The Pool is Not My Home

The whale in the Blue Leaves Community Pool was dying.

Tuesday, 3:00 PM. Sunlight mosses over the sky-blue tiles and red-and-white parasols of the

Blue Leaves Community Pool. The Cottage Cove women squint at bingo boards over their

eyeglasses. Female exchange students share a bowl of cheese nachos, jabbering in rapid Russian.

Old Man Bill squats on a white sunlounger, tapping the rhythm to a Beatles song with his

wooden cane.

A boy steps out of the crystal water, his hair soaked. Water puddles around his sunburnt feet. He

cocoons himself in a towel and joins his mother on the sun lounger. She skims a magazine,

pinning the pages with her long red nails.

The boy observes the sunlight swirling on the glimmering pool’s surface and comes face to face

with the whale. The whale, with its rich skin of blue, green, and purple, barely fits into the

standard 25-yard pool. Cauliflower-like barnacles froth on its back. Morning glory muzzles the

whale’s jaw, the flowers blooming in cyanide. Vinyl seaweed and crumpled paper algae clog its

blowhole. Blood taints the pool a poisonous pink.

The boy points. “Look, Mom, look!”

His mother lowers her sunglasses, one brow raised.

“The whale! It’s dying.”

“What whale?” She eyes the cobalt-blue water.

Groaning, the boy snaps up and runs to the Russian adolescents. “The whale! There!” They

glance amongst themselves and giggle.

To the Cottage Cove ladies. “Right over there!” Tut-tut-tut. They sway their white heads and

smile at him like he’s a toddler claiming to have seen an alien.

To Old Man Bill. “We have to help!” He sticks his grubby, stubbed chin out at the boy as if

considering it. When the boy looks away, he curls a finger around his thinning temple.

“Boy, shut up!” The janitor barks, chin taut. He smacks the end of his broom on the electric blue

tiles. “Let them rest.”

The boy trembles, heart pumping in his throat. He crinkles his small hands into fists and mutters

under his breath. The stench of chlorine is suffocating.

The boy’s lithe body crescents midair and plunges into the water. Bubbles seethe to the surface

and open without a noise. He is gone. Gone like he had never been there. The women return to

bingo, the blonde girls pick up a chip, Old Man Bill hums the melody to ‘Yellow Submarine,’

and the boy’s mother puts her sunglasses back on.

Old Man Bill is the first to feel it. The Earth pulsates beneath the tiles. A guttural bellow of a

whale thrums in his stomach, raising the hairs on his arms. The tiles clatter, jerking up like young

frogs excited to test their new legs. A gust of wind whooshes the parasols shut. Mother Nature

conducts primordial music that cannot be transcribed.

The boy shoots up from the pool, his hair without a single drop of water. He hugs the whale

beneath him, tugging the vines and plastic loose, and whispers promises of never-ending oceans

and chemical-free salt. The whale sighs a bittersweet cry. It fans its large wings and flies towards

the sun.

The whale is free.