After

On the third day after John’s death, Delia strode along the course of the beach, her house pixelating behind the tea tree scrub in a series of creamy flashes. The ocean’s blue on her left side, a clean salted fringe. She could hear his voice still, slightly hoarse as it had been at the start and at the end of their lives together.

He had grunted and snuffled during their first date. ‘A cold would never have kept me away,’ he said, eyes red-rimmed, nose buried in a tissue. ‘I might not kiss you today, if you don’t mind.’

Delia had laughed, her younger, skinnier self unwrinkled and brimful of kindness. That had been before.

There had been difficulties, of course. It was a marriage. She had hated him sometimes, mostly for a week or so, occasionally a month. At one time, she had despised him for almost a year—the way he breathed, the noises he made as he chewed. Twitches in the bed. The unknown woman on his breath, his collar. Kids in the bedroom, yowling. Her husband’s penis, tucked decorously into his underwear. She had lain beside him, shaking with rage, clutching a fistful of sheets in the blackness of their room.

It had blown over, and afterwards, he was sorry. Not sorry enough. Delia went away for a week, left John with the kids, his helpless gesturing in her rear-view mirror as she drove away to another beach. Bordered by the same water, same weed, same bluebottles heliographing the sand. Just another silvery fringe of shore. Dunes behind her, grey and sage salt grasses, warning signs twisted into the wire fence. Don’t walk here, the signs said. Leave something sacred. Even one blade of grass, one tiny grain of sand, a single aureate daisy flower might hold all this shit together.

After she’d opened her front door on her return, shaken foreign sand from her sandals, John had wept. Old-fashioned tears torn from him, an act with no volition. He’d held her, shaking.

‘I’m sorry,’ he told Delia. ‘I won’t… I can’t…’

They went on. I should have left him then, Delia thought. Before I started loving him again.

Their house—a weatherboard by the ocean, three scant bedrooms, the tidal roar in her ears each morning as she awoke, dot-point gulls hovering over their terracotta roof tiles. Just a house. Not much to write about. The house might have been shabby but still it possessed a certain weight. It had a history which was not theirs. This family meant nothing to the house. It leaned defiantly into the wind, crusted its own windows with salt. Blotched its gutters with blooms of reddish rust, warped its floorboards, its doors. A grunting shove required to enter. There will be others after you, the house whispered to Delia. Your troubles mean nothing.

She forgave him in that house. Crushed flat, she’d hated him, and then in the end, she forgot how to stay that way. Her hatred scabbed over, as hatred would if more women allowed it.

The kids left home, and John left for a surf every morning before work. Each sunrise saw him on the waves, rocking and waiting for the one perfect thing, the shore break that never quite arrived. Some came close but they were never exactly, precisely and minutely correct. A curl, a clump of weed, a wobble at the wrong time; no. It was never really quite exquisite enough. He scribbled in his notebook every day. A chronicle of imperfections; a litany, a list, an index file of disappointments. All the ways in which a wave could slide away from him.

‘Not today,’ he told Delia.

One morning, on an early summer day a few weeks before Christmas, John shouldered their front door open with a creak.

‘It happened,’ he told Delia. ‘The perfect wave. The foam, the barrel, all of it. The wave was as sweet as a dream.’

‘How did it feel?’ Delia asked, curious despite herself.

‘I didn’t surf it. I just watched. You only see the perfect wave once. No point in ruining that experience by trying to conquer it.’

They made love on the old grey sofa instead. A single perfect moment, conquered after all. He had become familiar again.

John grew old more rapidly than Delia. His hair fell out, leaving only a silvery nimbus around his reddened skull, ears coarsened and flapping. His nose broadened, his lips thinned; seams on his cheeks appeared, his chin. Red flakes of cancers on his nose, his wrists. Salt in his pits, behind his knees.

After John died, Delia decided to renew her hatred. It wasn’t fair, she thought as she strode down the beach, cold sand between her toes, curls of foam on the shoreline, each wave reaching a little higher as the tide rose. How dare he, after everything, die first? His face in his coffin, a wax statue carved from yellowish fat. Eyes closed, hands across his chest. Long, thin fingers and a worn gold band. Weeping kids, grandkids. A eulogy that left out more than it expressed. She had hit him once, a stinging slap after it all became too much to bear. He recoiled, held his face.

‘I deserved that,’ he’d said. They locked eyes until the feeling ebbed away, and Delia shrugged, defeated. Maybe love was easier, after all.

Delia plonked herself down on the sand above the tideline, chin on knees, gazing at the endless ocean that didn’t give a shit about anything. She watched a wave, first of a set, a green fist of water clenching itself before thundering to the strand, almost reaching her bare feet. Was it a perfect wave?

Who could know, Delia thought as she stood, brushing off her jeans.

This story is a runner-up of the KYD Flash Fiction Prize 2025.