The Swimming Pool

The swimming pool reminds her of the sea but it makes her miss it too. She watches fireflies dance with death on its surface, setting themselves on the invisible line between under and over. Sat by it, in the sun, she can smell chlorine and longs for it to be salt. Fireflies here are large and red, blue, they look like plastic baits, not like they have a mind, a life, a breath, like her.

A red firefly falls from its in-between space, hopelessly it struggles, its wings too heavy now, floating and drowning. She reaches out and delicately grabs the transparent tissue paper thinness of a wing, holds her breath in case a cough, a sneeze, in case her strength destroys the delicate thing. She sets it down by the side of the pool, the brickwork dark with drips of water she brought up with the castaway.

Where the firefly used to be, there’s a stain of red there, in the water. As she watches the stain bleeds in the surrounding water but doesn’t dissipate, the pool becomes a paint bucket. She reaches out and touches the water – not cold like the sea but lukewarm. She lets the water absorb her, like the firefly she loses her place in-between something and something, dragged down against her will. She struggles but knows her wings are wet, there is no escape.

The red swallows her, no hand scoops her up back onto the side of the pool, this time.

She thinks of the sea and wishes the water was colder.