We’re pleased to announce the winner of the April WWWC: Dante DeBono. Responding to the prompt ‘there is joy in things’, Dante’s winning piece, ‘Object Permanence’, is a bittersweet tale of grief and memory, and the healing nature of time.

Read the winning piece in full below.

Object Permanence

She made us wait, refused to let anyone touch anything while she still had breath in her lungs. It felt too much like beckoning it closer, inviting in an omen. But in the end, death waits for no one.

The house doesn’t know yet. She just left one day, looking a little more frail than usual, and has yet to return. The house is waiting for her, just standing there, filled to the brim with her things. Gathering dust, some broken beyond repair. Old like her delicate bones and creased skin. A matched set.

You find that her things aren’t all things. Some of them are memories. You pick up a porcelain dish you remember being served a jam sandwich on during the summer you were six years old. A hat you ran after at the beach when the wind caught its brim, and it flew from her head. The brush on her nightstand that’s older than you, older than your big brother even. And you find loose hairs in its bristles, silver like it was at the end, and you cry because you can touch these strands but not the rest of her.

It’s a slow day. The house is full of family, mostly cousins, ostensibly helping but mostly rifling through it all. They weren’t here for Christmas, but they showed up on sorting day with its open invitation: take what you want. You and your brother were in last week; anything truly precious is already gone. Her wedding dress is in a box on your dining table next to the dust-covered photo albums, both unopened.

One of your aunties sets a cup of tea down next to you, pats your shoulder and leaves the room. You fold up her third-favourite apron. It smells like lemon. There’s a tree outside you used to climb, to help her get the fruit from the high branches. You fell out of it once, sprained your wrist, couldn’t go to your school swimming carnival. But you hate the water anyway, so it was the best day off you ever had. You spent it in front of the TV, eating homemade lemon bars.

The stack of newspapers you’re wrapping things in is starting to dwindle, but so are the contents of the kitchen cupboards. You carry a full bag out to your car, the cutlery resting on top of the plates tinkling like windchimes as you walk. You know you’ll take it all home and put it in the hallway cupboard because you don’t actually need more tableware. You’ll forget about it for a few years, eventually donate it all because it’s been long enough and you’re an adult. Sentimentality never did anyone any good. A fork is just a fork.

Your niece is climbing the tree when you walk back up the driveway. She’s been entertaining herself in the garden all day, content to make up her own games. ‘Look!’ she shouts out now, and wields a not-quite-ripe lemon, still a bit green but the biggest one she could find.

You smile for her. The scent of citrus follows you.

You find your brother when you return to the house, sorting through a crate of old records. He’s sniffling but smiling, holds out the album you would both dance to, movements wild and feet stomping so much that the needle would skip, and the song would jump, and she would shout out from another room to be careful, that stereo wasn’t cheap. The thin cover is wearing away at the edges, lifted in and out of the crate countless times, feels the same in your hands as it did years ago. Some of the tracks are in the workout playlist on the phone in your back pocket.

By eight o’clock you’re on your own, the house dark and quiet. Like it might be starting to catch on, realising that she isn’t coming back. That it’s being slowly emptied until a time when strangers start to walk through and imagine new colours for the walls and different uses for the rooms. It will be filled with new people and new things, new memories will take shape. You turn off the last light and lock the door behind you.

Everything still feels raw and heavy, too recent. It hurts to talk about her. You still forget to say ‘was’ and ‘used to’. Past tense. No longer. Gone.

But in time, you’ll make space for feelings other than grief. You’ll finally open the box on your table and touch the silk of a white gown you’ve only seen in photos, pack it away for safekeeping. Bake lemon bars from her handwritten recipe, serve it on an old porcelain plate. Buy a record player and dance like an uncoordinated child. You’ll remember that there is joy in things, even when they remind you of what’s gone.

Dante DeBono is an emerging writer working on unceded Kaurna Country in Tarndanya/Adelaide. She is a current PhD candidate at the University of South Australia with the goal of promoting social inclusivity and equality through her work focussed on diversifying queer representation in research and creative outputs. You can find some of her writing in Green: A Blue Feet Anthology (2022) published by Buon-Cattivi Press.