Welcome to October’s first Write On! Showcase. This is also my own first Showcase, so I’d like to introduce myself. I’m Charlotte, and I’m the Prize Manager at The Wilbur & Niso Smith Foundation. We are a literature and literacy charity, championing adventure as a genre. We run the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, and support new writers as well as offering opportunities for children and young people. We believe adventure stories are the stories that inspire and encourage people to dream, which is why this month’s theme of ‘Reality And Perception’ ties in so well with the work we do.

In adventure writing, these themes serve as a powerful driving force, propelling readers on an incomparable journey and adding depth and intrigue to the storytelling. They also tie into the act of writing itself. As they weave words on the page, authors wield the power to shape and reshape the perceptions of their readers, offering glimpses into alternate realities or shedding new light on familiar ones. Through their craft, writers allow readers to explore the boundaries of what is real and what is possible.

With this in mind, we have curated a selection of stories and poems that explore reality and perceptions, and the blurred line in between. The first is a short story from Matthew Di Paoli, the author of Killstanbul and Holliday with Sunbury Press and winner of the Foundation’s 2017 New Voices Award. In his inimitable way, Matthew explores themes of change and uncertainty, dancing in that ambiguous place between what is real and what is perceived. This piece demonstrates the complex interplay between external events and internal perceptions through the prism of memory and nostalgia.

Nobody Panic

“Nobody move. Nobody panic.” That’s the exact thing people say before everyone panics. I was failing at this. “You can move.”

“Daddy, what’s wrong?”

My five-year-old picked her head up from her tablet and looked at me the way airplane passengers look at a dead pilot.

“Nothing. I said you can move.”

“That’s weird. You’re being weird.”

“I’m being normal. You’re being weird.”

She shrugged and went back to her budget CGI Disney show.

The house was cooler than usual, but I didn’t have the energy to turn up the heat. The weather had been so warm lately I hadn’t changed over the boiler. None of this mattered at the moment. The only thing that mattered now was keeping Bunny safe. “Bun, go up to your room and get in bed.”

“I’m in the middle of Princess Pickle Time!”

Normally Princess Pickle Time took precedence over all else. “Bun, do this for me.”

Outside, the webbed ice climbed the sliding doors and wedged small cracks in the kitchen window. The wind made small wolf-like calls.

“No,” she said forcefully.

I picked up her wriggling body. She felt like asparagus sprigs that could fight back.

I carried her, still thrashing, up the stairs. I plopped her floppy limbs on the bed and she curled up in some ancient little girl defence mechanism: stronger than ramparts.

“I wish Mom was here! Mom wouldn’t do this!” She started to cry, which was a weakness of mine. I couldn’t have this.

I sighed. “You know why Mom can’t be here.”

“No.”

“Say it.”

“Because she loves her new boyfriend, Tibor, more than us.”

“Yes, good.” At least my teachings had stuck with her. She’d need that armour plating now.

I thought of her mom, my wife, not even fully not my wife yet and where she might be in this moment. Was she laughing? Did he make her chortle the same way so that the little flaps of her arm that she didn’t like shook? Did he take her hair and move it off her lips in the morning?

“What should I do? I’m bored,” said Bunny.

I looked around the room; the windows filled up red and dark with ashen clouds like oil slicks, and the room vibrated. In the corner, her mother kept an old doll house she’d once played with as a child. In each room she’d set a different scene: a cellarium of tiny high-heeled shoes, an attic of rosaries where all the dolls prayed, a small badminton court in the living room, and a bathroom where everyone ate a petite pheasant. These were the absurdities of my wife who was not my wife.

I wondered if Tibor knew of her dolls house and would someday come to take it from us. Or maybe no one would take anything from anyone because there wasn’t anything left to be taken.

Bun crawled down from her bed and onto the mauve carpeting where her pilled leggings dragged sparks along the coils. Outside, strange licorice rain began to smack the windows, trailing onyx ski paths into the glass and soil and root.

“How do you feel?” I asked. Really, I was asking myself. I saw myself mirrored in her, only greyer, flatter.

“I want to look,” she said.

“Look into the dolls house instead.”

A cellarium of pronged sandals. A mosque in the attic. A pickle ball court kitchen. A bedroom where everyone drank homemade wine that just tasted like grape juice.

Perhaps this was our home now and the outside world would never come crashing in on us. The room flowed red with heat. The stars flew by our window, and I wrapped Bun up like knuckles around a coffee mug and held onto her because she was the only thing that hadn’t changed; and I didn’t want to change, either.

We peered deep into the dolls house as my wife who was not my wife and Tibor said goodbye, their faces the colour of grape juice. That was nice of him. I don’t think I would’ve done the same. Maybe he wasn’t that bad a guy.

Bun reached out into the next day, and we saw the future together. I was comforted, doughy in the heat and joyful, until the moment that I was no longer in it.

(c) Matthew Di Paoli, 2023

You can connect with Matthew on X (formerly Twitter): @MatthewDiPaoli and read more about his writing on his website: https://www.matthewdipaoli.com/

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Our next piece, a poem written by Latha Rajasekar, highlights the contrast between the external and internal. It ultimately underscores the idea that authenticity and self-assuredness grounded in reality can lead to a deeper and more lasting sense of happiness, challenging the superficial aspects of perception.

Optimism

Break all eye contacts you want
Evade all acknowledgements you wish
Throw as many fake smiles as you please
Live in false pretence all your life
Accuse me of what you fancy
All I have to say is- Suit yourself ! My love is nothing new
My intentions been true
Sans eye contact I shall not perish
Sans acknowledgement I shall not wither I live a happy life
Both in your thoughts and in reality.

(c) Latha Rajasekar, 2023

You can connect with Latha on Facebook: www.facebook.com/latha.rajasekar.7/, X (formerly Twitter): @raj_latha, and Instagram: @latha.rajasekar

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Joe Totten was one of the winners of the 2022 New Voices Award, which supports emerging writers and offers a year of mentorship and editorial guidance from an industry expert. This extract is the opening to the novel Joe has been working on this last year, called Utopia, Texas. This extract explores how our individual perceptions of reality are shaped by our personal experiences, biases and resistance to change, highlighting the tension between differing perspectives of reality within a family.

Utopia, Texas

He stood in the kitchen, hands on hips, back straight, looking out at the lawn I’d forgotten to mow. His posture suggested he was about to receive an order, or give one. My father always seemed to be at attention, which made sense after 25 years in the army. “You’re driving Rue to Texas,” he said. “She wants to go to a funeral.”

I nodded and didn’t ask who’d died. Not that I wasn’t interested; I just didn’t want to prolong our conversation any longer than necessary.

“You’ll leave tomorrow after school,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen.

Her full name was La Rue Audrey Birdwell. Rue to just about everyone. No one ever called her Grandmother. She hated the word. There’s nothing grand about getting old, she said.

I barely knew my grandfather, her husband of more than 30 years. Rue almost never talked about Calvin. There’s only one photo in her home; a small picture frame next to her bed. Calvin is standing up in a row boat, waving his hat at the camera. Rue is seated at the oars, rowing. She doesn’t look happy.

According to my father, Calvin was a man of unchangeable habits. He wanted his dinner on the table every evening at six sharp, his son out of sight, and his wife quiet. That last one was impossible for Rue and the marriage became a battle. Everyone was forced to pick a side. My dad chose Rue and now I’m stuck with her.

I rode my bike over to Rue’s house. Her 1963 El Dorado Cadillac was sitting in her carport, covered in dust. Despite the numerous dents in the side panels and the thick dust, this was a beautiful car. Baby blue with white leather interior. I could lay down in the back seat and my head and feet wouldn’t touch either door. Sharp, chrome-trimmed tailfins sweeping back from the rear window made the car look like it was about to go airborne. The steering wheel as big as a manhole cover. There was enough metal on that Cadillac for two small cars. The last time she’d been at the wheel, she’d wiped out a few trash cans coming out of the church parking lot and my old man had taken the keys off her.

This time of day, she’d be in front of the TV watching her soaps, with the volume up so loud the dishes rattled. I knocked and waited. The door opened as far as the chain would allow. The old lady’s face floated into view.

“It’s Jim,” I said.

I could hear her swearing at the chain, trying to get it loose, then the door swung wide.

“Have you got the keys, boy?”

I showed her the keys. “Dad says we’ll leave tomorrow after I get home from school.”

She shook her head. “I want to get an early start. We got a ways to go.”

“I got school tomorrow, Rue.”

“School? Don’t bother. It’s not doing you any good.”

It was still dark when the phone rang the next morning. My room was closest to the kitchen, where the phone hung on the wall, so it was assumed by my family that I would answer it. I walked to the kitchen, picked up the receiver.

“We’re wasting daylight, boy. Let’s go.”

We took the interstate, heading west toward Atlanta. In the rush to get out of the house, I’d forgotten to bring a roadmap.

“We don’t need a map,” Rue said. “I know where I’m going.”

Northern Georgia is a monotonous landscape, thick stands of pine trees and wide fields of cotton behind miles of wire fences. I turned on the radio. The Supremes singing Love Child came on. Rue listened for a while and then snapped off the radio.

“Hey, I was listening to that.”

“I’m not listening to those people screaming at me.”

I looked at her. “What do you mean by those people?”

She turned her head and stared out the window. “What word do we use nowadays…negro, colored?”

“Black. Or African-American.”

“I been calling’em something else my whole life. I’m not changing now.”

“Rue, that word is offensive. Please don’t use it.”

“Know what offends me, smart guy? When those people burn down their own homes then expect the government to bail them out.”

“What are you talking about?”

She turned to look at me. Rue wore thick bi-focals that made her eyes appear oddly large.   “I was struck by lightning when I was a child,” she said, trying to change the subject.

That explains a lot, I thought.

(c) Joe Totten, 2022

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If you’d like to see your writing appear in the Write On! Showcase, please submit your short stories, poetry or novel extracts to: pentoprint.org/get-involved/submit-to-write-on/

Issue 18 of Write On! is out now and you can read it online here. Find it in libraries and other outlets and see previous editions of our magazines here.

Hear extracts from Showcase in our podcast. Write On! Audio. Find us on all major podcast platforms, including Apple and Google Podcasts and Spotify. Type Pen to Print into your browser and look for our logo or find us on Anchor FM.

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