In the middle of the night I stepped out onto the grass and across the pebbled driveway to the swimming pool fence, the pool’s light off then and only a first quarter moon overlooking all.
I was born under such a moon, which meant I would be forward driven, my mother once told me, although I have only ever been conscious of wanting to be naked and alive outdoors, as I was then, at 15 or 16. I descended down the pool steps, nudged by distant shadows as I stretched my arms across the velvet August water, paddling against nothingness, onward, onward, until my limbs grew tired and I opened my eyes as if after a long slumber only to espy my father, dressed for tennis, hopping into his jeep, moonlight gone and the silhouettes of night transmuted into solid contortions before me.
I waited, invisible, until my father drove away, before stepping across dew back to our house, still in shadow, wanting not to enter, feeling like my swim had prepared me for something greater, something other than returning to the dark and dreary lair of my childhood. I wanted to run elsewhere outside, beyond the green, the swimming effervescence, out into the world, which would hold me gently, or so I believed then. Instead, I had to retire to my room, its untidy bed and dream.
With that memory gleaming, 50 years later, I descended at the blue hour into that same pool, having parked my jeep outside the property, alongside the road, so I could find my way to the place someone else now owned that remained remarkably the same, same diving board, slate path bordering the pool, surrounding boulders and shrubbery, all where they used to be inside the fence my father built so many years ago.
I slipped out of my shift and underwear and stepped down into the water that was lit that night and felt cool. Directly under the diving board the underwater light beckoned, highlighting the waving folds of time of my still strong arms as I made my way back and forth across the pool’s length, as if through years, porpoise-like and free.
After a while I flipped onto my back and searched for stars, difficult at first to espy in the moonless night as I swam back and forth in a kind of trance, feeling young and old, self-accepting and insignificant as the dots overhead that dimmed as the sky blanched. Only then did I step out of the pool, admiring my audacity as I swatted water off my exposed limbs, my body better defined in its beauty than its flaws in the thin darkness. I stepped into my underwear, slipped on my pink shift and whisked down the familiar drive that had become tomorrow, a hibiscus borne by wind trying to beat daylight.
Arya F. Jenkins’s stories and CNF have been featured in About Place Journal, Cleaver Magazine, The Nonconformist Magazine, Sinister Wisdom and many other publications and anthologies and have received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, a collection of short stories, and a novel. Arya’s website is aryafjenkins.com and her blog, aryafjenkins.blogspot.com.