All That Blind Eyes Can See

Congratulations to Keira Woodman (QLD), winner of the Fiction category of the Hachette Australia Prize for Young Writers in 2024! Read Keira’s winning piece below.

All That Blind Eyes Can See

Agatha cut the vegetables just the way he hated. She waited, for the small feeling of spiteful pleasure, as her knife ordered the carrots into the tiniest pieces, and the beans into thirds. It didn’t come. She wasn’t spiteful. She was worried. In fact, she was feeling a lot like the pot boiling on the kitchen stove. She had never felt like a boiling pot before. Maybe a tortoise, or aged wine, never a pot. But her stomach was simmering and swirling.

The first time, she had seethed. The swinging door, the absent shoes, the unanswered calls. The second time, she had watched his every step down the slope to the sand and south along the sea, until the trees hid him from her view. That time, and the third time, and the fourth time, she had stood there, obstinate, lingering, until he returned. As if he took some part of her with him each time he left, and she was waiting for it back. This time was different. She hadn’t just let him go; she had fought it. And now she stood in the kitchen with uncertainty filling the hole where that piece of her was supposed to be, waiting.

Agatha cast the vegetables into the pot without conviction. He was, after all, just an eighty-two-year-old man with too few teeth. Her husband was the kind of man to tie himself in knots before asking for help with his shirtsleeves. The kind of man to stubbornly take up residence on the fifty-year-old decomposing leather couch in front a twenty-four-inch TV, when she had just installed reclining chairs and a sixty-inch widescreen in the living room. He would insist on open widows in the humid spring because he didn’t need air conditioning.

She did, and she wasn’t ashamed of it. Sweat had begun to gather at her brow. The air in the brick house was becoming a tangible thing, as the heat of the stove met the stagnant air of a late November afternoon. Outside, her marigolds slouched under the gaze of the sinking sun. At the window, Agatha paused, fingertips gingerly resting on the metal frame. No, she decided. He would be home soon. He would.

It seemed Harry was also the kind of man to abandon his wife to an empty house, so he could wander the rugged shoreline along the edge of the farm in search of… what? Some spiritual cure for the most tragic of all conditions: getting older? And now he was separated from her, alone with his poor sight and old bones. My fault. Is it?

She remembered the thoughts that had cried out as he had put his hand on the door handle this time. He’s not capable anymore. But she was just being dramatic. It was only ever an hour.

She glanced at the clock. The clock hands kept on moving, the hour hand descending in the same manner as the sun, which she prayed would not yet surrender itself below the horizon. No matter how still she stood the clock didn’t stop ticking. She could retrace her steps back to the pot on the stove, cross her fingers and close her eyes, but time would keep moving on.

Turning off the stove, she left dinner to fend for itself. She swung open the screen door. Then she paused. But the screen door swung firmly shut behind her, barely avoiding her hip. Go, it said.

Agatha stood on the balcony staring out towards the sea. She did not see Harry’s outline against the sand. She did not see Harry’s bent back as he made his way up the slope. She didn’t see Harry crossing the lawn, windswept and smelling of salt. She didn’t see Harry at all. And then the clock sung six o’clock through the hall, and for the first time Harry’s footsteps didn’t follow.

She had reached the slope before she realised; realised she had left her coat, had no torch, no walking stick. She hadn’t even changed her shoes. But when she turned toward the house the doorstep was dark. The sun was slipping from the grasp of the sky and the trees had sent long shadows out to meet her. Go on, they said.

Agatha paused at the start of the small descent. It was small, very small, but her confidence was smaller. For all her admonishment of Harry, he had descended this slope every week, and she hadn’t come this far in half a decade. Harry had always been the strong one, steadfast and resilient. But the sandy wind had worn away at him and dug deep creases in his skin. The years had stolen the strength from his bones.

She had only ever had a family, nothing else, no remarkable purpose. Harry had brought her to life. That life, it was at the bottom of the basket he would bring, filled with sheep wool she would knit into scarves for the kids. It was in the engine of the cherry-red Honda four-wheeler, as he drove her over the hills of the sheep station. It was in the red wine they would share on a blanket, at the edge of their property looking out at the beach.

The very same beach.

The beach she was inching closer to, as she took her old bones down the slope, sandals clinging, clumsy and out of practice, to the damp the grass.

It was a battle through the vegetation, on the overgrown path. The bush seemed to pull at her thin skin like the fear that was tugging at her mind. An old woman’s mind was often prone to catastrophising. She hadn’t yet stopped to wonder what she would find. But in the stillness between each step, as she stopped to brush aside imposing branches, her thoughts whispered, what happened to him?

When she spilled out onto the sand, she realised she had been asking the wrong question. Would she find him? Because she had quite forgotten the vastness of it. The empty beach that stretched on for two kilometres till the rocks, then on and on for another three. And all of it was wild, and immense. From the breathing sand to the waves climbing the beach with the rising tide.

Then came the questions she should have asked a long time ago.

What was out there for him?

Why had he never asked her to go?

The answer to the first question was a gate. It was halfway to the rocks she was approaching and sat at the top of a crooked wooden staircase. It led to their farm.

The first day he left for the beach, that was because of the farm. Just one week into his overdue retirement, he had opened their front door and left. And now, she stood beside the stairs, just like she was sure he had, just seven wooden steps away from a small herd of sheep at the edge of the property.

But she couldn’t find his footprints in the sand. She had no trail to follow, no idea of how far he came. She searched the landscape, eyes squinting, but no form materialised in the distance, no pale body outlined against the rocks. Further then. She went further, sand filling her sandals, caught under the straps and between her toes.

Every now and then the wind stirred, and her mind turned the dancing sand into a man, with a bent back and white hair. But the next step forward always broke the illusion. He wasn’t there.

When had she last told him she loved him?

As Agatha rounded the peak of the rocks she felt herself fill with the hope she would see him again. That the jagged stones would move aside with a smile and say, we’ve kept him safe for you.

Except the sands didn’t move on this side of the rock, shielded from the northerly winds. Shielded like the pale figure down by the water. A pale figure that drew her eye as it moved ever so slightly, despite the absent wind. An outline of a man whom she knew.

He was breathing, he was whole, he was there. But Agatha didn’t run to him, hug him, yell at him. And he didn’t turn to her, didn’t stir.

So she kept walking. She sat down beside him and stared straight out to sea. Until he put his hand in hers. Questions and frustrations sat on her lips, but he knew that. And he would’ve argued and apologised and explained, but neither of them were ever good at saying things straight. So, he said something else instead.

‘I can’t see them.’

The coal ships. Agatha knew that. They had watched them port many times, lit up like Christmas.

‘Well, there are only six of them tonight,’ she said, her eyes tracing their outlines against the horizon.

‘And I can’t hear the waves,’ he continued.

‘They’re just quiet.’

‘And I can barely see you? Barely hear you?’ he said, running his finger along her palm.

‘I think you see more of the world than I do, you know.’

But there was still something Agatha needed to address.

‘Dinner will probably be at seven now.’

He squeezed her hand. ‘I guess I can’t read my watch anymore’.

‘I can read it for you.’

Harry turned to face her. ‘You’ll let me go again?’

‘Not alone I won’t.’

‘Would you come with me, Aggie?’

‘All right.’

He smiled. And she didn’t need perfect vision to see that.

Then they stayed there, in silence, her head on his shoulder, until the water claimed the hems of their pants.