Fire Solves All Problems Perfectly pt 53

You wave your season swimming passes at the bored girl behind the counter who barely looks up from her magazine as she buzzes you into the locker room; once changed and wetted down you race each other outside onto the pool patio where the sun ricochets off the new concrete and the water, a galaxy of suns surrounding you. The pool itself is huge, long, going from a shallow three feet all the way to ten, boys jumping off the diving board headlong into the water, kids everywhere, running along the concrete and being told to slow it down, getting drinks from the small snack shop with elaborate video games that annihilate entire city blocks, floating in blown-up ducks and horses, standing on their hands underwater and splashing each other ceaselessly. You carve out a space and lay down your towels, sliding into the water, hiking your arms up over the lip of the pool and surveying everyone. There’s an older man playing with a group of little kids on the other side of the pool; they crawl on his back, trying to pull him under, and he obliges them, pretending to be unable to resist only to rise back up growling like a monster. He has a faded tattoo of a Great White on his shoulder and USMC in block letters beneath.

Tim and Jason are wrestling in the water, splashing, whistles blown and ordered by the nearby lifeguard to sit out for two minutes. Grumblingly they haul themselves out of the water and sit on the bench beneath her post, scowling at their feet while they wait. You float toward the old man, who is letting the kids step into his palms to be lifted clear out of the water. He’s a little like your grandfather, and you get in line and get flipped like the rest of them, and love it, and try it again and again. You don’t notice that the old man is pushing you towards the deeper parts each time, and the little kids can’t follow so they go back to the shallows. You can’t touch the bottom so the old man holds you up, letting you rest on his leg while he asks you about school. It’s just the two of you, with grown-ups around but they aren’t paying any attention, and Tim and Jason are in the arcade. The Shark tells you to try on his goggles, retrieving them from his neck, holding you on his lap while you slide them on. Sometimes there’s money on the bottom, he says, you want to look? And you say sure, and he holds you around the middle tightly while you looking under water at all the pale legs that kick and splash, dragging down great silver wands of bubbles that divide a hundredfold as they rise, and when you look down at the Shark’s body you see that his erection is pulled out and standing stiff, pressing up from between your legs.

You tell him that you don’t see any money and he says to keep looking, holding you, his hands snaking their way inside your suit and pushing at your butthole, and then painfully inside of it; he is sliding you back and forth on his lap, and you hear a grunt; there’s long white streaks of something in the water and he shoves you off of him, swimming away and not looking back. You can’t touch and almost panic, but make it to the side and pull yourself out. Your suit pulled around and you yank it into place, burning, humiliated. You pull off the goggles and throw them in the water, watching as they sink out of sight.