As Brian attempts to shape Tobias’s story, the boundaries between creator and character begin to blur, revealing deeper truths about avoidance, shame, and the fragile process of healing. Told with quiet intensity and recursive structure, the piece explores how fiction can become a mirror; and sometimes a conversation, between the writer and the parts of themselves they’re afraid to face.

Eight-year-old Sam arrives at a new school, immediately feeling like an outsider due to a personal physical challenge and the disorienting change of location. Placed by a careless error into a class with pupils noticeably older and larger than himself