Ocean

• Ashah Taylor, Grade 9
• Short Story
• 2010

‘I don’t understand why you wanted to come here.’
The teenage girl spread out on the sand next to her younger sister. In front of them was the ocean, the waves rolling gently into shore. It was a peaceful scene.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ her younger sister replied, laying her head back on the sand, her eyes closed.
Her sister snorted, ‘You wouldn’t know.’
The younger girl smiled, used to comments like this. She had been blind since birth.
‘You are right,’ she told her, sometimes insensitive, sister, ‘I cannot see. However, that does not mean that I cannot see. What you use your eyes to see, I use my other senses to see.’
Her sister smiled across at her, ‘How so?’
‘I know we are at a beach,’ the young girl said, ‘because I can smell, and even taste, the salt in the air. I can hear the waves rolling into the beach. I can even hear the people running across the beach in front of us.’
She moved her head, following the sound, so that it looked like she was watching the two joggers. Her older sister rolled over, to smile fondly at the child.
‘You have adjusted to being blind by sharpening your other senses?’ the teenage girl asked, remembering that her mother had told her this once, before she had met her estranged sister. Their parents had separated not long after the younger child’s birth, each taking a child with them.
The child nodded, ‘I can see everything you see,’ she said, ‘just not in the same way.’