The Endarkenment

The Pool

8 The Pool Twelve years old, treading water in the deep end when Maria Goretti swims up and snatches my tennis ball, clutches it to her new chest, dares me to wrestle it back. The world—the lifeguard in his elevated metal bucket, the grown-ups buried in their lounge chairs, the other kids shallow-end frolicking—can only see our heads, the twelve inches bobbing above water, not the other fifty-eight writhing beneath the surface, our silk thighs brushing, our bathing suits bursting with these new pieces of organic technology invented inside us. The grown-ups, nerve endings filed down to a bore, and the lifeguard with his transistor brain don’t know Maria and I have grown gills, that we’re breathing underwater, that life is happening down here. In twenty years, we’ll climb out, grab towels, slide on wedding rings, and sink into our respective lounge chairs. The grown-ups will have moved to Florida, a state with so many old people it looks like a coffin being lowered at an angle into the earth. The pool will be cemented over, paved 9 into a parking lot, where once a year Maria and I will come with our bathing suits bunched up in our pockets and stare at the yellow lines and the nicked fenders and think how certain tailpipes look like the rusty lips of snorkels. ...