Underwater: Impressionistic Writing

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.