She change

This article was a finalist in the 2024 IA Writing Competition Most Enthralling Creative Work category. You can read the excellent work of all our finalists HERE.

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This short story is an *IA Writing Competition (creative work category) entry.

Daisy dismissed the nurse with a weak wave and shuffled the remaining steps in her walking frame to the rock – her rock – on the headland.

She unfolded a neatly ironed white handkerchief embroidered with a capital "D" in one corner and laid it flat. Using the walking frame for balance, she gently lowered herself, closed her eyes and took in numerous deep breaths.

As the years rolled into decades, she always returned to this rock and the sea before it.

Daisy sighed as she reached for her journal. She ran a shaking hand over its much-faded leather cover before opening to her first print-scrawled pencil entry:

'The osean is really blu today.'

A tiny smile as she thumbed pages of drawings: stick figures swimming in the ocean and one with a whale, floating impossibly on the horizon, all richly coloured with her treasured pencils.

As the entries advanced from pencil print to cursive ink, she paused on a page decorated with red lips. Her heart jumped. Her first kiss with a blonde surfer on this very rock.

Daisy closed her eyes to the memory of clumsy tongues exploring first love and her nose crinkled at the remembrance of coconut oil on suntanned bodies. Trembling fingers instinctively explored her rock, but she knew the love heart scratched and traced multiple times each day for two months had long ago weathered.

Pages of unforgivable adolescent angst followed, fractured friendships and family tensions — dark sentences and vows of revenge had Daisy tightening her mouth, touching her lined face and seeking out the darker blues of the ocean.

With the busyness of adulthood, the entries were shorter and factual: ambitions stated, career choices touched on and travel plans listed, all with a confident flow of the pen.

She paused, sometimes smiled and sometimes slightly shrugged her shoulders at her mental ledger.

Daisy raised her eyes to the ocean kaleidoscope; twisting and twirling greens, browns, whites and all shades of blue, frolicking and teasing her memory in the retiring afternoon sun.

She turned faded yellowed pages to a telegram, pasted in with the little plastic lid brush supplied with the tub of pinkish-purplish paste, but resisted bringing it to her nose:

'CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR WEDDING DARLING DAISY STOP I WISH I COULD BE THERE STOP LOVE GRANDMA XX STOP'

A long, tear-stained typed eulogy to her grandmother had followed a week later and Daisy gently bit her finger as she read.

Thumbing through the many pages of her marriage, Daisy openly laughed at fond memories, pausing on the black-and-white photograph of them both dressed in Sunday best, beaming outside their first fibro home. She fondly touched their firstborn's lock of hair, pressed between following pages.

A roller coaster of a partnership and he had long passed away. Her entries on his imperfections had her shaking her head... and his indiscretions... biting her bottom lip. She rotated her wedding ring on her thin, frail finger.

The ocean was choppy now as the afternoon breeze picked up and the fading sun tossed more colours into the waves. Daisy tightened her shawl around her shoulders.

She turned to the phone contacts in her journal and smiled at the neat line through early entries of just four numerals repeatedly replaced with longer numbers as their tiny coastal town expanded.

Tears welled as she traced fingers across the many names crossed out.

Tiredness weighed Daisy’s head to her shoulder… Her eyes opened to the gentle touch of the nurse.

“It’s time to go, Daisy.”

Daisy took a shallow breath and managed a weak line under the final entry, closed it, rested her elbows on the cover and cupped her shaking chin.

Her watery eyes a prism for more hues in the forever youthful sea. She openly sighed and for the first time, allowed the nurse to assist her to her walking frame.

“Yes, I know… It is... time to go.”

John Longhurst is a former industrial advocate and political adviser. He currently works as an English and History teacher on the South Coast of NSW.

* Full IA Writing Competition details HERE.