Pools

The Meeting of Pools

We kissed last night. I am not ashamed to say: It started awkwardly. One pair of lips paused, as one pair flew eagerly. Two keys clashed. (I thought of Claudia, of kissing her in a car I can no longer picture, in front of her colorless house, in front of her parents standing behind blind windows, in a context I can no longer recall.) And then suddenly, after parries...one became a lock. We danced with rhythm, adopting the music. We smiled at what we had learned. Inwardly. We laughed in the throes of joy. Inwardly and then outwardly. We evolved through radiance only to part. You went back to yours, and I went back to mine. And now, with the return of time, with the first cup of coffee drunk, with the sounds of engines and walking women's voices, with the crows and jays squabbling before the rainfall, I try to imagine you and cannot. You could be doing any one of a thousand things, and they are all pedestrian; and they are all pointless and aimless in that I do not figure in any of it...unless somehow I do.

The Pool Enters His Forty-seventh Year

At first I noticed one body in the drained swimming pool. I turned on the hose and began filling it anyway. An indoor pool. Almost an aquarium. After that I noticed more bodies, all fully dressed and in upright or semi-upright positions and crammed in a space above and beyond though accessible to the pool. I sent the hose places and turned it on these and watched the corpses dislodge and slip eventually to the pool below. One or two were stubborn and liked where they were. I prodded these with a switch I had fashioned for another purpose. And I had just wanted to settle down with the old screen.

And I had just wanted to settle down with the old dream. And I had just wanted to settle down with the old screen. And I had just wanted to settle down with the old dream.

The Rumored Deer

Once I heard a pop, like the report of a rifle in woods where there were deer...or rumored deer. That was early on. Later, as I horsed around with my brother for the umpteenth time, I lifted him up and dropped him on his bowl-cut. I heard that all-too-familiar sound. I held up his head at the cheeks and tried to look him in his eyes. That was adult of me, while I felt that dread that kids feel. I wanted to disappear and felt a drying in me. My father appeared out of thin air and was frantic and shouting. He flailed his arms. He too had heard what I heard. (I wondered what it sounded like to him; I never got to ask.) Like I said, I wanted to disappear, and that is why and when the ocean arrived at my door. Or a pool. Nonetheless, it was big enough, and I was big enough, and I could swim away for a time. I could swim underwater until forced to come up for air. And then I would have to face the people again...and the music. People slip away, but not the music. Where had I heard it before? My brother works in film. My father, dead now five years, flails his arms. He directs traffic in a neighborhood where buildings fall regularly amid shells. I can see him doing things he never could see himself doing. I walk past these columns uprighting the ruins and enter the water. I smile to see my brother and my father already there.

Richard George is a Tulane graduate whose work has appeared in Mystery Itch and is forthcoming in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and Toho Journal. When he isn’t writing, he works as a probation officer. He lives in an apartment in Toms River, New Jersey.