Line in the Sand
by Suneeta Peres da Costa
The moon is very faint tonight, in its final quarter, but it is still possible to see the tide,
high, coming in and ripples of black water as the waves break one by one on the shore.
Inevitably, the line in the sand will disappear, whether now or tomorrow when the seagulls
descend or the children race over in their eagerness to get started on their sandcastles.
The man who has drawn it is himself now moving away, walking toward his old beach shack
to prepare his evening meal—some mussels and bread, he thinks, and one of the bottles of stout
his neighbours had given him in exchange for a gift of smoked fish some days ago. In one hand
he holds a piece of driftwood he has collected which he may whittle into something later in
the evening. When all the things of the day—his dinner plate and fork, his tackle and rod, his
clothes which he has left in a heap on the bedroom floor—have been put away, he will climb
the stairs to his small attic workbench and begin to sculpt the timber. Mostly the figures he makes
are of naiads, sea-nymphs, mermaids even; water creatures that nevertheless bear the same
countenance, the same earthy features, of a woman, real and familiar, whom he knew long ago.
Although the calendars that hang in the house of the man who has drawn the line in the sand
are outdated, from bygone eras, and while the clocks tick without any particular urgency, he has
a sense of time, of evolution. Lately, looking at his own hands as he works, he catches sight of
the veins which are prominent and the tanned, wrinkled skin; he seems to perceive all the things
which have passed through them: all the things they have held as well as those of which he has
let go. At such moments, he is apt to recall the face of the woman whose features he has etched
over and over and begun to wonder, were they to ever meet again, would she even recognise him?
Blowing away the sawdust, he has studied the details and contours of his workmanship, only to
find himself moved less by the likeness it describes than the light streaming through the open window.
And abandoning his tools, his materials, he has stood up to contemplate the canopy of Northern stars
and gazed at the decisive position of Cassiopeia. The sky is again cloudless, the firmament vast
and clear. It may therefore be the same tonight or it may be different—for all the reasons known
to him and those he is destined to discover—so that when he lies down to sleep it may well be
the line in the sand, rather than her face, which he encounters in his dreams.
Suneeta Peres da Costa was born in Sydney on Gadigal land, and is of Goan origin. Her writing has recently appeared in Meanjin, Peril and Sydney Review of Books, and her latest book, a novella Saudade (Giramondo, 2018; Transit USA & Canada, 2019), was shortlisted for the 2019 Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the 2020 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, and a finalist in Field Notes' 2020 Tournament of Books.
