Matt Kendrick
Writer | Editor | Teacher
WELKIN PRIZE 2026 - SECOND PLACE
What Stays Behind
by Muntasir Salman
I packed my name into the small bag because there was no room for fear.
The bus smelled like metal and goodbyes.
Everyone said leaving was brave, but bravery felt like forgetting slowly.
At the border, the guard asked questions that didn’t want answers.
I watched my shadow stay behind, loyal to the dirt.
At night, the sea practiced breathing, in and out, pretending it knew us.
I asked tomorrow if it would recognize me.
It didn’t answer.
Still, I stepped forward, carrying silence like a pearl,
hoping movement itself could become home
without maps prayers language permission or certainty of arrival.
Muntasir Salman, is an aspiring writer, winner of the 2021 Commonwealth Essay Writing Competition (Bronze Award). Always seeking to share stories whether it's fictional or non fictional.
Judge's comment:
When you only have one hundred words to play with, each of those words needs to really earn their place, and this piece is a brilliant example of that – the creativity of the start where it isn’t clothes or belongings but identity itself being packed into the narrator’s bag; then a jump (but a perfectly clear one) to the bus, the border. The progression of the piece is continuously unexpected. We move inwards towards the reflective and the philosophical. And the overall effect, for me, is a resonance of so many layers – this specific story (that suggests the refugee experience) but also the story of anyone shifting from one identity to another; the evocation of scene but also the evocation of emotions (the yearning within this is so powerful) and the evocation of message and truth (there’s so much for a reader to ponder here).
