The Pool

by Vic Larson

The balcony was solid and large, built to Hank’s specifications years earlier. He strolled its length and looked out over the backyard from his cantilevered vantage point, across the pressure-treated bench and safety railing, down the dizzying distance to the pool deck below. Memories sputtered for air as they raced to the bubbling surface of his new perspective. The swimming pool was gone. He headed down the stairs. “Caution” warned hand painted letters, and “Danger.”

He remembered assembling treads and risers on a hand cut wooden frame, lifting completed stairs into place with the help of several friends. Anchored between the balcony and a lower deck, the stairway was firmly shoehorned between those other wooden structures. Each step he took toward ground level accompanied a change in elevation that renewed his perspective of the altered yard and the missing pool.

A privet hedge still guarded two sides of the rectangular enclosure, now green where heated crystal blue once steamed in white windborne eddies on cool October mornings. Hank paused at the bottom of the stairs and turned to gauge the distance from the house to the fence at the back lot line, recalling the countless laps he swam on summer evenings. What an ordeal the pool had been to build, wedged between garage and property lines on a narrow suburban lot. But what a joy, facing skyward on sweltering nights, stars and fireflies mirrored in the illuminated blue-green water under his inflatable raft. Moments of bliss. Private. Secluded.

But his beloved swimming pool was gone, sold to strangers, forgotten for a time, and now destroyed. At what expense he wondered, understanding the need to break the concrete to pieces before filling the gaping hole with soil and seed. Otherwise, an intact massive shell would rise ship-like from the yard without the weight of water to counter the hydrostatic pressure from beneath.

Hank stepped cautiously onto the new lawn that spanned the distance from ghostly diving board to phantom shallow stairs. He remembered swimming between the two points, suspended in water like a hot air balloon in an Albuquerque sky. The grass was lush beneath his feet, sinking almost ankle deep in softness, disconcerting in its failure to support him fully by the time he reached the middle of the yard.

Hank’s gaze and stomach fell as the soft grass gave way to dark water, rising after several steps to lap the sides of his shoes. His feet submerged completely by the time he sought the safety of the pool’s edge and the refuge of the deck, out of reach in all directions. The yard undulated in a dizzying response to his shifting center of gravity. The pool was not gone. A seamless floating layer of thick green sod masked a reservoir of deep and sinister black water. He dared not move suddenly for fear of being dragged downward, blanketed by living lawn and held beneath the surface by his own weight. Remorse for building the pool and moving away caused him to tremble and then shake violently. Word of a fascinated toddler had reached him in his absence. The churning water beneath the sod gurgled with indifference and rose up to remind him of his sin.