I’ve Got a Few Pool Stories

I don’t know why, but I do. This is one of four in my files. The other three are just an opening paragraph and a notion, so far — although one already has a Steve Morris illustration. He sent the art a year ago to see what it might prompt. It’s a good image! All his images compel me. I just don’t know what events to build around it yet.

When I was a kid, 5 or 6, I was thrown into a pool. Not once, but repeatedly. It was an era, I gather, when swimming instructors had the idea that everyone is born a natural swimmer. Even babies. Just throw them in! Then stand at the edge, commanding them not to panic. From there, they’ll get the hang of it, and you can introduce technique. I remember struggling to backfloat properly while being berated by the demon who gave the lessons at the Y. So — is there a certain anxiety that lurks, for me, every time I smell chlorine and see the clean white walls, the aqua blue of a big YMCA-style pool? Is that why so many pool-set horror stories now sit in my files?

Maybe it’s just that when you see water so unnaturally calm . . . you suspect some worse unnatural thing.

[pool from It Follows]

A few years later, I took lessons again, under a friendlier regime, and became a decent swimmer. Ended up competing. Not on anything like an Olympic level, of course — but I was freestyle anchor in 200m relays, and delivered a win from behind a few times. Still proud of that.

I wonder, though, if pride in my modest swimming career is related to the way I felt proud at not being scared when I sneaked into my first R-rated slasher in a theater. Sure, I jumped at points, but I laughed too. A big change, at 16, from the way I’d hid around the corner during intense parts of the first R horror movie I ever saw at home, when I was 9 or 10. I ended up being a lot tougher in the theater than I expected. So maybe, given my early-childhood experience, swimming pools offer a chance to be tougher than I expect. Maybe in today’s story I’m making the pool even worse so I can still beat it every time.

Maybe it’s less personal. Maybe pools are a metaphor for fiction in general. There’s a shallow end and a deep end. You can see the darker water, right over there. You might be wary of it. Maybe you should be. Maybe stay right here. Where you can stand.

Or maybe you’ll dare it. Maybe it’s time to prove you can handle any part of the pool at all.

Hang on — is this a metaphor for reading fiction, or writing it?

[Pool from Let the Right One In]

Honestly though, let’s not go all in on the idea that I’m working out childhood trauma, or making any grand statement. Stories are more about noticing the metaphors we can play with, the wires we can cross. What if we cross this wire and this wire? Do we get a spark? I like the idea of crossing the perfectly clean pool with the rotting corpse. I like the idea of crossing innocent children with corrupt revenants. I like a narrator convinced he’s justified in all his thoughts while he’s so very wrong. It’s a fun dip — in some kind of water. Feel free to comment below on today’s story, or to drop any semi-related thoughts.