We’re pleased to announce the winner of the October WWWC: Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan! Responding to the prompt ‘on the wrong side’, Nicole’s piece poetically explores the oceanic journey of a determined eel.

The wrong side of the ocean

Éric begins as a shimmer, a strand of future memory caught in the swish and slap of ocean. A hiss. A flick. Then life: long-eyed, translucent, delicate. A leptocephalus, drifting on warm Pacific currents like a first-year philosophy student who’s missed the lecture on gravity. Born on the wrong side of the ocean, he has no passport, no spine of steel, yet he carries a blueprint etched deeper than thought, some ancestral algorithm saying: go.

He slides past coral crypts and continental drift, dodging blades and teeth in equal measure. The sea is not kind. But it is constant. Éric, creature of neither here nor there, rides its arterial push with the calm of those who know they are being pulled.

Rain drums its jazz on the ocean’s surface. Storms punch. Then pause. The tropical breath gives way to temperate sighs. Beneath him, the coast sharpens – a beige sprawl, concrete ambition, the bright smear of cities along the sea’s edge.

Sydney rises like a mirage forged of light and late capitalism. The harbour tosses sequins in all directions. Glass towers preen in the sun’s gaze. Éric is not distracted. He has travelled through the glitter of the wrong side before. The salt here speaks in an accent he does not trust. The water smells of invention. This is not the place.

Still, he must pass through.

In jacaranda season, petals float like fallen halos above him. He glides beneath ferries, cranes, and the shadow-play of wealth and noise. Too much signal. Too little depth. He dips into inlets, detours down dead ends. Once, he swims too near a fish market and recoils. The metallic tang of endings is all too vivid.

Course corrected.

Now the estuary narrows. The tide slows. Salt relinquishes its grip. Éric feels the change before it arrives: a quiet thickening of the water, a shift in taste, in tempo. He darts beneath smaller bridges. Mangroves crowd in with their arthritic limbs. Insects trill their baroque symphonies above. The light flattens. The sky opens like an old book.

Here.

Beneath the murk and muddle, he feels it: the magnetic certainty of belonging. The end of the beginning. He is no longer drifting. He is arriving. This water, tannin-stained and slow-talking, carries the residue of centuries. Darug country. Burramatta. The place the eels return to, again and again, as if time were merely a loop of tide and silt.

Éric sheds his larval transparency. A costume change. A private transformation. He is becoming muscle and shadow, a ribbon of intent. The journey ends not with triumph, but with stillness. Here, in this brown-gold hush, he will linger. Feed. Grow. Remember.

And in half a century or so when the shape of his body forgets the shape of this land, he will turn again toward the sea, toward the dark pull of origin.

But not yet. Not today.

Today, he rests in the place of the eels. No longer the wrong side.