What the Sea Returned

Chapter 1: Beach Day

Themba first noticed her because of the yellow dress.

It moved in the evening breeze like a small flame against the blue-grey ocean. One moment, the fabric rested against her legs; the next, the wind lifted its hem and sent it fluttering around her knees. She stood near the shoreline with her sandals dangling from one hand, watching the waves collapse over the sand.

Loose strands of hair kept sweeping across her face. Each time, she tucked them behind her ear. Each time, the wind pulled them free again.

She never appeared irritated.

Themba sat several metres away with an unopened paperback beside him and a bottle of water growing warm in the sand. He had come to the beach to read, or at least that was what he had told himself. In truth, he had spent most of the afternoon staring at the same page while thinking about everything he had been trying not to think about.

Then the woman in yellow appeared, and the noise inside his head became quiet.

“If I had three lives,” he murmured, “I’d marry her in two.”

He watched her take another slow step through the shallow water.

“And in the third, I’d become a writer just to keep her alive in ink.”

Themba shook his head and laughed under his breath.