Popshot Issue 39 - The Heart Issue Sample

EDITORIAL

ISSUE 39 — HEART SPRING 2023

You might be wondering who the person on our cover is. at noble side pro le doesn’t look much like the whiskered King of Hearts who ordinarily graces playing cards. No, this king is the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose epic poem, e Divine Comedy, has been studied and enjoyed since the Middle Ages. At the opening of Inferno, or hell, Dante describes his heart as being like a lake, a reference to the vast and sometimes complex landscape at our physical core. In fact the word “cuore” in Italian means heart but also emotion, or spirit. e idea of a lake of spirit summed up our feelings about the role of a heart, which is functional, but also wildly literal in the way it moves emotion through us.

As always, thank you to everyone who took the time to submit writing to us. Your poems and stories have shown me how powerful and varied our associations are with this particular word, whether you’re describing an organ that beats to keep us alive, the centre of something or a rather kitsch pink shape. e best writing revealed the heart’s mysterious control over us, and the resulting drama when our hearts are in con ict with our rationality.

e romantics among you will enjoy Cupid by Skye Fulcher (page 8); while anyone burned by a relationship or unsure of their standing in the heart of their lover might want to look at e Inner Chamber by Lauren Woods (page 30). We are fortunate to have an extract from our guest author Kevin Jared Hosein’s novel Hungry Ghosts among these pages (page 20). Kevin, who is from Trinidad and Tobago, has published two previous books and won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2018. His latest novel explores what happens when a person at the heart of a small community vanishes. ank you for reading, and we hope you’ll nd something that speaks to your heart here.

Popshot Quarterly is the illustrated magazine of new writing, providing a publishing platform for the best emerging talent. popshotpopshot.com hello@popshotpopshot.com

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ISSN: 2041-4382

Cover illustration by: Chiara Morra chiaramorra.com

Editor: Matilda Battersby Art Editor: Andrea Lynch

Publisher: Simon Temlett

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Published by: Chelsea Magazine Company Ltd chelseamagazines.com

Distributed by: Seymour Distribution

Matilda Battersby — Editor

Printed in the UK by: William Gibbons

Poetry

50 Neil Laurenson

FIRST DATE Illustration by Katie Coward 56

Suzy Aspell HEART AS SNOWSHOE HARE Illustration by Ginger Ngo 62

Emmaline O’Dowd CHINESE JAR Illustration by Milena Muszynska 69 Ciarán Parkes HEARTSEASE Flash Fiction 8

Skye Fulcher CUPID Illustration by Tímea Terenyei 18 Reema Rao-Patel HER TWINN Illustration by Tim Alexander 38 Emma Robertson THE PICKUP ARTIST Illustration by Catherine Byun

HEART | Illustration by Alissa Thaler

“When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.”

– Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

CUPID

Flash fiction by Skye Fulcher Illustration by Tímea Terenyei

So, you take this arrow, anchor it to your bow and you just…shoot! e curly haired man said, releasing it through the air, aimed squarely at a woman on the tour boat. ey watched as a smile broke on her face and her head turned, drawn to the man with a backpack besides her. See? he said. at’s all there is too it, but make sure you’re not seen. ings get messy otherwise, let me tell you. I don’t have the energy to do it all myself every year, but you can practice on the animals if you’re nervous. Plenty of pigeons about.

Fearne stood under the old timber walkway and looked out to the ames. She held the cold arrows between her ngers, admired the swirling Baroque pa ern that crawled up the limb of the bow. It seemed dangerous, this kind of job, especially for a woman, but the pay was good and Mr Valentine seemed decent. She was almost four months behind on the rent, the soles of her good shoes were going and the fridge held nothing but a can of moulding coconut milk and a slither of old cheese. is would do for the time being she decided. e day melted away in a sweet, loving haze. She thought she was making the world a be er place; dousing the streets of London with Love. She was liberal with it too, occasionally ring two if one didn’t do the trick, for some seemed so hardened by life not to be a ected by one. She broke up ghts with her arrows, watched the crowd laugh and disperse. Sometimes her arrows made people drop everything they were doing. Taxi drivers le their passengers stranded, a woman abandoned a half-cooked dinner. Other times it wasn’t so drastic as Fearne came to believe that she didn’t make people love but moved them to love, renewed what was there already. Couples clasped hands tighter and looked at each other, held their gazes just that li le bit longer than usual.

She lit up dingy Underground stations with candlelight, so ening work worn faces. She travelled far across the city, going along every tube line at one point or another in her mission. She came to imagine that the whole city had a pulse: a huge, heavy heart beating, crying out for love. e map of the Tube a network of veins moving her closer to its central organ.

But she made a mistake and was careless as day grew to dusk. It was her last arrow too, aimed at a man travelling alone looking for a hotel. He gasped as it struck him in the chest and his suitcase toppled to the pavement. Warmth ran through his body in waves, rippling and trickling up his spine and down to his toes, until he looked around, turned to see Fearne’s face peeking out behind the phone box.

ECHOCARDIOGRAM

I lie on my right side, wired up to the machine, gel smeared on my chest. I can see the screen as the probe slides. I recognise the heart chambers pulsing in segments like those of a pregnancy scan, but make no sense of the multi-coloured lightning ickering in a thundercloud, nor of a line of skyscrapers and a procession of sailing barges re ected in calm sea, all accompanied by glooping sounds like a radiator lling with air bubbles from a central heating pump.

Six weeks on, a le er from the cardiologist: there’s aortic stenosis and regurgitation, but neither too severe. ough a heart valve is slightly narrowed, my le ventricle is functioning as it should. I’ll be reviewed a year further on: nothing to get too concerned about, yet.

Poem by Mantz Yorke Illustration by Martyna Grᾳdziel

WOO-WOO

Dale types text to overlay the photo: You are about to receive ten thousand dollars! Type yes if you believe! He clicks save, names it, using a naming format he’s adopted to keep track of his thousands of a rmations, then pulls up the next photo, a generic sunrise. He switches screens to his running list of a rmations. Closing his eyes, he calls upon his intuition to make his gaze alight on the right phrase. He looks at the screen. His eyes land on All that you have experienced was only preparation for this moment. Type yes if you believe! He repeats it in his mind three times to give it intent, then switches screens to the meme-making app and types in the text to overlay an image, saves it, names it.

Dale posts the a rmations on Instagram and Twi er. Timing is everything. With half the world’s population engaging in social media an average of two point ve hours per day, the odds of reaching just the right person at just the right time might seem low, but not if you factor in the divine algorithm that organizes everything. e Internet, Dale thinks, is an avatar of Universal Mind, the elephant-headed Ganesh manifesting through microchips.

Short story by Mike Wilson Illustration by Darren Espin

Dale feels guided to do one about love. He checks his running list, but nothing feels right. He turns to the hole in his own heart that yearns for a twin ame to burn beside him and waits for angels to put the words together. He feels it coming and begins typing before he even knows what the words will be. You will meet your twin ame today. Love is coming to you. Type yes if you believe! He nds a stock image of two lovers holding hands, but instead of overlaying these words on that image, he decides to keep this a rmation for himself.

Dale intuits he’s posted enough for now. As if on cue – isn’t everything? – the ring-tone on his phone sounds, a Zen meditation gong struck to signal it’s time to rise from the cushion. But when Dale looks at the caller’s number, he takes a deep breath and mentally crosses himself. “Hi Mum.”

“I’m just calling because you haven’t called me. I wanted to make sure you were still alive.”

“We spoke a few days ago, Mum.”

“How’s work?”

“Fine.”

ere’s not a lot to report if your job is handling packages at an Amazon ful llment centre.

“Are you happy, Dale?”

is is, at best, a rhetorical question, and at worst an indictment. If he says anything other than an unquali ed yes, she’ll drop any pretense of boundaries and expropriate his entire life. “Sure, Mum. Anything new with you?”

“What could be new with me? I’m in constant pain with my arthritis, but I don’t talk about it. I don’t want to burden you. I’m thinking about replacing the couch. It’s been broken for years from where you used to jump on it when I told you not to. Your father’s having problems with gas. It’s a good thing I don’t smoke, or this house would go boom like the Fourth of July ” “New couch sounds like a great idea, Mum. Well, I have to go, so I’ll hang up now.”

“Is it a girl? Do you have a girlfriend? You didn’t introduced us to the last one.”

“No, Mum, not a girlfriend.”

Silence.

“ at’s ne, no need to tell me, I don’t want to pry, so long as it’s not drugs.” It’s not anything. It’s just an excuse Dale made up to end the call.

“No drugs, Mum. Say hi to Dad for me.”

“Love you.”

“Love you, Mum.”

“Call me.”

Dale ends the call. He’s all jangled inside. And he still has more a rmations to prepare for posting. Maybe he’ll call it a day on the a rmations. Maybe he’ll go for a walk in the park. Yes, that’s what Intuition is telling him to do. Eureka! Dale pulls up the screen of his running list of a rmations and types, “Intuition is the only authority. Type yes if you believe!”

*

Megan can’t believe Tony is dumping her via text.

You’re a wonderful person, and it’s been wonderful to be with you, but I think I need time to gure out who I am and I can’t do that and hold up my end of a relationship at the same time..