Popshot Issue 37 - The Haunting Issue Sample

S h o r t S t o r i e s / F l a s h F i c t i o n / Po e t r y

POPS HOT QUARTERLY

THE ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE OF NEW WRITING

J M Miro short story inside

THE HAUNTING ISSUE Issue 37 – Autumn 2022

“Her eyes are like fingers. They can touch. They can press and pinch.”

– Sa ra h Wa te r s, T h e L i ttle Stran ge r

HAUN T I N G | Illu stration by James Mer r itt

HALLOWEEN Poem by Al Crow Illu stration by Andrew Haener

and the kids are dressed up like it’s the end of days They’re busy plundering lollipops from the sweet bowl left out by a neighbour we hardly know and I’m wondering what the world will be like in their haunted future I’m not afraid of a bang or a whimper to end it all Not afraid of witnessing the fall inevitable as it has become I’m just so very scared of what those few extra degrees will mean for this pack of excited school children who are so full of sorcery with their witches gowns, broomsticks and wands because there just might not be enough magic in these desperate days to come strong enough to undo our past

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PUSH Shor t stor y by B enjamin Her r iton Illu stration by Guille Manchado

He’d been having a rough few weeks. The band he was in weren’t going to make it, it looked like. He’d realised the songs he was writing with his bandmate – the keyboardist – were bad.

Terrible, really. Really terrible. If they were narrative, they were forced; if they were abstract, they were pretentious. He’d tried his hand at shifting the rhyme a word earlier (instead of It’s you I miss, You I long to kiss he had I miss you, Long to kiss you). It hadn’t worked or not worked. He had the same words and a headache.

The headache persisted. Morning came and the fogginess hung around. That sunrise, that new day (as referenced in many life-affirming songs), was not to be his.

The beach, though, acted as surrogate. He listened to a songwriting podcast as he stared out across the waves. He balanced on the rocks as it played, bumps and points pressing into the soles of his shoes. A musician – a renowned, profound lyricist – discussed the relationship between inspiration and craft in terms that made sense to him. The interior landscape of the songwriter’s mind was uncannily familiar. The exterior context (of the songwriter’s described youth) was not dissimilar either. Something clicked. His awareness laid itself out over the water. He thought he might have the beginnings of a song. It would be Leonard Cohen-esque, with the spirit of George Harrison and the verve of Avril Lavigne. Its shape came to him like the memory of a flavour.

The podcast ended. He had to make it home and get his hands on a notepad and a pen and a guitar before the ungraspably beautiful became the ungraspable. He needed a head empty of distractions but nurturing of conception. He needed his song to stay put.

He chose to walk back through the gardens. They ran parallel to the shore, sloping up from sea level to above the roofs of beachside buildings. In the gardens there were flower beds and bushes and the backs of retirement homes and a bandstand. It was only the secondfastest route, but it had greenery - albeit reddening - and seemed appropriately fertile.

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His headphones pressed against his skull through his beanie. They were noise cancelling, and sometimes he felt as though an alien were sucking out his brains through his ears. He considered putting on an album to carry him home but decided against it: he didn’t want to get back and rehash a Lennon-McCartney track.

He clacked his teeth (arrhythmically, for fear of inventing a beat and losing it before it could be documented). Bum blum bababa went his mouth. He held a long note devoid of melodic content, which eased into silence. The back burners kept burning. Centre stage was hushed. Clarity, he thought, was a knife edge.

He found himself at the top of the steps: two sets that ran from the esplanade to a rooftop café and from the rooftop café to the gardens. He hadn’t taken them - they constituted the most direct and hectic route. He looked down at the people drinking hot drinks and chatting.

“Maybe I’ll kill someone,” he said.

Woah, he thought.

When, a few weeks later, he thought about pushing someone, it was far more his thought than the murder thought (which had just popped into his head, he assured himself) had ever been. But push - he could sit with push.

The song had turned out okay. A sincere okay, though, much better than terrible. The keyboardist hadn’t been receptive, but he was confident enough in its quality to consider recording it solo. No one had been murdered. The waning of the murder thought - it was much more a thought, he was convinced, than a desire – had been a relief. On an intellectual, a moral, a logistical level, he was glad he hadn’t killed anyone. Which is not to say that he didn’t keenly feel its lack. Christ, wasn’t this mundane? Where was the adventure he had expected as a child after reading Treasure Island and watching Lilo & Stitch?

A push, of course, is much less than a murder.

“Push,” he’d started saying to himself in quiet moments. “Pushpush-pushush.”

On the sofa, in the shower, at traffic lights. Pushpushpush. He began to think it would make a good name. He pictured a man at a business convention in a futuristic conference centre wearing a sharp suit and a nametag that said Hello, My Name is: Push. In his lyric book, at the top of a blank page, he wrote ‘When Push comes to Shove’.

One evening, after locking the door, he turned to see the letters P U S H floating before him, translucent and drifting, as if he’d been staring at a neon light commemorating his uncommitted crime.

In a crowded station, perhaps. Plenty of jostling. Plenty of CCTV – although good luck pointing any fingers during rush hour. Maybe the blame would fall on the Chief of Crowd Management. The poor train driver, though.

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A crushing might be too much. Perhaps a bloody nose or a grazed arm or internal bleeding would be better.

The coffee shop in town was stuffy and smelt of floor cleaner. A lady was being rude over the phone. Apparently someone was ‘incapable of disactivating the auto-renew on a simple pissing family-plan gym contract’. He had a feeling that auto-renew would still be toggled when it came her turn to order. He was right. He also suspected, owing to a God-I’m-sosorry-can-you-believe-this look she had shot a well-built man in the queue, that she drew the friend/foe line between people in the real world and people in her phone.

He was wrong.

She wanted a large flat white – quickly, if they would. The barista was a teenage girl with dark hair and a spasmodic habit of scrunching her nose. She spoke quietly. The lady scowled.

“What?”

“Would you like our Spooky Dusting?” the barista asked, a little louder.

“Why would I give a shit about a spooky dusting?”

The queue moved at a snail’s pace. He waited and was agitated. Not so much by the delay itself, but vaguely because of this woman and her meanness. He felt a tension melt in his shoulders when she left with her drink.

The queue moved. He ordered and joined the small “He was glad crowd of waiting people. It hadn’t occurred to him that his animosity might induce action until the phone-lady he hadn’t killed burst back into the store at speed, her sports trainers anyone.” squeaking against the sparkling floor. He noticed an untied lace. She reached the counter and slammed her unlidded cup down, dusted foam sloshing over its edge and gathering at its base.

He wasn’t sure exactly why he stepped away from the wall towards her exit route, but he did so with certainty of movement if not certainty of purpose. She was no longer on the phone and could therefore direct her full frustration at The Idiot Who Put This Shit On My Drink. The barista apologised as she prepared a replacement.

Headphones on, playing oblivious for he-didn’t-know-why, he took a further step out to ‘check on his order’. The lady held her phone close to her chest as she typed, making eye contact with no one, tapping aggressively. Her new, undusted drink was ready. She took it and turned to leave.

It was happening. The untied lace was on his side. It was happening.

She yelped as she fell. The blood in the foamy brownish milk looked bizarre enough, even without noticing the unattached incisor. Her nose was in a bad way.

He was the first to her side after her trip - not a single finger a pointed. The barista called an ambulance. An ex-nurse took over as the principal carer. He slipped out.

Trip. T-ri-puh. Triptriptrip.

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DURAN DURAN Poem by David Romanda Illu stration by Daisy May Morgan

We were sixteen, maybe seventeen, walking by the river, and Heather said, My best friend killed himself over there. She gestured to a graveled parking area.

He came in the night, she said, plugged up the muffler with a bunch of socks, rolled up the windows and kept the car running.

The police found a Duran Duran tape in the tape deck. And I was jealous of Heather.

Her life seemed so much larger than mine.

And it was.

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