All of the lines curved away
from each other, bending with the heat waves that shot down from the sky,
making the dirty feet of strangers and childhood acquaintances twist and warp
as they paddled past. Blues and greens swirled together in indistinct clusters
of water and algae and reflections if the haphazardly patterned tiles that
coated the walls. Little oil spills of sunscreen drifted lazily across the
surface, filtering the light through opalescent windows, diluting the summer
brightness from above. The muffled noises of happiness and conversation bubbled
up in loose, round syllables. A man, just a
few years too old, swam down to the drain, surveying the little world occurring
under the water until his breath ran short and he shot back up, into the thick
midsummer air. Everyone's skin prickled with
the same insidious threat from that gaseous mass of the sun hanging what seemed
like merely ten feet above. Inflatable balls and rings and animals far
outnumbered the grimy hands of the children tossing them around, a whirlwind of
fluorescents spinning in the humidity. The full onset of it all, if you were to
break the surface, would be enough to make you burst.The paddling of some unclaimed toddler in
this inflatable contraption stirred the water, forcing the bubbles
into hurricanes, blotting out the blues and greens with a solid white cloud of
air before fizzling up to the top and out of existence. Ripples in the surface
tension echoed in sloppy rings, pressing outward, as if trying to escape the
heat like everybody else.