September 8, 2014 | Occasus | Issue 4 | Fiction

The Pool

It was a sunny day in August. The sun was high, and bright, and Annie was beginning to sweat from the heat. She wiped at her brow and tucked a stray lock of chestnut hair behind her ear. Annie was, or rather is, a swimming instructor. Or at least that is her summer job. She first got the job three summers ago, the summer after her high school graduation, and each summer since she has returned to her home town of St. Catherine's and to her job at the community pool.

She could have stayed at school for the summer, in fact, she almost had. Her friend Mary, who worked in one of the libraries on campus, had said that they were in need of a summer student, and her boyfriend Carl was staying to take some extra classes to help round out his minor. Annie had spent the better part of the last week of term deliberating over whether or not she would stay. She loved Carl. They’d been together since freshman year and she didn’t envy the thought of spending another summer away from him. She hoe’d and humm’d, asking friends and family for advice on just what exactly she should do. In the end she had decided not to stay on campus and instead to return home for the summer as usual. Annie had decided that as much as she didn't want to be away from Carl, she wanted even less to spend a whole summer away from her family. She barely saw them as it was, thought Annie. She spent the summers and Christmas holidays with them, but apart from that it was maybe a few weekends out of the year that she actually got to see them. She saw Carl a lot more than that, she thought.

And so she had come home. And she had taken up her place by the pool, and was—if you recall from the beginning of the story—beginning to sweat from the heat of the August sun. She was standing near the shallow end of the pool, unconsciously taking in the feeling of the warm wet concrete under her bare feet. She was doing her best to keep an eye on the group of eight-year-olds that she was instructing of this afternoon. There were twelve of them in total: eight boys, and six girls. It was free swim time and the kids were busy playing a game of Sharks and Minnows, shouting and splashing as they made their way from one side of the pool to the other. Or at least, most of them were.

Out of the corner of her eye Annie watched as David Bell, whose family lived only a couple of blocks away from Annie’s, got out of the water and, trying to draw as little attention to himself as possible, slowly made his way toward the deep-end of the pool.

So, Annie was not caught the least bit off-guard when the cries began to ring out into the humid August air.

“Help!”

David’s cries, high-pitched and filled with a desperation and terror one might expect from someone who had just been taken hostage, pierced and completely drowned out the shouts coming from the shallow-end of the pool.

David had, in a bid to impress his peers with his daring and bravery, climbed the five steps of the diving board determined to perform the greatest cannon-ball any of them had ever seen in their lives. The problem had come when, mid-way through bounding off the long sky-blue board, David had decided that the board was in fact much higher than it looked from the pool deck and that maybe he oughtn’t jump off of it after all.

Now, if you’re not familiar with how diving boards work, you may not know that there comes a certain point in the process of jumping off a diving board where the leaving of the board becomes more or less inevitable, as the board has absorbed the energy you initially put into it and is now determined to use it to throw you off of itself and into the water.

David had already passed that point. The board had bucked and David, finding himself quickly slipping off its surface did the only thing he could think to do; he spun his body around and with a kind-of adrenaline-fueled bout of strength and coordination he had never before known himself to be capable of, wrapped his arms around the end of the board just as he began to fall passed it. His feet were now kicking frantically as he dangled a few feet above the water.

Annie let out a short sigh, and hurried towards the diving board.

“It’s okay, David. Just drop down into the pool,” Annie crooned. She was doing her best to use her most calming tone of voice, while trying to hold back the giggling laughter that was threatening to bubble up from the back of her throat.

The voice, Annie noticed, had had at least a small effect as it was with a still panicked, but less piercing, voice that David responded.

“No! I can’t! I don’t want to let go Mizz Anne. Please! Pull me up, Mizz Anne! Pull me up, I’m scared!”

Annie placed her hands firmly on her hips; Were it not for the red Speedo swimsuit she was wearing, and the fact that her pupil was currently dangling from the end of a diving board, she could have easily been mistaken for a kindergarten teacher. And it was with a teacher’s voice, simultaneously reprimanding and reassuring, that she next spoke.

“No way, Davey. You got yourself up there, now you have to get yourself down. I’ll be right here if something happens but I’m not going up there to get you.”

David began to protest some more, tears of exhaustion, indignation, and fear, all spilling together and running down his flushed cheeks and into the water below. But it was no good; Annie had been here before, and she was standing firm. She knew that helping David back up onto the board would do a lot more harm than his dropping down into the pool ever could. And in that moment Annie could see a change roll across David’s tear-streaked face. She watched as David, his short arms burning from the effort of clinging to the diving board, passed into the final stage of grief: Acceptance. Then, with a look of hardened resolution far beyond his years that David let go of the diving board and, with a sharp clap as his body hit the water, sunk into the pool.

One Mississippi.

Two Mississippi.

Three Mississi-

David’s head shot out of the water, his bowl-cut black hair plastered to his scalp.

“You did it!” cried Anne.

And she was smiling, because he was smiling. As David’s face bobbed up and down above the surface of the water, an elated smile broke across his face. He bobbed there for a moment, beaming, and then he began thrashing his legs, making a bee-line for the side of the pool.

“That was fun,” he said, “I want to do it again.”

  Anne laughed. David smiled.

JONAS TROTTIER is an undergraduate student at Western studying Biology and Theatre. He enjoys the creative exercise of writing, as it gives him reason to dwell on aspects of his environment and experience that he might otherwise take for granted.