The Man on the Beach

By Elaine Waldron

A dying teenage girl finds romance from an unusual stranger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elaine Waldron
• Release date: Jan 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458095572

Elaine Waldron

Elaine Waldron began her career as a novelist with Publish America, publishing her first two books with them. Aside from her novels, she has had numerous short stories published in various magazines and anthologies, such as Amazing Journeys and Trail of Indiscretion, winning best story based on cover art for issue #4. She was a newspaper journalist earlier on in her career, but shortly after leaving the newspaper, she began selling her short stories.Her favorite authors are: L.J. Smith, Stephen King, Stephanie Meyer, Jack Engelhard, and John W. Cassell. She enjoys Shakespeare and her favorite poet is Rainer Maria Rilke, and she mostly reads and listens to his works in German.She is an advocate for preserving our planet, believes in God, and recycles. Loves animals and has two cats.

Book preview

The Man on the Beach

A novelette by

Elaine Waldron

Copyright 2007 by Sandra Elaine Waldron

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Beginning:

I could hear Mama crying in the adjacent room. Daddy was doing his best to comfort her. I felt sorry for her and wanted to console her, tell her I had acknowledged the truth and was actually content. It was a strange feeling, knowing I was going to die soon, and at the ripe old age of seventeen. But I did believe in God. Though at first that didn’t help a lot.

It had been really hard at the beginning, but after many agonizing weeks, I had finally accepted it. The hardest thing was fully realizing I would never marry and have that family of my own that I had dreamed of all my childhood. It still bothered me. But if it wasn’t in God’s greater plan of things, then I had no choice.

Acute Leukemia, the doctors told us. Leukemia is what you have—words that rang like hot, resounding bells through my soul. I had requested (pleaded actually) from the doctors as well as my shocked parents that I be allowed to live out my last days at home. After much deliberation and argument, especially with my parents, they all gave in. I was relieved and grateful. At least, I could have that dignity.

It was one of my better days, and I felt strangely strong as I moved across to my bedroom window, the only one in the house besides the living room window that looked out over the sea. That is why Mama gave me that particular bedroom, aware of my fondness for the water.

We lived in Louisiana near the Texas-Louisiana border. Daddy had built our home in a beautiful location along the shoreline where it was not readily accessible to tourists or anyone else for that matter that didn’t know the back roads and their way around. When he wasn’t out to sea fishing, he was doing carpentry work on the