We’re pleased to announce the winner of the September WWWC: Chloe Staykov! Responding to the prompt ‘the things you learn’, Chloe’s story is a humorous, touching exploration of grief and making your own rules for life.

Read her winning entry below.

The Things You Learn

The pigeon had been living in my kitchen for three days before I decided to name him Gerald.

This wasn’t a whimsical choice. Gerald had arrived through the broken extractor fan on Tuesday morning while I was trying to make toast without burning it (day 47 of this particular challenge, success rate holding steady at 12 per cent). He’d emerged in a cloud of feathers and indignation, knocked over my coffee, and proceeded to establish himself on top of the fridge like he’d paid a deposit.

I should have shooed him out. I knew this. Instead, I’d googled ‘what do pigeons eat’ and put out a saucer of seeds I’d panic-bought from Costco at 11 pm.

‘You’re losing it,’ my sister said when I finally answered her calls. ‘Mum’s been dead six weeks and you’re running a bed and breakfast for vermin.’

‘Birds,’ I corrected. ‘Gerald is a bird.’

The silence on the other end spoke volumes. Rita had always been the sensible one. The one who’d cried appropriately at the funeral, organised the wake, and returned to her life in Sydney with her neat husband and neater children. I’d stayed in Adelaide, supposedly to sort out Mum’s house, but mainly I’d been sitting in it, learning that grief doesn’t arrive like they show in films. Instead, it arrives in odd ways. Like not being able to throw away half a bottle of detergent. Like befriending urban wildlife.

‘You need to see someone,’ Rita said. ‘A professional.’

I looked at Gerald, who was methodically destroying a packet of digestives I’d left on the counter.

‘I’m fine,’ I lied.

Here’s what they don’t tell you about losing a parent: it’s not the big moments that break you. It’s the small ones. The packet of gummies you find in her handbag. The way you still check your phone for her goodnight text. The fact that no one on earth will ever again ask whether you’ve had your A/C serviced.

I’d expected to learn about mortality. About cherishing every moment. About not taking things for granted. The usual platitudes people write in sympathy cards alongside promises to ‘pop round soon’ that never materialise.

Instead, I was learning how to coexist with a pigeon.

Gerald had rules. He didn’t like loud noises. He preferred the left side of the fridge to the right. He was partial to blueberries but wouldn’t touch bananas. Every morning at six, he’d coo at precisely the same pitch until I woke up and acknowledged his existence.

It was the most honest relationship I’d had in years.

My boyfriend, Marcus, had left two weeks after the funeral.

‘You’re not present,’ he’d said, which was rich coming from someone who’d forgotten my birthday three years running. But he wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t present. I was somewhere else entirely.

Gerald didn’t mind. Gerald just wanted his seeds and bread.

On day seven, I started talking to him properly. Not baby talk, but actual conversation. About how Mum had always hated pigeons, called them ‘flying rats’, which made this whole situation either deeply ironic or some kind of cosmic joke. About how I’d quit my job at the call centre because if I had to say ‘no worries!’ one more time, I’d throw myself into the nearest fountain.

Gerald cocked his head, unimpressed by my employment crisis.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Very middle-class problems.’

The thing about talking to pigeons is that they can’t offer advice. Can’t tell you to buck up, look on the bright side, or remind you that Mum wouldn’t want you moping. Gerald simply existed, entirely himself, requiring nothing from me except seeds and the occasional piece of cake.

It was revolutionary.

By week two, I’d stopped apologising when people called. Rita, my ex-colleagues, the aunt who’d always been vaguely disapproving. I stopped explaining why I hadn’t cleared out Mum’s wardrobe or why I was spending my redundancy money on bird seed and painting supplies (I’d decided to take up painting; I was catastrophically bad at it, which somehow made it perfect).

‘You’re having a breakdown,’ Rita said during her intervention attempt.

‘Maybe,’ I agreed. ‘Or maybe I’m having a breakthrough. Hard to tell from the inside.’

Gerald had taken to sitting on my shoulder while I painted. My canvases were terrible, muddy things with no perspective or skill, just colour slapped on until something felt right. I was learning that you could be objectively awful at something and still find it worthwhile. That making bad art was better than making nothing.

Three weeks in, Gerald brought a friend. She (he?) arrived through the same broken fan, took one look around, and settled on top of the microwave. I named her Melissa.

‘Absolutely not,’ Rita said when she turned up unannounced. ‘Christ, Lizzie. This is actually happening.’

‘Cup of tea?’ I offered.

She looked at Gerald, at Melissa, at the kitchen that now smelled distinctly of bird and contained more seed than a garden centre. At me, in Mum’s old cardigan, covered in paint, probably looking completely unhinged. Then she started laughing. Proper laughing, the kind that turns into crying, the kind we should have done at the funeral but didn’t because there were sandwiches to arrange.

‘She’d have hated this so much,’ Rita gasped.

‘I know.’

‘The smell alone would have killed her.’

‘Yep.’

‘You’re completely mental.’

‘I’m not.’

Rita sat down at the kitchen table, moving a pile of sketches.

‘Tell me everything.’

So I did. About how Mum’s death had broken something open, and instead of finding grief, I’d found this strange, wild space where normal rules didn’t apply. Where you could keep pigeons and make terrible art and eat Maccas for dinner and nobody could tell you it was wrong because the person whose approval you’d been seeking your entire life was gone.

‘What are you going to do?’ Rita asked.

I looked at Gerald, who was eyeing her handbag with interest.

‘I have absolutely no idea.’

Here’s what I’m learning: you don’t find meaning in the expected places. Sometimes it arrives as a pigeon through a broken extractor fan.

The things you learn. God, the things you learn.