outpouring of emotion—but he turned back to the crowd. “Li Pai has been like a son to me, but no one has known him as long as Ning Wang. He’s volunteered to say a few words about his dear friend.”

The chief sat to a round of applause that abated as soon as Ning stood up. As he maneuvered himself into position, his chair scraped loudly against the floor. Uneasy, eyes down, he felt in his pocket for the speech. There was a great silence all around him, and when he looked up at the crowd, he saw that they all hated him, and only the chief’s authority kept them from shouting him down. He unfolded the speech and held the paper out before him. He took a deep breath and began to read without understanding the words of praise, and without hearing his own voice, but hoping that he might, by some magic of language, acquit himself.

A perspicacious poem taken from Tim Wells’ forthcoming poetry collection, Everything Crash, published this month by Penned in the Margins.

‘Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success’
Bob Dylan, ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’

How he got here doesn’t matter: the raw talent, the hours
of practice, the racism; the mob that gets you breaks
but never lets you rest; the hits, the girls, the hangers-on.
Even if tonight it’s just the uppers keeping him upright,
when the spotlight hits, he’s on his own, all else fades
and Mr Excitement is king of the room. Horns punch,
drums jab and hook, he ducks, weaves, that voice soars,
lifts ‘em up and knocks ‘em clean out. Dancing
into centre-stage, he throws his jacket over his shoulder,
arches back, knees bent — sweat soaks his silk shirt.
Flipping forward, rolling hips, shoes shuffling in a blur,
if he undid the fly of his shark-skin trousers, it’d take a bite.
He knows, as the girls tear his clothes and he’s ankle deep in
lingerie,
it’s important not to dress as who you are, but who you want to be.

Designer & illustrator Jez Burrows has created a selection of short stories composed using only example sentences from the dictionary.

The project — initiated by the same Jez Burrows who was behind the short fiction and illustration anthology You Are The Friction — gives a new perspective to the example sentences that dictionaries provide to help demonstrate the most probable usage of a word. Every one of the eight stories published so far (with, no doubt, many more to come) is written entirely using example sentences from the New Oxford American Dictionary — with nothing added except some punctuation to piece them together.

Ranging from the poetically succinct to the nonsensical, the dictionary stories are highly entertaining to read through — and with the words that spawned each example sentence underlined for added context, it ends up providing not one narrative but two. The first being the narrative made up from the example sentences, and the second showing the skeleton chain of single words that gave forth to it.

Head to the Dictionary Stories website to see them for yourself. We’re off to see if we can compose a few ourselves…

After our current issue abruptly sold out last month, we’ve now re-released it in a limited edition supplement-style format of just 200 copies.

The freshly published edition is packed with the same great illustrated short fiction and poetry that graced our thirteenth issue, but comes in a slimmer, supplement-style format which has allowed us to drop the price to a mere £3.50 — almost half the price of a normal copy of Popshot.

This edition is available to order exclusively through our website, and as long as stocks last, new subscribers will receive it as their initial copy when they take out a subscription to Popshot. A yearly subscription costs just £10 and also includes Issue 14 and 15, plus complete access to all of our back issues courtesy of the digital edition.

With just 200 copies available, we’re not expecting them to hang around for very long so if you would like to get your hands on one, either subscribe or order a copy at our issues page.

Corin Dilip Faife’s macabre short story delves into the world of a secretive sculptor whose masterpieces turn out to be more unique than ever imagined.

Magenta Finn, it was agreed, had developed her signature style early on in her career. Surviving work from her art school days, still on display at the London academy where she had studied, was in fact rather gauche and amateurish. Then — with little preamble and shortly after her graduation — had come the point at which she conceived the first of the bone sculptures that were to be her sole artistic output from that point onwards.

As her work began to be exhibited, at first in small galleries and group shows, a handful of critics took note of the striking, unsettling quality of the organic-looking forms. Admirers remarked on their curious construction; from where did she acquire the bones, and from which animal? How exactly were they carved to be assembled without visible seams? And how did the artist achieve such strange textures, the drawn out filaments and oozing, gelatinous drips? On all of these points, the tall, softly-spoken sculptress gave no comment. Her reticence only added to the air of mystery around her work, which, in turn, started to increase demand. Having obtained a modest price for each piece in her first series, Magenta Finn moved to a larger studio in a warehouse shared with fellow artists and creative types. Besides the day she moved in, and a few fleeting appearances at social events that took place in the building from time to time, she was rarely seen. None of the artists in adjacent rooms ever heard her at work; in fact, as the illustrator in a nearby unit observed, her studio seemed to be devoid of tools or building materials: just a table and chair, and plinths for the new sculptures that would appear and disappear from one day to the next. As to the how, when, and where of her craft, no one was any the wiser.

Though her colleagues found it strange, these elusive ways were of no concern to buyers, who clamoured for more of the sculptures almost as fast as she could make them. Inundated by requests, she eventually agreed to be represented by an art dealer — not the most high profile of all those who had approached her, certainly, but a dry, well-respected Scot, who had simply been the most accepting of her unwillingness to give more than the most basic details about herself and her working habits.

The partnership was of great benefit. At her new agent’s suggestion, Magenta began to make fewer but more ambitious pieces, which, with his help, would fetch much higher prices. Where early sculptures had been barely more than two feet high, new pieces stretched metres from the ground. The sinuous twists and turns of her youthful series were still there, but now fashioned into wild, tortured branches flailing out from twisted stems; always, the forms were worked in the same glistening white bone, so carefully fashioned that an observer would think they were moulded from a single piece, were this not impossible given the material used.

Over the next year, the work sold faster than ever before. Magenta Finn moved to a private studio all of her own, a small warehouse south of the river where she would not be disturbed. Her work was shown in more prestigious galleries, her name dropped into conversation amongst knowledgeable circles. Yet, as her art became grander and her fame increased, the sculptress herself grew ever quieter, thinner, more pale. On rare public appearances, when she was questioned about her work, she responded with the same wry smile, and a reluctance to talk that was almost as much her signature as the sculptures.

One evening, in the modest office from which he worked, the art dealer received a call. A building consortium wanted to commission a giant work by Ms Finn, to be installed in a plaza outside a new apartment complex. It was larger than anything she had worked on before, but the developers were adamant that her style would fit perfectly with the setting. Naturally, given the demands of the task, there would be a very generous recompense. Details were yet to be finalised, but would he transmit the proposal to his client on their behalf?

Conversation over, the dealer stood the handset gently on the table. Then, picking it up again sharply, he punched in his client’s number, but it routed to voicemail. Leaving a brisk message about ‘big news’, he closed up the office for the day, climbed into his rattling coupé, and set off to Magenta Finn’s studio to relay the news to her in person.

A half hour later, he pulled into the bland industrial estate where the studio was housed, and halted outside its thick metal doors. With a bottle of champagne in hand — a luxury he judged worthy of the occasion — he strolled the few yards into the recessed porch. Looking around for the intercom, he saw a plain, grey box fixed to the wall, with a pair of thin wires jutting out where the buzzer had been. It was beyond use. Shrugging his narrow shoulders, he first knocked, then shouted, but received a response to neither. He was about to walk off when, almost as an afterthought, he gave the door handle a turn. It yielded to his grip, and, with a push, the heavy steel door swung open into the dark interior. He sauntered amicably inside.

Having visited once before, he vaguely remembered a workspace at the end of the short entry corridor, which he was now inside. Far better to deliver the news in person than on the phone, he thought, and as a bonus, maybe even glimpse his client’s secretive works-in-progress. Then, as he neared the end of the corridor, he heard a strange noise: a coughing, retching sound as of someone choking on a meal, mixed with an unplaceable guttural undertone. Was it an animal, a guard dog of some kind? Perhaps, but could it be a person — what if Magenta was gripped by an affliction, some type of fit? Concern outweighed trepidation. He strode the last few metres of the corridor and burst in through the studio doors. From inside there was a scream; next, a crashing sound; finally a low moan. Silence. A yellow flood of champagne bubbles trickled slowly out across the floor.

An hour later, the dealer emerged from the studio. His face was drawn and sallow, his gait barely more than a shuffle. He walked back to his car, sat inside, gripped the steering wheel with shaking palms. It was a full ten minutes before he started the engine and drove off.

Magenta Finn’s last work was, without question, the finest of her career. When fully installed, it spanned the concrete plaza from edge to edge: thousands of strands of dazzling, pearlescent white suspended delicately in the air, twisting and spiralling, intersecting in bulbous nodes and dripping stalactites, woven around each other like a giant bird’s nest with a small, dark ovoid shape just visible at the core.

Hordes of visitors flocked to the opening, wandering through the space with their necks craned, gazing upwards at the vast, milky filigree above them. The crowds were enraptured. Delighted couples wandered hand in hand beneath it, reviewers fawned on its ‘transcendent’ nature, art students with Wiro pads nodded solemnly and made notes. Curiously, in the midst of this great success, the artist herself never made an appearance at the site. Shortly before she delivered her commission, Magenta Finn had declared her retirement from the art world with a short statement conveyed to the press. From that point on she had not been seen in public. Everything, from the delivery of the sculpture to its installation, proceeded according to the sketches and written instructions she provided, with no personal intervention whatsoever. To those familiar with her work the announcement came as a surprise, but most attributed it to some capriciousness of character: she had always been such a quiet, reclusive type after all, so who could really say what whims possessed her?

Three weeks later, as plaudits for her final work continued to accumulate, the handful of colleagues and associates who had known her realised they still could not vouch for her whereabouts; she had disappeared from the radar entirely. Of course, questions were put to the agent who represented her, and who had been in contact with her just before her abrupt withdrawal — yet, when pressed on where she had gone, the art dealer, himself looking more pale and haggard by the day, remained as tight lipped as Magenta had once been.

‘She was someone who put a lot of herself into her work’, was all that he would say, struck by an almost imperceptible shiver.

‘Maybe too much.’

Hayward Publishing’s newly released book, The New Concrete, celebrates and surveys the rise of concrete poetry in the digital age.

Edited by poets Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe, The New Concrete is a fairly comprehensive tome that introduces, examines and celebrates the landscape of concrete poetry in the 21st century, gathering together work created since 2000 from contemporary artists and poets all over the world.

The accessibility of digital text and image manipulation, modern print techniques, and the rise of self-publishing have invigorated a movement that first emerged in an explosion of literary creativity during the 1950s and 1960s — and this new, beautifully produced volume provides an illustrated overview of those works that have helped bring visual poetry to a new audience, via a (relatively) new platform.

It’s that sense of modernity that’s key, as Victoria Bean states in her short piece about how the book came to fruition. “The New Concrete is not about how concrete poetry relates to the past but how it relates to our immediate world, how it responds to our culture and its rapid changes. What is it reflecting back to us, hiding from us, trying to make us see?”

View a few spreads from the book below and pick up your copy of The New Concrete here.

Adena Graham’s stirring flash fiction piece takes us into a world that our isolated protagonist is desperately trying to escape. Illustrated by Sam Pash.

Most evenings, when the birds had stopped their daytime gossiping and the valley was thick with silence, she would throw stones into the small stream beside her hut. Their plonk-plink, though made by her own hand, somehow helped her feel less alone; the echo of ripples across the water reminding her of childhood, when her father would take her net-fishing — their wellingtons sploshing through shallow waterways.

What had happened to her father? She couldn’t remember now. Perhaps she was too old for memory, although she had always assumed certain events remained embedded. Certainly, she ought to recollect how her father had come to pass, yet every time she stretched her mind in that direction, it would return to her empty-handed.

Her eyes, keen as a cat’s after so long without the aid of artificial light, scanned the surrounding trees, eager for signs of life. Human life, that is, but it never came. Even the animals seemed to avoid this corner of the earth; but when they did pass through, she would treasure those brief visits. One day, as she was pegging out her washing, a tiger had emerged from the shadow of the trees. She wasn’t scared, even when he raised his eyes to hers, acknowledging her presence. He had dipped his head, then, to drink from the stream. Even now, she can recall the diamond-bright drops of water trembling on the tips of his whiskers. Memories are funny like that – sometimes the smallest details remain the sharpest.

Another time, a baby chimp clung to its mother’s back. The two animals sat for a while on the far side of the stream, and she had found herself quietly humming a lullaby for the mother and her offspring.

How long had she lived here? She couldn’t remember that now either. Her hands, gnarled as the surrounding tree trunks, hinted at age beyond comprehension.

Suddenly it dawned on her that she didn’t have much life left – a week, a month, a year. Whatever time remained, it was running against her. Before it slipped through her fingers entirely, she wanted to find out what had become of her father, but more than that, she didn’t want to die alone.

Saying goodbye to the hut wasn’t difficult. It had never felt like a proper home; it was a spartan, functional space – somewhere to simply be. Sometimes she remembered another home, from long ago, but the key for that house had been lost in time. A long life meant there was a lot to forget – intentionally or otherwise.

As she began to walk, following a path she had never bothered with before, the trees on either side pressed in on her, whispering dark secrets. Brambles caught at her skirt, and roots snaked across the forest floor, as if trying to push her back the way she had come. Dark clouds passed overhead, heavy and menacing, and when the rainstorm came, it left her weak and shivering. Her hands were bloodied from fending off whip-sharp branches, her skirt torn, but she continued to fight her way through. Something, deep in the fabric of her soul, urging her onwards – always onwards. She had no idea where she was going, only that it was, somehow, of utmost importance that she get there.

Eventually, after days of walking, the trees began to thin out and the path cleared until she came upon a vast plain. Undaunted, she headed towards the horizon, empty apart from a small, unidentifiable speck.

Half walking, half running on legs jellied with age, she caught herself humming Brahms. The same tune she’d sung for the slumbering chimp. The closer she got, the more obvious it became that she was heading for a hut, much like her own. Disappointment gripped her chest. Was this it? Was this all the destination there was going to be?

She was upon it now, and it was the same! The exact same hut she’d left days earlier. Wailing in frustration, she flung open the door and tumbled onto the bed – her bed – exhausted and defeated.

A lullaby hung softly in the air – not her voice this time – a man’s, deep and heart-wrenchingly sad. ‘Come back, come back my little chimp,’ it said, and for a brief second, she remembers – in flashes. She is not old. She is seventeen. She sees it clearly now: an accident, the windscreen of a car, shards of glass raining down on her like diamonds. They are all still there, waiting. Her mother, her sister, her father. Yes, her father too – not dead, but alive. Alive and singing. Always singing as he sits beside a hospital bed, willing her to return – urging her to fight her way back to the reality she has left. ‘Come back. Come back.’

I’m trying, she thought. And tomorrow, I will leave this hut and try again. For now she remembers. She has tried to make this trip before, but always it brings her back to the same place. Back to the hut.

Alan Ward’s short story tells of how some curious ‘pets’ turn a family’s summer into an ordeal of warlike proportions. Illustrated by Phil Couzens.

My daughter clutched something, and more than once on the drive home I caught my son whispering to her. I asked what she had. The clap of the car door echoed between the wall of the barn and the side of the farmhouse. The corners of her pinny were folded tightly to her waist and my son informed me she had been entrusted with the care of the class pets over the summer.

I queried the plural. ‘Pets?’

They came in pairs but she had four – ‘four!’ – because it was cruel to keep them on their own and the more kept together the better. At the dining table my daughter stood on a chair and settled her pinny on the surface, smoothing the corners over the oak. I’d heard about these. All the rage in the cities. But how were you supposed to care for them? What did they eat? It was easy, my son explained, as I took down the old mouse cage from the top shelf in the pantry. They would practically look after themselves. I washed away the dust and scrubbed at the corners of the plastic base. In a shivering group on the table stood four tiny, pink people. They couldn’t talk and never would, my daughter explained. They had the brains and instincts of rodents but bodies of men and women. Two were male and two female, all naked and clutching each other. I set the cage on the table and one of the men stood forward as if he might oppose imprisonment. He was no taller than three inches but muscular with a beard and tiny dot of pubic hair. We settled them with cotton wool to sleep on and a bottle cap of water.

Later, after my son had fed them droplets of gravy and leftovers from the chopping board and my husband had looked into the cage and grunted, I read in my daughter’s homework diary a note from her teacher: ‘Thank you for agreeing to take the class pets over the summer. Your daughter has been most enthusiastic in rearing them in the classroom and I can think of no better candidate to host them over the holiday. Please be aware the lifespan isn’t always very long – sometimes just one or two weeks. It’s something in the genes. They’re releasing a new version in time for Christmas which is supposed to last longer and I was thinking the school might invest. I can’t take much more of the tears.’

The next day I reprimanded my daughter. She smiled at me knowingly. The school would be locked and empty for the next six weeks and I could do nothing except take solace in the fact that in two weeks the little people would probably all be dead. As children do, mine became acclimatised to having their pets at home. The brook at the end of the garden called and the little people lost their novelty. (I had never much been interested in the mice when I was young.)

I thought it curious the day the people in the cage stretched the cotton wool and pulled it over their bodies. Their makeshift clothes were not perfect. I supplied them with more cotton wool and a small terracotta house from an old fish tank. By the end of the first week one of the women had a swollen stomach and I wasn’t surprised when I woke on the Friday to find the four of them cooing over a newborn.

‘Don’t you think there’s something strange though,’ I said to my husband, ‘they’re supposed to be as docile as rodents, but they’ve made him blankets.’ My husband seemed unconcerned. Days passed and there were other children: a little tribe developed.

One night we were woken by the smell of smoke and I found the little people cowering against the bars of the cage, the small house ablaze, filled as it was with wood chippings and cocktail sticks and other things my husband had said I should not give them. A cup of water quashed the flames, but shock governed the tribe and I sensed blame had been attributed. The tribe split into two, the dividing line marked by a scar where the plastic bubbled in the fire.

When I went to the pet shop in the village to buy an additional cage I asked the woman behind the counter what could be done. ‘They’re just so angry with each other, since the fire’ I explained. She gave no answer but looked at me suspiciously.

I gave one tribe the new cage and set it in the corner in the living room, leaving the other on the kitchen table. When I returned to the kitchen I found the little people scrabbling at the swollen plastic with their hands, trying to dig, the dead body of an old man – one of the originals – laid out with his hands on his chest.

When my grandfather had kept the mice he had maintained a small graveyard below the kitchen window. He didn’t have funerals but did have headstones – un-cracked flints poking out of the soil. Some were still there, I noticed, having taken the cage out into the moonlight. I let the little people watch as I made the first new plot in many years. I marked the spot with a flat stone, although the little people were distracted, looking out over the garden. They stayed at the bars all the way back to the kitchen.

The next morning they had escaped, leaving behind the body of another of the originals – one of the women. My husband caught a couple of escapees lurking under the hat stand and returned them to the cage, but they only escaped – or were broken free – again. I expressed my concern about the speed of the little people’s development. In just two weeks several generations seemed to have passed. Each time one of the elderly died they were left out, hands on chest, and we would add them to the mouse graveyard. It did not surprise me that the first thing they built was a church, beside the fireplace out of charred wood with stained glass windows of melted sugar.

At this time the children were scheduled to go away to summer camp for two weeks. We said goodbye, and as my husband drove them off in the four-by-four, and I boiled the kettle, I could hear scuttling. A scavenging party. Behind the teabags stood a row of three young men, shoulders pushed back to the hardboard. I ignored them. Better not to knock their pride.

The mouse graveyard began to grow of its own accord: they buried their own dead and reproduced at a rapid rate. Fires were a problem. The church burnt down more than once. I began leaving the lights on at night to try to reduce their need for flame.

All this time the cage in the corner of the living room had been lagging behind, its little population stabilised at about twenty. This changed one day when, as I often had, I took the cage outside so they could witness the burial of one of their dead. The cage’s inhabitants were attentive and stood at the bars to pay their respects. They still wore stretched out cotton wool, whilst the escapees had developed more complex fashions using scavenged thread and fluff. Some escapees came to see what was going on in the graveyard and I felt their gaze as I lifted the cage back inside.

That night saw the launch of a rescue mission. The descendants of the kitchen table tribe broke free the descendants of their enemies. Then the trouble really started. There was something different about the people from the living room cage. They walked with their heads bowed and despite their freedom did not stray far. Physically they were different: their noses flatter, foreheads more pronounced and skin closer to opaque.

Time flew. The little people scavenged everything. When I went to vacuum the children’s playroom I found whole strips of floorboard missing, harvested for industry. Towns sprung up. Our plumbing had been intersected with pipes forged from melted down god-knows-what. The first war was mild; they only had spears and catapults then. Strange religious rituals came into vogue, although my husband seemed oblivious, even the morning he found the cadaver of a young man bound and gagged in the sugar canister. By this point the graveyard had a wall and a gatehouse, and spread deep into the shadow of the farmhouse.

The wars tended to be between the two lineages: those that had dwelt on the kitchen table – well, they all had once – and those whose antecedents had lived in the cage in the living room. The population of the garden had become more raggedy, harder skinned and leaner, whether they were of living room or kitchen table heritage.

The architecture became more ornate. They went through a phase of building castles, then shopping centres. I suspected they had melted down my husband’s old tools; he was misplacing things more than usual. They tore through the house like termites, stripping plaster from the walls. Things began to crumble and very little furniture remained when the children returned. Their bedroom was not safe. A city floated on the beams and smoke hovered on the ceiling. Although fires were still a problem, in some principalities a fire service would deal with them before I could get water.

‘Where are we to sleep?’ my children asked.

The city in their bedroom had not been wired up, and this made its relocation easier. The grid of electricity pylons downstairs kept tripping my husband and he would get shocks or else would spike himself and bleed onto the streets. I sent him to the builders’ merchant for more floorboards, determined to retake the upstairs.

I tried speaking as I lifted each house, explaining that my babies needed to sleep, that they had always been there, long before the city. I went unnoticed, as if the biggest, most unwieldy giant could go unnoticed. This is when I first got to thinking about godliness and when I first shrieked into their houses at the top of my voice ‘You have to go!’ and they didn’t hear.

Within an afternoon the bedroom city was outside and my husband had put down enough new floorboards for the children to be able to navigate their room. We salvaged what was left of their raggedy mattresses and blankets. It was enough.

My daughter came to me from the garden, choking on the air.

‘We only wanted to play, we were only playing.’

My son was shrouded in smoke: they had made a pyre of him. His little fingers were curled into his palm and he lay on his back on a scabbed bit of ground. The left side of his body was dark with fluids and dirt. I dragged him away from the minefield before swinging him onto my shoulder. The planes hurt when they hit and bullets stuck like splinters. Pylons were torn up as I skipped across the yard. My daughter complained of electric shocks but my son had been more badly damaged.

Being so far from the city and any hospital I was used to patching up the children myself, but the way his fleshy shoulder was scorched and open like that was disconcerting even for a farmer’s wife. All the same, the squeeze of the white gauze seemed to hold him together. I worried for the scar.

We stayed in one bed that night, the four of us listening to battles rage through the garden and into the house. Islands of plaster slid down the walls and our home smelt like a building site. The garden glowed with flame and I thought back to the first fire: their cowed little faces as they clung to the bars.

In the morning, my son was yellow from the shoulder to the chest, his eyes bloodshot and slow to follow movement. My husband gave his verdict: ‘We’re not having this.’

It was hard to kill the first. Hard to smash and pulp them. But if they screamed it was on a different frequency to our own pragmatic voices. It was as if their pale bodies had no bones, when you squelched them. We took the house in hours. The mouse graveyard was as good a place as any and they all ended up there, although the grave was a single pit and their blurred, watery bodies mulched into one. The builders’ merchant did a good trade that summer in bricks and plaster and beams and boards to get our house back to what it had been.

I am surprised, even now, that not one seemed to survive. I’ve noticed not a single scavenging party, any missing sugar, not one mysterious fire. The scar on my son’s shoulder curls onto his chin in a grey whisper and flints still stand upright in the mouse graveyard. I think on the little people sometimes, looking down from the kitchen window, suds on my hands, or looking up beyond the garden, at the sky. The ceiling.

Our two most recent issues — on the theme of ‘Time’ and ‘Outsider’ — have just sold out, leaving only two remaining issues of Popshot in print.

Thanks to an unexpected rise in demand, our two most recent issues have now joined a number of other Popshot back issues in the out-of-print club, leaving just Issue 3 and Issue 5 remaining in physical form. Our ‘Outsider’ issue can be found in independent bookshops all over the world until October but if you wish to track down a copy of the ‘Time’ issue, your best bet is to download our digital edition (which contains every issue we’ve published to date) or start scouring eBay or Amazon.

A poem from Aki Schilz, articulating the wistful desire to unspool time and extract a tender passage from life’s story. First published in our ‘Time’ issue.

I would unwind you from my body, until

our separated bodies lay innocently side by side
on the bed in the room with the crooked curtain rail

that caused the sun to fall in broken pieces on the floor.

I would uncurl your fingers from each strand of my hair,
divorce your lips from mine to let the air between them

become words to speak away the silence that led to
that first kiss. And, unkissed, I would walk backwards

away from your house, down the hill towards the harbour
past the ships and birds and moorings. I would walk

backwards to the train station to take my seat and forget,
halfway home, where I was going because I’d never been there,

in the room with the broken sunlight and the crooked curtain rail,
the photographs and our hands, that never touched above our heads.

Unkissed, I would lie at home, not thinking about you,
not falling in love with you, not falling in love with you,

so I would not have to wish, years later, that I could undo you.

Our thirteenth issue — re-released in a slimmer, supplement-style format of just 200 limited edition copies — which brings the madmen, the oddballs and the observers into the spotlight to delve into what happens on the fringes of ‘normality’. From a woodland story of a lost boy that the Brothers Grimm would be proud of, to a rallying call for us to listen to the lunatics, to an off-the-grid society at risk of disappearing, to a poem quite simply called ‘The Pervert’ — the Outsider issue is the veritable feast of oddity that it should be.

Issue 13 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.

Ethan Chapman’s short story explores a family’s attempt to come to terms with abduction and the construction of a life in its wake. Illustrated by Joe Wilson.

I was sitting in the garden with my sister when a van took her away. I looked up and she was there. I looked down, distracted by something, something important. When I looked up again, the scenery had changed. There was a shadow stretching across the grass and I watched as a van door opened, the interior darker than shadow. I looked around for my sister and somehow she was by the van, a man’s arm pulling her inside. I saw my sister’s face look out at me, firstly with curiosity and then, when the door started to close, with terror. I watched all this – the van going away, exhaust fumes circling around the road, emptiness – and did nothing. It didn’t occur to me to do anything. It all happened so fast that my thoughts felt slow and sluggish by comparison. So I sat there and waited for someone to tell me what to do.

When my mum got home she ruffled my hair as she walked past and went inside. After a while she came out, the smell of chicken and vegetables coming out behind her, and she asked me to come in for tea. Then she asked where my sister was, so I told her. I watched her face scrunch up in terror like my sister’s had earlier. She grabbed me and shook me and things started to spin. She asked me why I hadn’t done something, why did I just sit there, was I stupid, and I didn’t know the answer to any of her questions. She started screaming at me and I didn’t know what to do.

Things happened fast after that, despite things not really moving at all. There were police cars in the garden and on the road, police officers in the house, police officers eating cake, police officers eating my cake. There were family members sitting in the living room consoling my mum, casting sad but blameful looks towards me on occasion, drinking tea, also eating my cake. They didn’t ask, however. There were reporters and television crews asking all sorts of questions, asking my mum things about my sister which she answered. Most of the answers were true, some she made up to add drama, I guess. Someone had given me a list of things to say beforehand about my sister and it felt odd because I knew about my sister. I knew her. I loved her. I didn’t need to rehearse how much I loved her. But I memorised the lines and they came out cold and distant, which strangely made everyone feel sorry for me even more. The person who wrote them didn’t even know my sister.

This circus went on for a couple weeks. It felt like I couldn’t go to the toilet without a reporter being at the door when I left the bathroom asking me how it went, was it a full bowel movement, anything else I’d like to add? I couldn’t walk around with only my pants on for fear of elderly relatives catching me and screaming in that theatrical way. So I stayed up in my room and remembered how close my sister and I were. I remembered the things we did together: playing out in the garden; walking to the end of the road where the woods appeared to have swallowed it and walking through them, hearing birds whistle, trees sway in the breeze, sunlight bounce as they swayed; walking into town and me not having enough money for sweets, for magazines, for comics, and her giving me her own money to spend. I would always say thank you and take it, never say don’t worry and not. As I sat in my own room, alone, it hit me what happened and I cried and clutched at my bedcovers. I wriggled until I’d wrapped them around me in a cocoon and I stayed like that for weeks.

When I left my room a few weeks later the circus had died down. The flood had decreased to a trickle. Twenty police officers had turned into three or four and they weren’t eating my cake or talking to my mum so much anymore. The relatives decreased as well, most of them going back to whatever branch of the family tree they’d descended from. Reporters still came round but they didn’t bring cameras with them, just notepads, the news going from national to local. A few weeks later even that stopped, until the two of us were left alone with each other which was worse than the frenzy that preceded it. My mum couldn’t look at me and when she did, I could imagine those thoughts dancing through her mind, blaming me for my inaction. The two of us danced around each other, moving to different beats. I wanted to scream at her – what could I have done? I was only a boy! I just didn’t think! I wasn’t expecting what happened, I wasn’t prepared. She made me meals but she wouldn’t sit with me like she had when it was the three of us and, as far as I knew, she didn’t eat anymore. After a while I noticed the colour had dissolved from her face, as if she’d left it in another room somewhere and forgotten to take it with her. She was thinner and if eyes are the windows to the soul then you’d have to put your hands up to the pane to peer through hers. The light had disappeared from them, she was a dark and empty room. She was disappearing before my very eyes, over what felt like days but was actually months. School became important only if I remembered to go. People came round and asked my mum why I wasn’t going to school, and she’d sit and nod and pretend to take it all in, all the while staring out of the window into the garden, as if she expected my sister to be there.

And two years later, that was exactly what happened.

I was sitting out in the garden, reading. Mum was inside somewhere, lost. It had been my sister’s birthday a few weeks before and this one had been easier than the last one, the first birthday after her disappearance. I wondered if the people who had taken her had let her celebrate it. I wondered if they had at least extended her that courtesy. Sitting there I imagined the two of us, brother and sister, both forgotten in our own little corners of the world, discarded and alone; we’d been cared about for a little while but had become boring. Now my mum and I were left to carry on with our lives and pick up the pieces, but you can’t really; they’re so minute, the size of atoms, and they’re scattered as far as the eye can see and beyond.

And I looked up and there she was.

My sister.

It was her, I knew it. She had grown but I remembered her face. She had my mum’s face, only younger, but it looked like whatever my sister had gone through had made it catch up; she looked much older than she was.

I put the book down and stood up. We stared at each other, frozen, then I slowly walked over to her. She blinked at me, as if recognising me from somewhere but trying to pinpoint from when, from where. She had new clothes on and, for all intents and purposes, she was my sister; but there was something missing. I could tell that straight away. She reached for my hand like she was walking a tightrope and then fell into my arms. I held her up and we stayed there for a long time. I grasped her tight. We whispered to each other, tried to fill in the gaps of the last two years, clinging on to each other for dear life, just in case this meeting was temporary and she’d drift away. We peeled away from each other and I looked into her eyes. There were tears in them and she managed a smile. I put my arm around her and we walked into the house.

Mum was lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. It took a minute of us being in her eyeline before she made sense of what her eyes were telling her. She must’ve thought it was a mirage, more punishment from her thoughts, perhaps she was dreaming. But she wasn’t. This is real, I said. She fell into my sister’s arms and we all collapsed into each other on the floor. We stayed that way for not long enough.

The circus came back to town but the story had changed. It was one of relief, joy. I wasn’t handed anything to say and it all came naturally to me. The three of us sat together on the sofa while a reporter asked us questions. Cameras and lights honed in on us. We saw ourselves on the TV afterwards and we joked about how we looked. The police were questioned and they said how it was a miracle, a modern day miracle. They didn’t say how far they’d got with their own investigation. Eventually, much like before, the circus left town again. Neighbours came round and wished us all well – and we were well. We were complete again.

Things weren’t perfect, however. My sister didn’t just come back and reintegrate herself into her, and our, life seamlessly. There were hospital visits, visits to therapists, and my mum took to the habit of trying to pry information from my sister, but instead of using tweezers, decided on using sledgehammers. She’d become impatient, wanting to know the ins and the outs. I asked her to stop but my mum would turn on me, saying this was my fault, and it would descend into farce.

After a few months my sister was still distant. I don’t know what we expected. It was as if she weren’t there at all, as if she’d never returned, as if she’d left herself out in the garden that day and I was the one to blame. They’d borrowed her body but stolen her soul. She had come back broken, hollow and empty.

Mum couldn’t stop trying to tunnel her way into my sister’s mind. Even after months she couldn’t help herself. They’d have an argument as if it were my sister’s right to divulge that information, and I’d get involved and ask my mum to stop, and she’d blame me for letting it happen. Repeat. Over and over again.

For her part, my mum tried to bring us all together and act like the family we had once been. It was good of her to try, I guess it was the right thing to do, but it couldn’t happen. Not then. We were back together but we weren’t the unit that we had been before; we were barely holding on by our fingertips most of the time.

But as time went by, the closeness that my sister and I had before began to take shape once again. We resumed our trips into town, walking in the woods and, little by little, her personality started to reattach itself to her body, stitch by stitch, seam by seam. She never told us what happened to her and I didn’t pry. They were her secrets and it wasn’t up to me to go hunting. She was entitled to them and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know anyway; I was scared of what those secrets might be.

But sometimes late at night, when my sister and mum had gone to bed, I’d sit out in the garden at night and remember that van, and think of how things could have been different, what I could have done, perhaps should’ve done. I’d stare out at that road, think of that day.

One night I was out there and found my sister had crept up behind me. She didn’t say anything, just sat down beside me and rested her head on my shoulder. We both stared out into the shadowy street, everyone else fast asleep. I knew my sister had come back altered, a surgery of the personality, but it wasn’t just her; something had left me when she was taken as well. The pair of us were missing parts and, staring out into the shadows with her head on my shoulder, I liked to think those parts of us were out there somewhere, sitting in another garden much like this, playing and laughing, and should a van come and a door open revealing an interior darker than shadow, we’d run inside and hide in my bed, the two of us cocooned under the covers, and wait for that van to leave us behind.

Taken from our ‘Time’ issue, read Shirley Wright’s poem, Methuselah, inspired by the 5,000 year old pine tree of the same name. Illustrated by Glenn Harvey.

You show your age these days,
there’s no more hiding it. Winter winds
must give you jip, those grey arthritic
limbs wearied on the wheel of years.

Green grown, your canopy has counted
twenty times the transit of Venus,
waved endlessly at Halley passing by,
nodded as the pyramids went up

and bombs rained down. Back in your
Neolithic nursery, with Stone Age yahoos
bashing heads against your toddler trunk,
did you dream of mobile phones or botox,

the space race, that the white face smiling
from the conquered moon would be ours?
I’d like to lie beneath your shade and talk
to you, listen to you. Wait it out with you.

Our website has been given an extensive overhaul, making it mobile/tablet friendly, and now able to house content from various issues of the magazine.

After weeks and weeks of bashing around bits of code and agonising over the spacing between headings and subheadings, we are proud to now unveil our brand spanking new website. In the two years since we last gave it a refresh, the world of web design has progressed at a rate of knots, meaning our previously up to date website was starting to look rather tired.

As well as an updated look and feel that should (hopefully) work across all devices, our new online home also allows us to start publishing more online content. With nine of our thirteen issues now out of print — and The Time Issue set to join them very soon — there’s a vast array of Popshot-published short fiction and poetry that is subsequently harder to track down. As a result, we’ll be beginning to add it to the new site from now on. If you want to be kept up to date, sign up to our newsletter at the bottom of this page or follow us on Facebook. In the meantime, enjoy taking a look around and if you notice any issues with the site, please do let us know by dropping an email to hello@popshotpopshot.com.

Short fiction and poetry submissions for our ‘Curious’ issue close in twenty days’ time. Send in your literary triumphs before July 20th.

With the arrival of July, we are less than three weeks away from literary submissions deadline day for our 14th issue — exploring the theme of ‘Curious’. As ever, we’re keen to make this the best issue we’ve made yet, so if you have a piece of writing already penned, or half a piece forming in your head, please make sure to send it in before July 20th at the very latest.

Since this issue is all about the curious, we’re interested in reading work that manages to tread the line between the strange, peculiar, offbeat and unexpected, whilst not going so far that it’s difficult for our readers to relate to.

If you’ve already submitted your poetry or short fiction, fear not, your writing is already under consideration. For those of you who haven’t, make sure that you acquaint yourself with the submissions guidelines at our submit page.

Working with the fledgling digital bookstore, 0s&1s, we’ve now made the last four issues of Popshot available in PDF form.

The notion of selling magazines and books in a digital format is one that’s been intriguing us ever since it became more widely accepted — largely thanks to the iPad, the iPhone and the Kindle. Although Popshot still shifts far more printed magazines than digital ones, our digital edition has opened doors to readers in parts of the world that we might struggle to reach in physical terms. However, up until now, this has exclusively meant readers with tablets or smartphones.

Now, thanks to the fledgling digital bookstore, 0s&1s, we’ve made Popshot available in PDF format, which means you don’t have to own a smartphone or tablet in order to read our last few issues on a screen. That’s inverted progress…

Head to the dedicated Popshot page at the 0s&1s website to find out more.

Our thirteenth issue, which brings the madmen, the oddballs and the observers into the spotlight to delve into what happens on the fringes of ‘normality’. From a woodland story of a lost boy that the Brothers Grimm would be proud of, to a rallying call for us to listen to the lunatics, to an off-the-grid society at risk of disappearing, to a poem quite simply called ‘The Pervert’ — the Outsider issue is the veritable feast of oddity that it should be.

Words by Karl Mercer, Ellen Davies, Rafael S.W, Lucy Brown, Jonathan Greenhause, Ty Landers, Ben Banyard, AE Ballakisten, Alex Eastlake, Alexander Blustin, Carol Farrelly, Carmina Masoliver, Joshua Preston, Janet Lees, Adena Graham, Jon Lemay, Barry Charman, Marianne MacRae, Laura Ritland, Darcy Jimenez, Emma Simon, Alex Rezdan, Avril Staple and Mantz Yorke.

Illustrations by Matt Harrison Clough, Señor Salme, Tom Haugomat, Sébastien Thibault, Masoud Keshmiri, Kevin Davis, Analisa Aza, Pedro Semeano, Jörn Kaspuhl, Paul Garland, Isabel Seliger, Jason A. Mowry, Bradley Jay, Karolis Strautniekas, Max Temescu, Jordan Hourie and Marie Emmermann.

Issue 13 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.

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

Despite its questionable reputation for killing cats, curiosity is one of the finest traits of humankind. It was the thing that sent man to the moon, Christopher Columbus to the New World and Alice down the rabbit hole. Curiosity breeds exploration, invention and, on a fairly regular basis, some form of destruction. It is the tentative footstep before the leap into the unknown, and as a result, could be argued to be one of the most intriguing words in the English language.

With that in mind, we’ve decided to name it as the theme for our forthcoming fourteenth issue of Popshot, The Curious Issue, which as of today, is now open for literary submissions.

If you would like the opportunity to have your short fiction or poetry published and illustrated in the next issue of the magazine, find out the full submissions guidelines at our submit page — and make sure that you send your work in long before the deadline of July 20th.

In advance of literary submissions opening in one week’s time, we’re offering half price copies of Popshot to potential contributors.

We’ve mentioned before the remarkable correlation between those people that have read Popshot and those people whose poetry and short fiction ends up being published in its pages. In our most recent Outsider-themed issue, three quarters of the writers that got in were either subscribers or had bought a copy of Popshot before. As a result, the more people that read it, the more fitting the submissions that we receive for each issue become. And as a result of that, the quality of the writing that we publish goes up.

So, with submissions for our fourteenth issue set to open in just one week’s time, we’re keen to get the magazine into the hands of as many potential contributors as we can by making all of our available issues half price until June 1st. Take advantage of the offer by heading to our single issues page now.

The Roundhouse’s festival of spoken word, storytelling and live performance has now kicked off and will continue for the next two weeks.

Kicking into life a couple of days ago, The Last Word is a festival of spoken word, storytelling and live performance that, for the next couple of weeks, will be taking over the much-venerated performing arts venue, The Roundhouse. Some of the UK’s finest literary and lyrical performers will be taking to the stage, including Luke Wright, John Hegley, Talia Randall, Inua Ellams, Mark Grist and Deanna Rodger to name just a few. To find out the full line-up and to book your tickets to one or more of the many events, head here.

Bursting at the seams with a selection of short stories and poems that bring focus to those who live on the fringes of normality, Issue 13 is out today.

We’re very pleased to announce that our thirteenth issue, which celebrates the madmen, the oddballs, the observers and the outsiders, is officially out today. Bursting at the seams with a selection of short stories and poems that bring focus to those who live on the fringes of normality, the Outsider issue is the veritable feast of oddity that it should be.

If you would like to get your hands on a copy, you can take a flick through a few of the pages here, before ordering the real thing at our single issues page, or subscribing from just £10. All pre-orders and subscriber’s copies were posted out this morning and will be arriving on doormats around the globe in the coming weeks.

Following the unveiling of the cover of Issue 13 of Popshot, you can now view, in digital form, a selection of spreads from The Outsider Issue.

Last week, we unveiled the cover of the latest issue of Popshot to herald the imminent arrival of our thirteenth edition. In advance of its launch in a week’s time, we’re now releasing a selection of spreads from the issue that can be viewed immediately, in digital form, by heading to this very page.

Take a flick through, and to read every poem and short story from our ‘Outsider’ issue, pre-order a copy from our single issues page.

We’re delighted to release the cover artwork for our forthcoming thirteenth issue, composed by illustration’s next big thing, Matt Harrison Clough.

With our thirteenth issue of Popshot, addressing the theme of ‘Outsider’, being sent to print this morning, we’re very excited to now unveil the cover artwork for it. Composed by illustration’s next big thing, Matt Harrison Clough, it provides the perfect analogy for what this issue is all about. We’ll be releasing a few spreads from the new issue within the next week, with an expected launch date of April 1st.

To get hold of your copy long before it hits the bookshops, you can pre-order Issue 13 through our single issues page or subscribe to Popshot from just £10 a year.

As part of its #travelbetterlondon campaign, Transport For London has opened up a poetry competition looking for poems to grace its future posters.

If you travel on the London Underground relatively often, you’ll already be well aware of the longstanding relationship between poetry and TFL. You’ll also probably be familiar with the format of their illustrated poetry posters, which have been going strong since 2013 with the help of French illustrator, Mcbess, and look a bit like the one above.

Now, as part of its #travelbetterlondon campaign, TFL is looking for poems that could grace future posters via its poetry competition. The purpose of the competition is to ask people to submit their own poems about one inconsiderate travel habit they have witnessed on public transport, with the winner’s work made up into a poster featuring the verse accompanied by their likeness in the accompanying artwork. To find out more about how to enter, head to the dedicated competition page at the #travelbetterlondon website, and make sure you send in your ditty before March 1st.

Following the recent closure of literary submissions, we have now chosen the final 24 pieces of writing that will feature in our forthcoming issue of Popshot.

Following the closure of literary submissions exactly a week ago, and an extensive seven days of shortlisting since then, we have now chosen the final 24 pieces of writing that will feature in the forthcoming issue of Popshot, on the theme of ‘Outsider’. A big thank you to everyone who took the time and effort to send their compositions in. We receive 2000-2500 submissions per issue, so despite only being able to publish 1% of the work that’s sent in, we truly appreciate the thought and endeavour that goes into every submission.

The new issue will launch on April 1st with submissions for our next issue opening up in June, so keep your eyes out for that. In the meantime, if you would like to get a better idea of the work that we publish, you can subscribe from just £10 a year or read every issue we’ve made for just £5.50 courtesy of the digital edition of Popshot.

Our twelfth issue, which flings us into the past, present and future – both real and imagined – to explore our perception and relationship with time. From tales of the future where clocks are obsolete, to spending time with 5,000 year old trees, to the fear of losing precious memories, to time travel caused by sherbet and the story of a man who cannot die; the Time issue is a treasure chest of short stories and poems that take us anywhere apart from here.

Issue 12 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.

A year ago we launched the digital edition of Popshot. Now, with the help of Exact Editions, we’re giving it away to our print subscribers for free.

As some of you may remember, we launched the digital edition of Popshot a little over a year ago, meaning that from Portsmouth to Prague to Panama City, anyone in the world could be reading Popshot on their tablet, phone, or online, within seconds. Since then, it’s become a resounding success and currently accounts for a quarter of our total subscribers.

Now, with the help of our friends over at Exact Editions, we’re making the digital edition available to all of our print subscribers for free. With a number of subscribers asking how they could read some of the sold out back issues of Popshot, we felt it was important to make all of those issues, and all future ones, available in digital form to our most loyal supporters.

Subsequently, anyone who now subscribes to Popshot from just £10 will not only get three print issues delivered direct to their door, they’ll also receive digital access to every issue we’ve ever published. Become a subscriber by heading to our subscribe page or if you already are, drop an email to subscriptions@popshotpopshot.com to find out how to activate your digital subscription.

Our twelfth glorious issue, packed full of illustrated short stories and poems that explore the theme of ‘Time’, is out now.

Coinciding rather nicely with National Poetry Day (which is today in case you’ve forgotten) we’re delighted to announce that the new issue of Popshot is out now. 25 pieces of writing grace this beautifully broad edition, packed full of illustrated short stories and poems that explore our perception of, and relationship with, time, and take us to some weird and wonderful places in the process. If you want to have a squinted look through a few pages from the new issue, you can do so here.

All pre-orders and subscriber’s copies have been posted out and will be arriving on doormats around the globe in the coming days. If you want to get your hands on your own crayon-scented copy, subscribe from just £10 and receive Time as the initial issue of your subscription, or order a single issue from £6 + p&p. As we may have just demonstrated, it seems you can put a price on loyalty. Those who are more digitally minded can read the new issue on their smartphone or tablet by downloading the Popshot app.

To herald the impending arrival of Issue 12 in two weeks’ time, we can now reveal its cover artwork, illustrated by the masterful Sam Pash.

After what feels like (and probably is) a small age, the collected writings and illustrations of our twelfth issue – The Time Issue – have gone to print and are now being stamped into some of the finest offset paper, somewhere in Wales. To mark the moment, it gives us great pleasure to reveal the cover, illustrated by Popshot favourite, Sam Pash. If ever there was a cover of Popshot that instantly captured the mood of an entire issue, this would be it; calm, contemplative, and slightly nostalgic – our forthcoming issue in a nutshell.

To celebrate, the new issue is now available to pre-order for a fiver, with pre-orders open until October 1st when the price will go back up to the usual cover price of £6. Or you can subscribe for a tenner, and get this issue and the next couple after that delivered to your doormat without even having to think about it. Thanks to our partnership with magazine kings, Newsstand, we’ve also been able to drop the price of overseas postage – a saving that has now been passed on to our readers. Further details of the new issue to follow in the lead up to launch day.

Stand-up comedian cum novelist, Mark Watson, has a new book out entitled Hotel Alpha which manages to continue after it’s finished.

Most people who know of Mark Watson will probably be more familiar with his work as a stand-up comedian than as a novelist. However, with five novels now to his name, the balance may be shifting. His latest book, entitled Hotel Alpha, is the story of London’s most extraordinary hotel, run by a man called Howard, which has been built on a series of secrets and dreams. Whilst the book has an excellent plot, the real twist comes when you finish it.

Alongside the novel, Mark has written 100 accompanying stories that can be found online – some the length of a tweet, others a paragraph, others a thousand words or more. The stories can be read in any order and shine an alternative light on the plot, bringing to life additional scenes, exposing secrets and hidden links, and giving voice to some of the thousands of minor characters. It’s a fantastic concept which plays with the idea of the traditional novel, pulling into question whether a book actually finishes when the last page has been read, and blending together the strengths of both print and online.

If you want to get a taste of what Mark calls an ‘encyclopaedic novel’, pick up a copy over at Picador’s website then head to the Hotel Alpha Stories website as soon as you’ve finished it to read on.

Our eleventh issue, which takes us on the journey of a series of journeys. From escaping the rat race to explore the planet, to mapping out our lives in jars of memories, to watching a baby’s lungs billow into action for the first time; the Journeys issue features 24 short stories and poems that allow us to travel into the curious minds that stipple today’s literary and illustration scene.

Issue 11 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.

Our landmark tenth issue, which leads us into the deepest and darkest depths of the wilderness, exploring the wildness of nature, the wildness of human nature, and everything beyond and inbetween. From the fraught retirement years of a lion tamer, to the blind man who struggled to deal with the miracle of sight, to Dominican ghost stories, dystopian ecopoems, and the tale of the man who claimed he was raised by wolves – the Wild issue is a riotous display of the quality of contemporary writing and illustration.

Issue 10 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.

Our ninth issue, which pays homage to one of the finest facets of humankind – the imagination. From tall tales of market stalls selling ideas, to imagined rooms and lives that gradually become real, to worlds where we find our lost loved ones again; Issue 9 is chock-full of short stories, flash fiction, and poetry that addresses the ethereal, the surreal and the fantastical creations of our minds.

Issue 9 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.

Our eighth issue, freshly relaunched and redesigned to suit its new literary status as The Illustrated Magazine of New Writing. This issue features 27 short stories, poems, and flash fiction pieces, all elegantly compacted into 64 pages of illustrated heroism and centred around the rather befitting theme of ‘Birth’. Expect to find literary musings on the birth of nations, transvestites, eternal youth, a life spent in freefall, and how society might operate if we all had transparent foreheads.

Issue 8 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.

Our seventh issue, based on the wonderfully tangled and extensive theme of Power. Expect to find poems about selling the sky, baby dictators, the infamous jumpers of 9/11, and women’s connection to the moon. Featuring work from some of the finest contemporary poets and illustrators working today, plus interviews with Ross Sutherland, Clinic, and the co-director of the film We Are Poets, Alex Ramseyer-Bache.

Issue 7 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.

Our sixth issue which tackles one of the dangerous themes in poetry. Expect to find poems about the weight of meaning behind the term ‘wife’, love as an elderly lesbian, motherhood and the hopeless powerlessness of love after death. Featuring work from some of the finest contemporary poets and illustrators working today, plus interviews with Joe Dunthorne, Salena Godden and Tom Chivers.

Issue 6 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.

Our fifth issue which takes a hide and seek peek into the rose tinted, summer filled hours of our childhood. Expect to find poems about worm eating school children, horror filled sleepovers, school toilet hierarchy and old wives tales. Featuring work from some of the finest contemporary poets and illustrators working today, plus interviews with Polarbear, Peepshow Collective, Murray Lachlan Young and Mr Bingo.

Issue 5 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.

Our fourth issue which takes an inquisitively analytical step back from the whirlwind world that surrounds us and tries to work out exactly what this modern living nonsense is all about. Expect to find poems on TV culture, living for the weekend, the London underground and how a GPS can steal your husband. With poems, illustrations and interviews from some of the finest contemporary poets and illustrators breathing today.

Issue 4 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.

Our third issue which takes an explorative gulp into the world of liberation and challenges what liberation and freedom really means in the 21st Century. Expect to find poems about taking your clothes off, ejaculation, beating up the Dalai Lama and your grandmother growing her brain. With poems and illustrations from over 50 of the finest contemporary poets and illustrators breathing today.

Issue 3 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.

Our second issue which looks at the bizarre compulsion as a human race to create splits, divides, factions and in particular – the ‘Us & Them’ mentality. Expect to find poems about the BNP, the royal family, dreaded job interviews and humans being eventually replaced by robots. With poems and illustrations from over 50 of the finest contemporary poets and illustrators breathing today.

Issue 2 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.

Our naively beautiful first issue which dives head first into the celebration of the everyday and the recognition of those smaller things that can tend to pass us by. Expect to find poems that commemorate the tea mug, identify with the milkman, marvel at a woman called Barbara and sympathise with the feelings of a washing up brush. With poems and illustrations from over 50 of the finest contemporary poets and illustrators breathing today.

Issue 1 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.