No. 5 : The Magical Mundane
Editor's Note by Hannah sparks
Featured
“Did you ever imagine that Granny’s old oak table would serve this purpose,” I heard my daughter-in-law whisper to her father as she leaned over to him.
Sunrise at the sacred circle of stones. We have joined hands and now we separate with instructions to find the stone that calls to us. Some one else claims the one I was first attracted to.
I wondered about why our eyes change colors. Climbing up and down the wooden ladder of the ship throughout the night as if between the earth and sky.
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Popcorn is a bimonthly zine. We accept any and all submissions from current and former Sense Writing students. Story length should be 1000 words or less, and inspired through the Sense Writing practice. While every submission will not necessarily be featured in the upcoming edition, we are committed to featuring everyone's work eventually.
Edited by Hannah Sparks
Very little can pass for magic.
The Naga fireballs are a phantasmic mystery. The Northern Lights are a beautiful illusion. A perfectly light and risen soufflé is alchemy. A memory attached to a an object is some kind of conjuring. Much of the universe has yet to be explained, and isn’t that the very definition of magic?
Lolita Brayman describes the life-giving powers of a day’s first coffee in “The Best Part of Waking Up,” while Amy Avgar could not divine the many lives lived around “Granny’s Old Oak Table.” Mystifying details in an eerie scene swirl in Isabelle Phillipe’s “The Death Rehearsal,” and Katie Finlay-Meredith exorcises darkness and depression in “The Vigil,” not by forgetting, but remembering. An apartment dweller finds themselves in the kingdom of a rodent, by way of a consecrated rock in Megan Williams’s “In the Temple of the Rat.”
The “Fountain of Youth” isn’t an age-reversing geyser, but the ocean of wonder that stays with us even in old age. Let these stories be a reminder of the magic in the mundane.