May 2018

Popshot Magazine

The illustrated magazine of new writing

Popshot Magazine1 min read
Editorial
I sometimes wonder whether the truth is overrated. Does it do us any good to know the world is in a terrible and terrifying state? Wouldn’t we be happier if our crushes told us they loved us desperately, completely, exclusively? Who wants an expert o
Popshot Magazine6 min read
Cultivate
‘And this,’ Neale Michaels said, motioning with a sweeping gesture, ‘is our pride and glory, our green wall.’ A vertical lush-land crept its way up the exterior of the building, flowing and undulating like a pot of boiling soup. Shades of green, from
Popshot Magazine11 min read
Rag Doll
Dad had been found by a neighbour on the first-floor landing, a crimson halo radiating from his head. The paramedics suspected a heart attack or aneurysm, but the post-mortem revealed nothing that might have caused an otherwise healthy seventy-two-ye
Popshot Magazine3 min read
Dear Late 1980s Teen
Dear Late 1980s Teen You don’t know me, but I wrote you a letter, and you wrote back, in the summer of 1989. You were fifteen and you thought I was too. You also thought I was a boy called Justin. But no. I was me, Teresa, and I was eight years old.
Popshot Magazine1 min read
Artists Of A Fading World
The colours left the world. They left like figures in a painting in the long glare of the tropical sun. The sun pours light on a world without light, investing objects with form. How odd that it should also drain objects of colour, like chlorophyll f
Popshot Magazine7 min read
Abstract Impressions
It was a copse viewed by the artist from across a river, that much was clear, at first. The way vermillion bled into jade, just so, with emerald swirling around flecks of white and yellow. Birds in trees. Canopies. A switch of sapphire slicing throug
Popshot Magazine10 min read
Towns Like Ours
After the factory shut its doors, our town ticked by, in the way towns like ours do; tossed aside in favour of something new, something modern, something more suited to the times. Our rural life was a dying kind. The cogs that kept nearby villages go
Popshot Magazine9 min read
Metube
The barista asked Julia if she really was the girl from the video. ‘What video?’ Julia asked. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘the one where the bride goes nuts, cuts her own hair.’ He mimed a handful of hair with imaginary scissors. Julie felt the blood drain
Popshot Magazine8 min read
Resting
Forty years in the theatre. The regulars knew Ursula, the shape of her large spectacles behind the ticket office glass. The theatre owner, Bob, suggested now was a good time for her to retire and had an idea she might just like. He handed her a gloss
Popshot Magazine9 min read
Jude
When my wife handed me the telephone, saying there was a strange woman wanting to speak to me, I experienced one of those inexplicable insights that occur to all of us from time to time, and which have no satisfactory explanation. ‘Is her name Jude?’
Popshot Magazine2 min read
The 1:43 To Victoria
The first time you said it, you told me it was a mistake. You hadn’t meant it. Not that you hadn’t meant it. That you hadn’t meant to say it so soon. It was too soon, so I nodded and told you it was OK and squeezed your hand. You thanked me for not f
Popshot Magazine3 min readEarth Sciences
The Tidal Man
There was life, it seemed, in the estuary; the flats blistered bubbles that rose and burst like gasps, brackish pools guarded poking razor clams and whispering whelks, gulls paddled respectfully around a lumpy porpoise. I shielded my eyes, tapped a s
Popshot Magazine4 min read
Endnotes
6 – Sophie Lay is a creative writing student at the University of Gloucestershire, and has performed her work at the Cheltenham Literature Festival and Cheltenham Poetry Festival. Cultivate was inspired by her suspicion of rejuvenation and gentrifica

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