13.1

The pool is sloshing over murky. A chalky cool. Greenblue and misty. The children stand at the gate, black bars falling over aquamarine, a bicycle lock latching the door. On the other side a janitor walks the flooded pool deck. He carries a long handled net, wears a belt of tools. The children are skinny and tan and smell of Banana Boat. Towels hang dripping from their fists. It is late in the summer. The time is sometime close to dusk. A melty ice cream sky. The water in the pool is a cool color but it is all wrong. The janitor crouches to check the filter and the children watch through the black vertical bars. A single brown leaf falls. Curved upward like a bowl. The pool is closed, the janitor calls, but the children stand and stare as if they do not comprehend. It is late in the summer. You can see the hip bones on the children and also the collar bones. The knobs where the collar bones connect to the shoulders and the knobs where they connect to the sternums. Over their bones their skin is freckled and brown. They watch with solemn quiet faces. Go home, says the janitor. On the flooded concrete pool deck, a solitary flip flop. Discarded band-aid. Water pools in all the low places. Strawberry sunlight, sweet in the blue of the pool. The eyes of the children are impassive and staring. They stand unmoving before the black gate and the janitor wishes they would leave. I do not know what's wrong, he says. This could take some time. The children do not answer. The towels are like sad banners in their hands. The janitor dips a litmus strip into the pool and the reading is excessively alkaline. The water, cloudy blue opaque. Calcifications accrete, scaling over the pool bottom like some white lichen. The children stare and stare. Unblinking. I cannot let you in! cries the janitor. He throws whole fistfuls of litmus strips into the water. Watches the paper stain cobalt. The pH of human eyes and mucous membranes is 7.4. Very near to neutral. The pH of this swimming pool is 13.1. About as basic as bleach. The janitor circles and circles the pool and does not know what is wrong. The sun is lowering in the sky. A sharper orange now. The children feel themselves growing older. They advance towards the black bars of the gate and begin to climb. The pool is closed! cries the janitor. He is mopping the flooded pool deck but there is nowhere for the water to go. The children wrap their skinny fingers around the black vertical bars and heave themselves up. Their bodies are skinny but strong. They scale the gate like insects. Up and over and down. The stink of the pool is ammoniac and strong. There are milky currents in the depths and a whitish vapor lifting in wisps from the surface. The single brown leaf floats round and round. The janitor's skin is mottled with pale, stretches of nerve endings that have died, his eyes are forever rimmed with red. He is crying. Go home, he says. The pool is closed. The pool is closed. But the children are running across the pool deck now, bare feet splashing in the chemical warmth, launching hungry for this milky blue, for the low sunlight lilting in the water, for the smell and color of a summer almost over. The janitor supports himself on the handle of his long handled net. He softly softly weeps. The children hurl themselves into the air and their skinny brown bodies hang suspended for a beat—silhouettes against the horizon's fire—then fall in a splash, splash, splash, splash. Plummet under with the rapid rush of gravity through water. Stream of upward bubbles—then, a second of silence. Water rushing to fill its wound. Surface sealing back up. The janitor watches, waits, the tears standing still on his cheeks. The whole world hushes. There is only gentle lapping, the reddish shellac of a vanishing sun. He waits. Waits. Dares not...