In advance of the judging and prize giving for the 2024 UoP Writing Prize due to take place next week, here is a reminder of the quality of last year’s winner.
The winner of the University of Portsmouth Writing Prize 2023 was Dascha Imani for her dystopian Portsmouth-based short story ‘Keepsake’.
Keepsake, Dascha Imani
It’s Easter Monday today. I wonder, do we still celebrate holidays so foolishly? The wind today is supposed to be harsh, but I haven’t felt it much. I picked up some groceries from Tesco over on Elm Grove since the Co-Op by us didn’t have cabbage. Mother keeps asking me why I need a cabbage so badly, and what I’m going to make with it.
It’s a cabbage – you can make anything!
The handwriting on the A6 drawing pad is clear and concise. At least, as clear as it could be after years and years of deterioration from the elements. The once firm white pages were now torn and waterlogged, but the writings from the mechanical pencil still somehow remained. A miracle.
I let the pages on the tiny book run along my fingers, taking in every dent and crease before continuing to read what was still legible.
I dropped off the cabbage at home. I got more groceries than I intended – as always. But I finally tried those angel slices on Good Friday and I ____ __ ___ some more! I hope you still like them. _______ ____ sweet tooth go away when you’re older?
Good Friday…I don’t remember the last time I celebrated that. There was no one left to celebrate it with. I only did it because of mother, and she’s no longer here. I sat still and closed my eyes, trying to recall that holiday back in 2023. There were no notes on it in this sketchpad.
What a shame.
The park up in Birmingham, some music, some family…probably alcohol? I exhaled. What I would give to taste mother’s rum swizzle one more time. I never liked alcohol, but things are different when you no longer recall the taste.
How many years ago did the shortage occur? About twenty? Hospitals and pharmacies made an emergency mandate to stop the selling of non-essential alcohol, so anything that wasn’t an antiseptic wasn’t readily available.
Of course, people have their ways. Alcoholics are alcoholics for a reason. That’s what took out one of my last friends.
Who would have thought a swig of vodka would wind up on the black market?
At Southsea Pier now. I just got ice cream from that one place,_______ Ice _____ and sent a picture of it to Grace and Donte (it’s his birthday today).
Grace and Donte… My chest tightened. I hadn’t heard from them in years. Isle of Wight and Bermuda were some of the first places to go during the mass floods.
The gusts of wind picked up again. The erratic weather conditions never allowed me even a moment of grief. I pulled the protective barriers on each window down, trembling and counting backwards from ten every time I closed another one.
It must have been the afternoon. I wasn’t sure anymore; all the synchronized clocks had stopped working since the cell phone towers shut down. There weren’t enough people left to man them, nor were the weather conditions stable enough for people to get to them.
I sat back down on my worn sofa in the middle of the living area, surrounded by no more than a table, some rations, and candles. I continued to read, even though the whistling of the winds that still slithered through the limestone house on the hill fought to keep my attention.
Couples are walking their dogs and the minty green waves are crashing against the pebble stone beach. The Wight Link ferry just came in and I got slapped by pellets of seawater! Ugh. I hope this doesn’t infect my contact lenses.
The seawater must have smelled so nice. Pristine and uncontaminated.
I see Spinnaker in the distance of some construction sites across the street, too. Some kids are on scooters, others spinning in circles to show off their dinosaur jackets zipped up to their little chins to their moms. Some of them are laughing trying to hold their balance against the wind.
Hmm. When was the last time I saw a child? Birth rates had dropped significantly, with people unsure of how they alone would survive, let alone with a child. What did that laughter sound like, anyway?
I scoured the page for more information, only to find some illegible drippings. I sighed once again. I suppose you take the rising sun and fluffy white clouds against the backdrop of the autumn sky for granted when you think you’ll see them again tomorrow. I tried again to make out some words, hoping for something – anything else to see if I had known this was coming.
Wind __ _______ up. Can’t write. Fingers _______ cold and ________ _____ __ ___ sick. Going home ___.
Another sigh.
Windy days in Southsea were normal. Did nothing prepare us for this?
I rested the sketchpad down on the water-damaged floor, littered with mould. The solace I was searching for remained unfound within the contents of those pages. In fact, the naivety was almost infuriating.
But still, I would keep this.
I would keep it and hope that, when my time inevitably came, someone would find this and take some comfort in the tarnished notes written down by a younger me, having a blissful day out in Southsea.
If nothing else, I could leave behind this keepsake.
About Dascha Imani:
Dascha is an English and Creative Writing student with an interest in speculative fiction and dystopian writing. Born in Bermuda and raised both there and in the United States, she came to England for higher education. She has a background in pharmacy and is going into science communications and content management, but is also pursuing her writing goals of publishing novels and novellas.
Inspiration for the story:
After taking the Dystopian and Apocalyptic Environments: Ecocrisis In The Literary Imagination module, I gained a deep understanding of the dystopian genre and developed a special interest in it. I'd like to publish a novel in the genre someday and thought it would be the perfect opportunity to test what I've learned by entering this competition.
I come from Bermuda, which is a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and always wondered how quickly my home may disappear in the face of an environmental crisis.
Being in Portsmouth, which is also close to sea level, made me think about what would happen if both places I call home were no longer inhabitable.
I even went out for a walk along the pier to scribble some notes about what life is like now, which became the basis of the descriptions in the piece!