Splash

Just across the pool sat a figure in her late teens. Dry swimsuit, lotion dripping down her bare neck, wearing tweed sandals that hung from her deck chair a few yards away from the water. Despite a shamelessly bright sky that offered her the most unobtrusive spot around the poolside, I could notice the glimmer dying on her lips.

My chlorine eyes, resting comfortably on the edge of the pool, watched her tear the seams of the summer we shared bit by bit. And before long, the last pieces of a brilliant June vanished without any trace. Tomorrow, everything shall cease to exist. We will be slung back to the stasis we rose from, is what she told me. Kiss me goodbye.

She said sitting inside the sauna felt like riding an elevator bound for hell. The dry heat that crawled up her skin was the devil’s foreplay and she wanted out. Out of the raging pit I imbue myself in every day after Swim. It was purgatory for my sins, is what I told her. Where I cleanse myself of my many fierce thoughts and ill deeds. Where God’s wrath shatters my being to rid my maladies. She didn’t know the same. She never would.

Stretching her legs out, she made her way towards me and stood near the water like a mermaid devoid of fins. With no apparent attempt to dive in, her hesitation slowly reached a fever pitch and she stepped back, overcome by fears that lay deeper than the depths of the pool. But I had plunged into the clear blue when I heard her heart split open and crumble like a pile of jigsaws. The photos we had taken the past week lay strewn before me when I resurfaced, all reduced to fragments as if nothing mattered anymore. Standing clear of impending doom, she walked away.