We’re pleased to announce the winner of the first WWWC of 2025: Steph Lye! Responding to the prompt ‘there’s no place like home’ Steph’s ‘Moving Forward’ follows a grieving man struggling to reconnect with his dead partner.

Read Steph’s winning piece below.

Moving Forward

I know bolts and screws. I know the smell of steel, the click of a ratchet spanner, the sound of a failing bearing. The black grease on your hands and under your fingernails and on your overalls which made your wife sigh because it wouldn’t come out. The days where the heat is like a blanket, hard to breathe, sweat that gathers like condensation and drips down your back just walking to the job, foam band of the hardhat already soaked.

The machines speak to me, their constant hum, their wakening roar, their groans of exhaustion. Opening them up bolt by screw by seal, investigating organs with gloved hands to see what disease has affected the insides. There it is, I say, that’s what’s done it. If it’s salvageable I do a transplant, sending the bad part away for the office blokes to crease their foreheads over and write their reports that no one reads. The shiny new part goes in. Be careful, don’t drop it, don’t scratch it, line it up just so. People think we’re brutes swinging hammers and beating our chests, but they don’t see what it takes to get tolerances down to the millimetre. I’ve got the feel for it. I’m the one the young guys come to. Come look at this, they say. What do you think?

When the job is done and the grease washed off the best I can, with just the bit under the fingernails that never comes out, I shuffle in, unroll my mat, line it up with the back wall. I sit down as comfortably as these stiff hips and knees allow me. Breathe in, breathe out. My body is a jumble of ungreased gears and over tensioned bolts and misaligned pipes. Come look at this, they say, what do you think? Needs some work, I say, maybe best to start from scratch. But replacement’s not an option for this old machine. That happens once in a lifetime, and only some kooky folk reckon they know what comes after that. Sixty years of no maintenance, they click their tongues and shake their heads. Should’ve done something earlier. Should’ve, would’ve, could’ve.

Dog, chair, cobra, warrior. Who am I?

I move my body in a bad replication of the lithe young things around me. My joints creak, my knees crunch, the teacher looks like the dolls the girls used to play with when they were small. Barbies strewn around the house, legs arranged at impossible angles, big smiles on their plastic faces. I struggle. I sweat. I try. The girls are older now. Moved away. What would they think of their old man, seeing me here? They wouldn’t believe it. Would probably think a screw’s come loose.

‘That’s gay, man,’ the young blokes at work snigger, their bodies shiny and new, skin not yet weathered and dusty like old jerky. Muscles and bones that operate off of full-strength beers, red meat and bravado. They do not yet feel the impact. They bend, and do not break. They wake after too little sleep, with spines that do not groan, and bellies not yet permanently bloated from too much alcohol. Just you wait, I try to tell them, wait twenty, thirty years and see what happens. Her words, my voice. She always said things better than I could. They don’t listen, of course. They jeer and snicker and drop heavy weights at the gym, and sink beers before dinner, and after too. I wouldn’t listen either. I didn’t. Hypocrite.

Bend, the teacher says, bend! But my hamstrings are rocks, my shoulders coiled springs with no give, my hips rusted shut. I’m in my spot in the back corner, the ogre in the swamp among fairytale creatures in their expensive, colourful outfits. I focus on my breathing, rattling in my throat. Breathe in, breathe out.

I think of my first time. All the words that made no sense. Trying my best to follow the instructions from the teacher. I can follow a work instruction but this one may as well have been in Chinese. I try not to think of the despair that drove me into the room. Do this, I said, while my limbs did something else. Clear your mind, I said, while the thoughts poured like water through a sieve. I’m not coming back, I said, as we lay on our mats. Corpse pose. Fitting. I’m nearly dead.

I lay, limbs jelly against my mat. Nothing has felt better. My thoughts floated away into the unknown. Can you hear me?

I found myself back again, unrolling her old mat. I’d hoped it would smell like her, but it smells like old plastic. One class turns into two into ten. I arrive, then sweat, then die. Rebirth.

The teacher is grinding away at the sound bowls and the humming fills my entire body and I’m sinking into the floor and floating off the ground all at once. Do you see me? I feel like crying. When I go to sit up, it hurts less than it used to. I picture the rust falling off my joints, one flake at a time.

One of the young things smiles at me, helps me put away my blocks. Good on you, she says, good to see ya again! She might be the same age as my youngest. I have a daughter around your age, I imagine saying. Instead I smile, say, Thanks, you too. I shuffle past the teacher. Did she know her? See you next time, she says, good work. She means it. She knows my name now.

I slowly put on my shoes and socks, not wanting to leave. Maybe next class I’ll set up in the second row from the back. I bet that’s where she used to go. Maybe I’ll get another mat, in case one of the girls wants to come with me the next time they visit. I look at the sign on the wall, as I always do. ‘There’s no place like HOME’ except the H and the E are crossed out and there’s a funny caricature of a dog in a buddha pose. I nod at the dog.

She would be proud of me.

Namaste, my love.