monday muddlings: swimming pool

This week, I bring you another piece of fiction for a Monday. This one took a few weeks to write. I’m not sure why. Though it would not leave me alone and insisted on being written before I tried to move on. So, to that end, here you are …

“Swimming Pool”

They had drunk mint juleps with mint that had been taken from the herb garden and bourbon that had come from the private cellar. Jane lay on her side facing away from Prudence, called Prue, who lay on her back looking up at the sun from behind the secure darkness of her wayfarers. There were no clouds in the sky, only the great and enduring light, which drew forth all the hope of rest from the bowels of the world and led it into drought. The sun set Jane’s golden hair on fire, a bright halo drowning out her face. She breathed quietly but heavily, the enduring warmth covering her body like an afterthought of pity. The sweltering July heat caressed Prue’s body, spilling off her onto the ground around her, too cold to be touched, as she shifted in the deckchair, turning her gaze from the sky to the rippling swimming pool in front of her.

Glimmers of the afternoon light danced across the surface of the water, but something dark was there, too, little wisps of shadow melting, teeming within.

Prue blinked.

“Why’d you do it?” Jane sounded faint. The heat was getting in her skin, encasing her with a suffocating certainty. She wanted to rise and to run, to jump into the pool and sink deep within the promise of the chill found in the depths of the endless blue, but she could not convince herself to move. Each time she thought to rise, the heat became all the more holding, bidding her to rest in its promise, a promise it whispered softly against her hair and ghosted over her left ear.

Prue pursed her lips, then licked them, tasting the deception of summer air. Pulling her auburn strands back, she took a silver pin composed of a Celtic design and fastened her strands back out of her face. She watched the shadow grow in the pool. It called to her, drew her in, and haunted her memory with something she had forgotten and had willed herself to forget again and again. Finally, she remembered that Jane had asked her a question. Though, she nearly laughed, it was just as likely that she imagined it. The heat made fools of all of them. The heat, even though it slid off Prue and fell all around her as the ice of her flesh felt the first touch of melting, still tickled her brain with its smooth words and gentle beckoning. Willing her mind to return to her, Prue broke the spell of her thoughts and spoke with a distant sense of matter-of-fact admittance, a tired sound as she replied, to the heat or to her sister she wasn’t sure, “Oh Jane, I just wanted to be perfect.”

Silence. The heat whispered something across the surface of the pool.

After a moment, Prue leaned over and picked her drink up from the stone patio and took a long sip. She studied the ice in the glass, which had begun to melt. Beads of sweat clung to the sides of the silver cup. It slid in her hand slightly, which was trembling. She had painted her nails crimson; the paint had chipped slightly on her right index finger from the shovel. She grimaced. Did the heat console her in this?

“Yes,” Jane breathed, rather heavily. It was becoming difficult for her to form words. She wanted to move her limbs, just to rouse herself, to roll over, but she could not bring herself to do so. It must have been the julep. She had only had one, but she was such an inexperienced drinker. Did she even drink? It occurred to her suddenly that she never had drunk previously. How had she forgotten that? The heat. The heat and the julep. Everything was confused. Everything was confused and yet terribly beautiful. She took a deep breath. “I imagined it would be something like that. You never much cared for things to not be just so. You always had a plan of what it should look like.” A pause. Jane thought she scrunched her eyes slightly in reflection, but she couldn’t be sure that she had. “Is that right? Is that what you’re like?”

Prue ignored her. She was looking at the swimming pool, watching the water and the shadows, surprised to feel the corners of her mouth twinge into a smile, then she grimace on impulse. “It was lucky I came home when I did, otherwise I would have missed you.”

“Lucky.” Jane tasted the word and found it bitter. Slowly she willed her eyes to open, for she suddenly realized they had been closed. What was this strange shadow she was seeing, something between darkness and light, warm and radiant? It must have been the sun through the lids of her eyes, setting her world into a shadowy, glorious red. But her eyes wouldn’t open. Perhaps, she realized, they already were. Wasn’t the side of the house painted the same haunting red? She couldn’t remember. There was little, she realized, that she could remember. Then the events of the afternoon broke into her mind, suddenly and clearly. Jane laughed quietly. “Yes, Prue, even Satan has his miracles.”

From behind her sunglasses, Prue rolled her eyes. It was an old argument, from when they were little. Jane had followed after their mother in religious devotion, spending her life, even to the end, haunted by some face, some emaciated gaze that penetrated the being. Prue had taken after their father in atheistic complacency, spending her life comforted by the certainty of her meaninglessness.

“Satan,” Prue let the name fall like velum and then took a sip of her julep, which was sweet on her lips and kissed her throat with fire, like the Communion wine.

“Don’t call his name unless you want him to come,” whispered Jane, who breathed so heavily that the heat seemed to part like a torn veil with her breath before her gaze, though it could have been imagined. She could no longer discern if her eyes were open. Were any of their eyes open?

That was the last Jane thought. Had she even been speaking?

Prue was laughing. “Was it Satan that made me do it, Jane?” She addressed the water more than the other. The water responded by rippling violently.

Jane coughed softly, though she may have been trying to laugh. Prue couldn’t tell. Jane had kept her face set against the wall opposite her sister, refusing to turn and look at her. “Oh no, not at all. Satan cooperates more with us than we realize. This was your doing; but I’m sure he was glad to help.”

Her voice was calm, contented. Something had changed and it turned Prue’s stomach. Of all times for Jane to be at peace, this was certainly a disappointing one. The thought bothered her, pricked her brain and stuck in it like a burr. She dismissed it as best she could, but kept returning to it again and again, covered in the thick heat that was no longer simply sliding of her flesh, but tarried there like a terrible blessing.

Prue shook her right arm, throwing off the invisible. “We should have had something else. Something with gin in it. It’s too hot. You have gin when it’s hot. Gin with mint and cucumbers and limes. That would have been something, you know? Something good.”

She was babbling, but it was cold and enunciated, scripted. Prue had always seen her life as a script. She wrote her parts over and over again, planned conversations and monologues, placed them into the actual moments of reality with an astute eye to some great, unknown plot that she secretly knew was ultimately nihilistic, and yet nonetheless she desired to cooperate in bringing it to its best, rightful close.

Cooperating in her meaninglessness gave the appearance of profundity and for this Prue was grateful.

Prue’s eyes moved from looking at her sister back to the pool, watching the shadow increase across the water, creeping into her mind and glossing over her eyes. She recognized something in it, the amalgamating shadow writhing in the trembling pool. Then the wisps suddenly split and divided, pulled and erupted, and a face, meager and captivating, fixated its full and piercing gaze on Prue. The transubstantiated lips moved and formed words that emanated from the mouth and curled up from the ripples of blue, teasing through the heat, splitting it in two as they came toward her, until it was interrupted by a violent cry of outrage from the young woman as she flung her julep glass across the pool. It clattered and sloshed on the other side, rejecting the prophecy and crucifying the words midair, condemning them all to a palpable silence.

The face dissolved into the darkness of the pool, which was now all murky shadow, that place Jane had once called Sheol.

The air smelled of spilled bourbon and blood.

“He haunts you,” Jane whispered, knowingly. “That face will haunt you until the end of all things. It’s been that way since the foundation of the world. Some people are captivated by it, some people are haunted. It’s the way. The oldest way.” She breathed deeply, a slight wheeze to her exhale as she asked, again, “Why’d you do it, Prue?”

Prue touched her left cheek, finding a thin drop of moisture had fallen there beneath her sunglasses. “Because I just wanted to be perfect, Jane. You were so perfect. I just wanted to be you.”

Jane took a shallow breath, “That’s it, isn’t it? The way of perfection?” She sounded as if she were shifting in the chair, but Prue didn’t take her eyes from the surface of the pool and the endless darkness that had spread throughout it. “There is no, ‘Be ye perfect,’ unless ‘I am’ is first handed over. It’s just the way. It’s the haunting.”

She was shaking uncontrollably. For a moment, Prue felt as if the purgation of the Holy Ghost was settling upon her soul, the heat of the prophesying sun breaking through the calculation of her secure rejection and denial, when a cry held back within her since the moment she swung the shovel and heard it break against Jane’s head broke forth from her lips and sewed back together the torn veil and laid back to rest those who had risen from sleep.

“Satan and his miracles,” Jane whispered.

Prue turned to her sister, a cold rage frosting her body, ready to be imparted like a dispensation, but she discovered that Jane was not there. She understood. Prue studied the deckchair for several minutes, noted the overturned mint julep that had toppled in the struggle, the shoe that had been stumbled over at the pool’s ledge, the shovel, a halo of blood about its crown, laid to rest beside. She reached to the table that was between the chairs, taking up a cigarette from her pack and her lighter, striking it thrice before it lit.

A long drag, then a slow exhale into the heat, which accepted the burnt offering.

Prue rose, walking along the edge of the pool to the far end, where the control box for the outdoor system was. She watched Jane’s body float in the pool for a moment, saw the mess of blond and blood soaked by the endless blue and considered it beautiful, a sort of art. Prue’s right index finger set firmly on the far right switch, which caused the motorized pool covering to whirr into life and slowly begin its drag across the surface of the pool. Jane floated, peacefully, until the covering pressed against her head and slightly pushed her along the pool, causing her head to bob up from the water suddenly, and Prue saw again the meager face but this time had no reaction to it, but to watch as it eventually succumb and slipped under the covering into the depths of Sheol, as the tarp reached the edge of the pool and the whole was covered in white.

Another drag. Another exhale.

A raven somewhere in the distance let out a sudden cry. Prue walked the long edge of the pool and entered into the house, sliding the glass door shut behind her on her way inside.

With the click of the latch, Prue suddenly cried out in fear and recognition, clutched her hand to her chest, coughed violently, and fell with, “Eleison!” on her lips as she collapsed dead on the marble tile.

© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.