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Diving into Dark

Kait Gilleran

    It felt like flying – that first time jumping off the diving board—water wings bouncing against my bony torso. Those first tentative steps took eons, but eventually I got to the end and looked down. The deep end looked like a never-ending pit into hell. My mother had always told me that demons lived on that side of the pool when she’d drop me and my brothers off there each summer day, treating it like cheap daycare. I was terrified of the dangerous deep and the child-loving imps lying in wait for my deliciously delicate limbs—I guess she created that horror tale to be sure she would come back to a lightly sunburned daughter rather then a tiny bloated body. Finally staring down into that chasm for the first time, I blew more air into my wingies and secured the rubber stoppers with an honest confidence that I haven’t been able to replicate since. I jumped off and spread my wings.
    It ended up as a kind of unpleasant belly flop, but my air-filled arm enhancements kept me afloat, and I lived to fear another day. I celebrated my triumph with a five-minute dance on the hot blacktop and a Sky ice cream bar from the ice-cream truck that melted enough to sooth my whining feet.
    Now I’m here at the pool again. “Here” being a rattrap of a suburban town; Weston, Connecticut, steeped in yuppies and old people. Except now I’m an adult (I guess), and now it’s dark, and now I’m trespassing, and the diving board is much less intimidating hidden by snow.
    I can’t separate my breath and the smoke as I exhale into the darkness, my cigarette the sole light aside from the moon. I’m lying on the ground post-snow angel construction, bundled in a jacket and scarf; thin jeans covered in snow, the thud of the outdoor shower stall door my only company. The acrid scent of my hair burning rouses me; I hadn’t even noticed my cigarette’s absence from my hand. I quickly sit up to inspect my newly burned hair. I venture to create friction between my hands, realizing that I must be colder than I had thought possible if a solid cylinder could escape my grasp unnoticed. It doesn’t concern me enough to actually remedy the situation—the idea of returning to my childhood bedroom in my mother’s house is much less appealing than continuing my time in the bitter cold.
    The scent of burnt hair and tobacco stays strong, a cloud surrounding me in the crisp night. I cough in disgust and reach for my large black leather purse. I take out a full button bag of soft brown powder and pour a penny-sized pile onto the CD case that I keep nuzzled within one of my purse’s smallest inner pockets. I transform the pile into a uniform line before inhaling it through a tightly rolled twenty-dollar bill. I light a cigarette and a smoky sigh of relief finds its way up my throat. The bitter taste of the powder mingled with mucus drips down the back of my esophagus. I suck on my cigarette like the dry heat will burn away the taste. The lingering scent of my burnt hair reminds me of another night that I’d endeavored to climb over the fence to this pool. I burned my hair that night, too.

    It was summer and I was fifteen. I was with Ben, a boy from up the street. We snuck out our windows that night to smoke pot. I nearly ripped a new hole in my already tattered jeans on the fence as I scaled it in my combat boots. Ben lifted me from the top of the fence and I could feel him shaking under my weight, his bony arms fighting the dying battle for chivalry. We sat against the fence near the deep end, where we couldn’t be seen from the road.
    He produced a poorly rolled joint from his pocket; it was a bit bent near the center from his own fight with the fence. At first it wouldn’t stay lit, but with a liberal use of Ben’s tuba-playing lungs, a fine glow was soon emanating from its tip. I thought it was so damn cute, imagining him playing a brassy number as he took a hit of mid-grade weed. Sitting there, holding a loosely rolled joint, it was as though my life had reached its peak; it just felt so unreasonably perfect: the way his newly bleached hair shone in the moonlight, the way it didn’t move in the wind, all spiked and gelled to perfection.
    Blazed, we started chain-smoking and laughing at nothing—playing a well-known game called, “Who can flick their cigarette the farthest?” I let him win, because it made him play with my braids while he bragged, and I could feel his hot breath on my skin when he leaned in to reach for them. It smelled like salami and weed, and that night, it was so intoxicating that I longed to bottle it to save for later.
    Soon we were taking breaks from sucking on our Pall Malls to suck on each other’s lips, our embrace temporarily broken by the same foul stench of burnt hair that surrounds me now. I had sex for the first time that night, on the diving board, after he gave me his mood ring. The amber color it displayed on him chilled to violet on me within the next hour.
    It felt like I was floating, sitting astride Ben’s undernourished form, looking down into the black depths of the moonlit pool—for a moment I thought I saw a pair of disapproving glowing red eyes watching, waiting for me at the bottom. It felt like I was suspended in time and the pain of broken cartilage fell away. It was the first time I felt sensual—I was a force. The way he inexpertly moved beneath me was inconsequential to the ecstasy of that moment; it was like I was flying. The solid rough texture of the diving board melted away and everything seemed to explode around me.
    When I was back to being me: naked, sallow, and lanky, I felt the coarse texture of the dirty white diving board on my knees and I recoiled. The air around us sat stagnant and I was overwhelmed by the salty stench of our bodies, sitting around us like an impenetrable wall binding us to the board. I grabbed my clothes and ran. I didn’t lose anything that night; I found a new part of myself, a part that I liked. A part that I would grow to love. I never talked to Ben again. He didn’t chase me, and that meant something.

    I feel warm, remembering the comfort of that encounter before my escape into the night. So warm that I take my scarf off and drop it in the snow as I begin a slow lap around the pool’s perimeter, the sound of my boots hardly audible as I wade through a mattress of untouched snow. The absence of chlorinated water gave rain and snow the opportunity to populate the blue cement basin. Rounding in on the shallow end, the snow level is high enough to pretend that it’s pool water on a hot day. I join in its game, slipping off my boots and throwing them into the adjacent kiddie pool—something like a giggle escapes my lips as I sit at the edge of the pool with my legs hanging down into the shallow end, as I’ve done so many times before.

    I had so hoped to hear Ben’s feet plodding behind me as I slowed to put my clothes on, lacy bra trembling in thin fingers. I knew then that the Earth hadn’t shattered, that there were no soliloquies attached to sex—it was comforting to know that things don’t have to change from every action committed just because an afterschool special said so. I peel off my socks so I can dig my toes into the icy snow and feel the solid frozen rainwater beneath it—so different from the cool soft waters of the past. I pull out my pocket watch and check the time. The faded red hand recording the seconds slowly ticks around the circle, and I wait for it to be exactly 12:05 before I return it to its proper place in my right pocket.
    The summer before my senior year of high school, I got my first job. After an obnoxious certification process, I became a lifeguard—more time to spend brewing in familiarity. I sat at the shallow end with my ankles immersed in the cold blue of the pool as dawn was rising. Donna, a young, bushy-haired woman—35, at most, was teaching me how to open the pool so she didn’t have to “get her fat ass all the way there every morning.” I had known Donna for years, the product of spending each day every summer at the pool. Her ass was undeniably fat, but it was not unappreciated by the male patrons as it waged its unending battle with the bottom of her lifeguard’s uniform, the classic red one-piece, and the suit was rarely in the lead.
    I kept asking her to clarify things. I wanted to be sure because I tend to break everything I touch. My brothers and I broke so many mirrors playing catch in my mother’s house, I must be on the hook for about fifty more years of bad luck. It was funny how quickly I ceased to care about specifics under Donna’s careful teachings. Her last piece of advice that first day as she unlocked the gates and I took my place on the shallow end’s lifeguard chair was, “Try not to be a buzz kill. You’re mostly here to keep kids from running.”
    I ran wet with sweat as the day went on, expecting the new swimmers to wait until I was looking the other way to forget to keep themselves afloat. The heat stroked me like an iron, and I began to appreciate the grotesquely large umbrella affixed above my chair—no one seemed willing to go within its shade—an invisible bubble of solitude and power. I was the master of the whistle, and I was bored as hell.
    “No running!” I yelled to a little blonde girl in a two-piece flowery bathing suit. She wasn’t even running, but the decorative pink frills on the edges of her bathing suit’s bottoms made me want to yell. I peered through my sunglasses at Donna, who was stationed over by the deep end, a place I was happy not to police. Seeing that I was currently aware of her, and perhaps sensing the intensity of my heat-stroke-fueled boredom, she gestured for me to come to her. I looked around uneasily at the splashing teacup-sized humans before obeying.
    “You doing all right, sweetie?” Donna took off her sunglasses and looked at the contours of my face, searching for an expression.
    “Fine. It’s just a lot more boring than expected.” I tried to be under her merciful umbrella as much as I could without sitting on her lap.
    “Well, honey, there are plenty of ways to amuse yourself. You’ll see.” Donna was eyeing one particularly muscular patron whose toned back glistened in the sun as he did a perfect dive off the board.
    “Scamming on attractive guys?”
    “Among other things...” She gave me a wrinkled-nose grin before shouting at a scrawny pimple-faced diver who had not waited for the last person to swim out of his way before jumping in.
    “Great, I’ll do that over on my end—that chubby eight-year-old picking his nose on the steps over there is looking pretty fine...”
    “Have you seen his older brother?” Donna gestured to a pale well-muscled boy who had just graduated from my high school, a veritable hunk, to be fair to Donna’s tastes. “Looks like that chubby eight-year old boy has a bright future ahead of him.” She completed the idea with a wet smacking sound that still resonates within me today whenever I find myself lusting after boys who are far too young to admit to noticing. Coming back to a sound mind (or as close as she could get to one), she said, “Here let’s take a break. Adult swim!” she shouted, giving my look of surprise a self-satisfied smirk and a shrug. “They can take care of themselves, trust me.”
    Disappointed children meandered out of the pool and made their way to the newly erected snack stand and playground as Donna and I slipped on flip-flops and made our way to the exit. I coaxed a cigarette from my pack of Kools and accepted a light from Donna. She lit a spliff and breathed deep. I was shocked; I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her daring lips as she took another pull. She laughed.
    “What? I told you, there are many ways to liven up the day. Want a hit?”
    The bitter taste of the loose tobacco mingling with the sweet flavor of Donna’s weed created a dissonant taste that I would grow to love those long summer days.
    Donna’s scent-covering concoction was one of many stimulants I found solace in during my summer safeguarding the pool. Another was a miracle drug called Oxycodone, those warm summer days would breeze away without the time to conceive boredom, because time barely existed—and even when it did, nothing really mattered. No one ever drowned; no little cherub fell into the pool and suffered from a wall-based concussion. And no one noticed my occasional naps behind my sunglasses—except perhaps, Donna—but she was the main proprietor of that sunny summer of complacency.
    I had more conversations with Donna than I had ever had with anyone before, until Jeremiah, that is. It hurts to think his name, a flash of his blue eyes clog my vision—the image so clear that I would believe a projector was laying it out across the white screen of snow before me. I can almost feel his hands in mine, his thin spidery fingers so surprisingly strong.
    Fingers made dumb by the cold, I fumble with my matches. A pile of failed attempts sit at my white and waxy bare feet, starting to tinge toward blue. I shiver. Reaching once more for my bag I make two crooked lines and use my olfactory nerves to take me back into the cozy folds of intoxication—I soon find myself warm in the breeze. I remove my coat, and the air feels like the hands of several lovers attempting to massage me to sleep. Snow is falling again and I open my mouth to the skies for a cool, mildly satisfying beverage. I can feel the smoke of my cigarette as it polkas in my lungs and does the cha-cha up my throat to culminate in a waltz of smoke that lingers for a moment to chat with the snow. I feel warm.
    The desolation of this sugarcoated wasteland is pressing on me, and the carbon monoxide in my cigarette adds to that feeling. Staring at the stars above me, an image of my father is produced like a giant game of connect-the-dots made by the gods. It has been years since I’ve let that blank-faced smile that he left me with permeate my mind, but I must admit that right now I’m kind of jealous of that definitive and painless end. He looked so calm.
    At fourteen, it was hard to rationalize a father’s decision to leave his three children alone with a heavily medicated mother, but it must have been great for him to finally find “peace,” as the grief counselor said, tissues held out in her well-manicured hands. Peace, calm, comfort. These were not words to describe my father in life, though perhaps in death. He was a predictable man, and sad, living in a constant state of reminiscence. Nearly everything that came from his mouth was an anecdote from his past, punctuated by odd and often inappropriate laughter. The way he twitched made me twitch.
    On my twelfth birthday he gave me his father’s gold-plated pocket-watch. He went on for an hour about his father giving it to him on his deathbed. My grandfather had fallen from the fourth floor of his office building on my father’s last day of eighth grade.
    “I was so mad, I wanted to go to a party at Marcy Joiner’s house—she was the girl everyone wanted that year, thickest hair, and oh her eyes were greener than a Saint Patrick’s Day parade. Everyone was going, and she had asked me personally, so I was positive that I was the one she’d be taking into her room that night.” He stopped for a moment, as though waiting to see if I’d ask him about his sex life, I had to stop myself from tapping my foot on the ground—I really wanted to get back to my friends playing double-dutch in the back yard.
    “Looking back, she probably would have chosen one of the high school boys anyway, I was even scrawnier then, less rugged. So, my mom forcing me to go to the hospital instead was probably a good thing. I didn’t fight her too hard on it, but we didn’t even know he was going to die, y’know? People go to hospitals all the time. I heard the party wasn’t that great anyway. Everyone just sat around sharing the six-pack that Todd Aaron stole from his dad.
    “My dad was all messed up, and when we got there they told us he didn’t have much time, so we all took turns alone in the room with him. He was all doped up on painkillers, so his tongue kind of lolled out of his mouth. He kind of reminded me of one of those dogs... what is that breed?” He looked at me as though I could see into his mind and provide him with an answer, “It doesn’t matter. When we were alone he said, ‘Jarred, you’re going to be the man of the house. Your mother, she doesn’t even know how to get the dog to sit without me handing her a treat. So you watch her, and the little ones.’ I almost cried, but he would have died faster if I had, from the effort of trying to hit me,” he laughed, “and then he told me that my granddad’s old watch was in a drawer in his office, he told me to get it—that it was mine, and that I better not sell it to buy some pretty girl a piece of jewelry.”
    He handed it to me then, as though to make sure I knew he had done no such thing—like I needed to feel it tangibly to understand. I’d never held it before, but I’d seen it a few times. It was heavier than I thought it would be, and colder.
    “A few days after he died,” he said, his eyes on my hands as I rubbed a bit of dirt off the watch, “I went to his office, his coworkers greeted me real nice, and made some apologies—and I thought, why? Why do people say sorry when they didn’t do anything? I never say sorry when people die—it’s silly. Anyway, I went into his desk and started rifling through all his drawers: tape, staplers, paper, all the normal stuff an accountant would need, when finally I found it.”
    I looked up hopefully, thinking it might be the end of the story. The cuticle on my index finger was bleeding from where I’d bitten it in my impatience. I sucked on it to stop the bleeding, looking back down as his mouth opened once more.
    “And it was on top of a pink slip! That bastard had been fired two weeks before and he didn’t tell anyone in our family.” My father laughed for what felt like centuries. It was manic. It came and went in spurts and the way he looked at me was almost desperate—he wanted me to share in his discomforting mirth at the ghastly punch line to his joke. I made a valiant attempt at a convincing giggle.
    My father must have been so happy as his final thoughts floated away, stories from his past disappearing with each labored breath—it was the first time he’d executed an entire plan instead of just talking about one. Closing that garage door, turning that key, and switching to his favorite rock station must have seemed like the most perfect culmination for his life of disappointment and self-loathing. It has been years since I’ve really thought of him—I was the one who found him. The garage smelled like gasoline and shit, I vomited when I saw that he had soiled himself. The soothing sensation of carbon monoxide filled his senses just as they are doing to me now, but that voluntary self-poisoning was a much more reliable suicide technique than this cancer-based one I’ve opted for.
    I drop my cigarette as I duck behind the walls of the pool in my paranoid efforts not to be noticed by a car passing on the road. I hold back the rising bile in my throat. Pushing away the snow, I see how murky the frozen rainwater beneath the snow is. The brown reminds me of the powder still left in my purse, and I partake in another line. If anything, I’m destroying the evidence. My bare arms shiver sporadically as I move away more snow to get a good look at the leaves temporarily frozen in time, fall and winter combined while I’m sifting through dreams of summer. I fight my way up from my crouched position, realizing that there are things to be done—though I’m not quite sure what. My shivering subsides as I walk barefoot across the frozen pool. Digging my toes into the snow with each step, I can hardly feel them.
    Oh, what would Jeremiah say if he could see me now right now, nearly naked and walking with an unwavering confidence? We met at the pool the summer after I miraculously graduated from Fairfield University, a college about half an hour away from my hometown, with my bachelor’s in Communications. He was visiting some members of his extended family for the summer—and he was perfect. I watched him dive from my new position as head lifeguard, Donna gone to bigger and better things in the form of a rehab in Florida. His arc was faultless; his toes even flexed in an attractive fashion. He was so petite and his complexion so pale. It made me want to hold him. I sparked up a conversation with him over a spliff during adult swim—he didn’t really like pools that much. We fell in love—illogical, blind, passionate love. I introduced him to the perfect bed, a diving board at midnight on a warm summer’s night, and he introduced me to unadulterated intimacy.
    He writhed expertly, his dark sheet of hair made darker by the night. The scar across his chest, a remnant of a long-ago car accident, reddened in the moonlight, and he looked like a wounded soldier out of some Greek myth that I have never been quite able to place—I traced it with my mouth and breathed his sour sweat-soaked stench in deep. No eyes watched us as we jumped off the diving board together in an embrace. Neither of us ran. I was overcome by a feeling of peace that I hadn’t felt since my first orgasm, perched on Ben Stedman’s bony form. It was the same kind of perfection, but with Jeremiah I wanted to know what could happen next.
    He spent the summer in my little Connecticut town and we did the things romance movies told me people do. We saw movies and ate dinner by candlelight, took long walks just to feel our feet move and leave sweat in each other’s palms. As the sticky summer air transformed into the dry winds of September he had to get back to his apartment in New York City, a class of third graders at a St. Brigid’s School waiting for his tutelage.
    We were at Mugs, the local bar, on his last night and his departure sat on our moods for the evening. He left me and my vodka cranberry alone to go to the jukebox, I stirred the ice in my drink, creating a whirlpool of liquor to watch as I waited, my eyes doing anything to not look at my dealer across the bar. It had been two weeks since I’d had any heroin, I had been taking a few Oxycodones a day, not wanting to waste any of my hours with Jeremiah in the cold damp pit of withdrawal—he hadn’t noticed any changes, but a new twitch had been added to my mannerisms that I couldn’t stop noticing. I was too embarrassed to have my ever-present summer fling know my weakness. I was far from recovering, still on edge when left alone with any stimulant—alcohol is a poor substitute to the high I feel now, clouding the stars above me. Pack of cigarettes empty, I spin in circles, watching the already blurred stars spin until they look like one great star on the black backdrop of the night.
    The jukebox clicked to “Summer Nights” as Jeremiah walked back over to the bar, a gazelle flitting through a mob of hyenas. He grabbed my hand and pulled me into an embrace.
    “Grease, really?”
    “It feels... relevant, don’t you think?” His eyes were such a deep blue that I just wanted to jump in them and drown. I put my face against his arm and huffed his sour stench. It left me lightheaded.
    “I guess.” I wanted the night to end, and I wanted to stop and talk to the man across the bar. Jeremiah stopped dancing and grabbed me by the jaw. He kissed me before getting down on one knee, his short blue jeans left his ankles naked from the strain.
    “I know this might just freak you out, and I know we’ve only known each other for a couple months but... I hate wondering and regretting. So... will you marry me?” I was freaked out, and my answer was no—I couldn’t take that innocent gaze a moment longer. I wanted to slap him but my arms wouldn’t move. I let out a strangled laugh, suddenly aware that the people nearest to us were waiting for my response as well. I ran.
    I ran all the way to the pool, nearly a mile in flip-flops with a stomach full of churning liquor. My tar-filled lungs left me heaving as I reached the tarnished fence. As I slipped my key into the padlock I heard a sound behind me. I held my heavy breath to identify the unfamiliar sound, his steps like raindrops after a drought.
    “I’m sorry, that was stupid.” His voice wavered like a child who’d been denied dessert; I turned to find his face a foot away from mine. I stepped forward to caress his unblemished cheek and kissed him. I can’t stand when men cry.
    “No. I’m sorry,” I replied, I opened the gate and we walked through, “I want to.” I said it without thinking, I hoped so much that my subconscious was right. He let out a nearly nauseating giggle, and picked me up, his thin arms surprisingly solid, and ran across the concrete, I hadn’t been held like that since I was a child, when my father had brought me to the pool for the first time. I let out that same excited shriek as Jeremiah and I invaded the still, cold water. Still wrapped in his arms as he waded in the deep end, I turned to kiss him on the mouth—I felt like I was three again.
    Sitting here, in the centermost point of the pool, with both the deepest and the shallowest ends in sight I can almost feel the sun and imagine the hot rays against my newly post-toddler skin. My father would throw me across the pool as hard as he could until I was red with impact, and I would ask for more. I had a pink-spotted blue inner tube around me, and after landing, I would pump my chubby legs in the opposite direction, teasingly. I can’t believe the exertion didn’t bother me. My thighs must have chafed in that frilly one-piece my dad had squished me into. My imagined sun quickly dissipates, and I find that I’ve absentmindedly poured the remaining contents out of my bag of dulled sunshine. The pile looks so much like an anthill that I’m afraid an army of bugs will come out when I touch it, but with slow and steady hands I manage to cut it into uneven lines. I’ve never done so much in one go, but each boost seems to make my memories hurt less, dwelling has never been my thing.
    We got married at the Saint Luke Church in a town over from Weston a week later. I did two lines of heroin before the ceremony. Oxycodone wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to feel warm and personable—something I always felt with just a little bit of brown courage. I had to steady myself on Mary’s paper-white sculpted arm before beginning my lone march to the front. My mother’s wedding dress had been tailored to fit me, and the newly taken-in seams hugged the small curve of my hips before billowing out into a full skirt that I had difficulty not tripping over. Light shone in through the stained glass windows, leaving a rainbow of light fragments all over the guests; by the time I reached Jeremiah in front of the sanctuary I was dizzy. My eyes fought to focus on his. When they did, I felt so comfortable under his gaze that I wanted to burrow into his jacket and sleep.
    I moved into his apartment and it didn’t take long to get a drug connection—but I was doing well. I got a job, a real not-just-pretending-to-do-my-job job, working at Jeremiah’s friend’s firm as the managing advertiser’s assistant. I had really quieted down my habit with Jeremiah’s adorable ignorance as inspiration—I showed an alarming amount of self-control, each day was sectioned off into three spurts of two lines. Most heroin users had devolved to injecting when they were as long gone as me. Not that I never considered it. I’m just terrified of needles. After a couple months of comfortable enough cohabitation there came, that day.
    I snort the last line and stand. The world feels crooked. I begin to take small steps towards the deep end of the pool. The snow is falling harder now, but my skin is unaffected by its icy attack.
    That day was like most days. I was watching TV while he took a shower; my feet were up on a stack of math tests he’d been grading earlier. I had begun to nod off, my head lolling to the right on the back of his threadbare loveseat. I didn’t hear him come in, and drowsily opened my eyes to a familiar gaze inches from my face. His lips were against mine. It was all so, routine. His fingers slipped up my thighs underneath my skirt and pulled my underwear away, I had to mask my shudder of revulsion at the feeling of his wetted fingers habitually moistening the soft uninterested walls of my vagina. Once he was inside he tore my shirt off and I moaned because I hoped it would make him get off faster. I missed that new feeling. Habitual sex was not for me, the largest lesson learned from my first long-term relationship. When he threw my newly unhooked bra I felt something slip away with it, and then I remembered.
    I pulled his face to mine and kissed him, staring into his eyes. He smiled against my mouth; “you’re really liking it today, aren’t you?” I moaned again in response as he pushed into me with a newfound vigor. When I felt his semen crawling down my inner thigh I began to panic. As he extricated himself from me I knew it was too late.
    “What is this?”
    “What?” I eyed the bag, half full.
    “I knew you were doing some shit, with that far off look in your eyes, but this looks serious.” He opened the bag and sniffed at it lightly, as though he could glean some knowledge from its scent.
    “You’ll have to have your nose a lot closer to figure that out.” I laughed until I cried.
    Now I’m back here, in this lonely wasteland where I began. I couldn’t stop. My mother was happy to receive me. Her once full house was now emptied of the mud-tracking children who had to break something purposefully just to get an iota of attention. She seemed more present, newly predisposed to take my side.
    “You got married too soon. I told you that when you got engaged.” She didn’t. She just pities me because I told her that I’m pregnant. I needed to tell someone. Pregnant. Me. I didn’t even think it would be possible with the way I rape my body. It’s been a month since I found out, and I’ve yet to speak to Jeremiah—when someone says never talk to me again, are there loopholes? Is this one of them?
    I feel more at home here, at the pool, than I do in my mother’s sterile house. My legs lose the ability to keep moving as I reach the wall of the deep end of the pool. Its lonely walls surround me, longing to be full of chlorinated water and flailing legs. The diving board above me looks like a plank to the heavens. I reach forward as though to grab on to it and remember how little of the pool is actually filled. I’m so warm. Unable to hold my body up any longer, I fall into the snow. Breathing is like doing sit-ups. Looking up, I can hardly see the sky—just the white of that diving board. I know what I need to do.
    Thrusting my arms and legs in a circular motion against the icy snow once more, I use the last of my energy to make another angel—it seems so important, but I can tell it looks disabled compared to the one I’d last made. How long ago was that? I pull out my pocket-watch and I can’t even feel it in my hands. Have I gained super strength? I use my mouth to open it; my hands can’t seem to grasp anything. 2:23. In my peripherals I see a man with red eyes and a balding head emerging from the walls—he has my father’s dying smile stitched onto his face as though to mock me. My vision blurs. I hear what sounds like a crack and a winged demon with a familiar dark curtain of hair flaps toward me. I struggle to keep my eyes open to see my mother’s foretold pool-demons coming from the pits of hell—how did she know? I feel as though I am surrounded. I fight my immobile body, longing to defend myself from the onslaught—to run again, but my limbs won’t respond.
    “It’s okay,” says one with pronounced veins pulsating on his forehead, eyes glowing in the moonlight. His gelled yellow hair is unmoving in the wind. I feel oddly calm. My eyelids begin to droop; gravity seems to be my true enemy. My body feels relaxed, lounging on a featherbed, but I fight it all the same. His assurance only makes me more alarmed, but my body and mind don’t seem to be connected—every attempt I make to move is imagined.
    “We’ve come for you.” I almost want to laugh; he leans forward and touches me. I feel nothing—I didn’t expect to. I let my eyelids fall.

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