The Chlorine Years
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The pool had been empty for seventeen years, but on certain mornings you could still smell chlorine rising from the cracked tiles, and sometimes, if you pressed your ear to the filter grate, you could hear a distant splash that no one had ever made. Dusk in March had a peculiar scent of old cement and phosphorescent shoes, but after heavy winter rains it smelled like a glass vase with a daisy blossom floating inside.
The bathroom clock was stuck on 11:03. It kept jumping back and forth from 11:03 to 11:04, but the seconds couldn’t go anywhere, so the hands just twisted around on the dial and the battery wound together in the dry, sticky places. A stray hairball poked out from the grate and oscillated as though it wanted to escape.
Once, they had taken the entire place apart, piece by piece. They had peeled each vinyl mosaic off the floor to count the patterns, and traced paths with duck decoy antennas in the dry basement. But this last time, they were afraid of scratching anything because they might never get back together. They didn’t go all the way down past the tiles, into the shadowy curl of the pipes.
Who’s there? This is the deepest question of all.
It’s me—my shape with white lightning stripes, my fog figure rising from the drain.
Voices came from the back of the pool in the shape of line drawings, and framed photographs. Plaque letters bolted to the pool cover read ravedove, lowerravesea. You wouldn’t be able to lift the lid if you wanted to. When I inhale, you feel like a gentle sleeping back which is lying sideways on your bed trying to cover the empty space, and yet somehow the hollow still stretches until you can’t breathe.
If the bathroom clock left its position in◆ About the ending
❧ About the title