Issue 27

Popshot Magazine

The illustrated magazine of new writing

Popshot Magazine2 min read
Editorial
Mystery is to storytelling what butter is to bread. You can enjoy one without the other, but they're much better in combination. Book shops are stuffed full of the whodunnits and crime novels we readers seem to have an insatiable appetite for; settin
Popshot Magazine2 min read
Eating Watermelon
If you eat a watermelon, a baby will grow in your belly. That’s what mama always told me. I avoided eating watermelon until that one really hot day at the summer carnival. Bobby Jenkins and I went skinny dipping in Sander’s Pond and afterwards we sat
Popshot Magazine3 min read
When A Body Loses Its Bones
At night, I find a femur under my pillow. In the morning, there’s a finger bone in my bathroom sink. On the chair in the corner, a breast plate watches me watch television. I close my eyes and when I open them, clavicles are hanging from the ceiling.
Popshot Magazine11 min read
A Double Life
It is hardly warm enough to warrant an evening in the garden but something about the house is pushing her out. After all these years, all the memories she made here in her teens and early twenties before Tom had so much as set foot inside its four wa
Popshot Magazine5 min read
Elephant In The City Of Blind
Elephant settled on the couch and took a sip of water. The doctor, already seated, focussed unseeing eyes in his direction and waited for him to start. Elephant had concluded that the doctor didn’t do pleasantries; not out of impoliteness, but out of
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Eggshell
To me, she was always all wrinkles,As frail as eggshell and embellished with lace.My lasting image is of her beaming faceWhen she opened the doorBut the more I age the less I can ignoreAnother scene projecting in my headOf her sitting still in a hosp
Popshot Magazine10 min read
Queen Of Salt
Some call me Altamaha-ha, after the brackish river I haunt. Others call me Mama Tunde, imagining me as some sea-dwelling surrogate mother to call to when their earthly mama falls short. Some call me the Queen of Salt, for they have heard that I’m onl
Popshot Magazine8 min read
The Mothership
Al couldn’t spot one free seat in the whole pub garden. It was Friday afternoon on a lovely July day. With the bank holiday weekend, it felt like Christmas but with better weather and less stress. “So, it’s going to be like Meet the Parents?” Kevin a
Popshot Magazine2 min read
What Nobody Knows About Josephine
What nobody knows about Josephine is that she loved music from cartoons. She thought her friends would think she was childish, so she only listened to them when she drove alone. Once, when her sister found a Disney Princess CD in her glove compartmen
Popshot Magazine6 min read
Intarsia
He woke knowing what would make the eye of the god. The bedroom had a muffled and still quality signalling that it had snowed overnight. He inched out from under the quilts on the bed – the quilts, his wife’s life’s work, twenty-three of them, heavy
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Mazey Ball
She watched him gather tufts from fencesalong the field, as he’d watched her finger woolin the village yarn shop, her gaze low and dark, smallbrown hands lingering over skeins still freshfrom early shearing. That night he switched off allthe lights a
Popshot Magazine10 min read
The Symmetry Of Ruby Margot
You can’t unfeel the kickback from the gun that kills your enemy. Its dark yellow weight rushes over you, where it stays, lingering at your back, living in the echo of your shadow. Ruby’s shadow was thick and hard against the docking bay at Porto Erc
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Sympathetic Magic
All her grandmother’s things still lived in the house,the girl didn’t have much of her own. She slepton the lumpen horse-hair mattress in the mouldof her grandmother’s body, in the narrow oak bedin which she imagined her father had been born. Each ni
Popshot Magazine3 min read
Deet
Deet was the best of all and Andy loved Deet too much. Mum rolled her eyes when she was heard Andy tell her about Deet. Why wasn’t he playing with the children up the lane instead? Deet played all the best games and Deet told the best stories. Andy w
Popshot Magazine7 min read
Gender Repeal
The news breaks over lunch. They’re eating last night’s pizza.She peels all the jalapeño off her slice before taking a bite. He stares at his own slice cautiously. “Thought you liked spicy?” “I do. But I don’t think the baby does.” He bites the tip o
Popshot Magazine3 min read
Apocrypha
At the rear of our new house we waited for moonrise. While the sun neared the horizon, we sketched the elderly neighbour. He was edging himself up a wooden extension ladder, a portable oxygen tank strapped to his back. He was in denim overalls, worn
Popshot Magazine3 min read
Endnotes
8 – Carmen Barefield is a poet and writer living in Salem, Massachusetts. Her work can be found in Poetry Quarterly, Black Heart magazine and littledeathlit. 10 – Amy Barnes is a widely published US-based writer. She was longlisted for Bath Flash Fic

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