Pools

The sun blowtorches its way into the water, fragments, and the bottom is an aqua sky webbed by white-hot lightning. Here and there, legs hang like halved mannequins disappearing into a squiggly-bright ceiling, through which you can make out the slurred shape of a poolside palm tree. The deep, guttural grooon-grooon of the water’s stomach growling is all you hear, dredging up a similar sound from your subconscious, last heard while you were immersed, long ago, in another fluid world. The water suddenly internal-combusts in a tangle of arms and legs, flailing in a fizz of a million tiny bubbles, some kid having just somersaulted into the blue. Soon, another’s face splashes down before you, slightly albino in the shining water, bug-eyed with silvered goggles like a child alien from a waterless planet discovering buoyancy. Then you realize it’s your own kid, wobbling from side to side, toothy, hair waving like smoke as he dog-paddles away. You come up for air, breaching the surface like a graceless dolphin, and clarity hits your ears, a momentarily soundless din. You can already feel your skin heating up in the blast furnace above water, confusing because there are beads running down your face and neck, cold. You suck a lungful of air and push yourself under again, but not before catching a glimpse of your wife drowse-browsing a magazine on her sun lounger, and the two umbrellas, the big one shading the miniature one stuck in the snowy slush of your pina colada.