What has Water Washed Away

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stripes across her bathing suit - performed the save. She threw her body off the steps. She then turned herself, which turned the water, which brought the underwater child closer to her. She kept her face upturned to the air, the water never touched lips pursed like snorkel. She stretched her hand and waited for the water to push the boy towards her, which it did. She sat back on the steps, breathing heavily, and held the boy close and rocked him while he sobbed. She looked up at the lifeguard for a brief second before returning her eyes to the kids. In the early mornings when the lifeguard empties the sludge from the underwater vacuum, he sometimes finds things that have belonged to people. Mostly there is hair: tangles of human hair, once aquatic tumbleweeds, and plastic hair in perfectly preserved black braids. On the shelf of his bathroom medicine cabinet, the lifeguard has collected several momentos from the vacuum sack: an extraordinarily long Frenchtipped fingernail, a tiny ceramic boot, a lavender barette with delicate plastic rosettes along the edges, a holy medal depicting St. Anthony of Padua, a Hermes silk scarf, a toy lifeboat which, in messy handwriting, has been labeled titanic, and one burgundy ostrich feather. There was once a time when two young girls played at the foot of the lifeguard’s chair for the entirety of his shift in the deep end. The girls wore massive goggles and spent long periods underwater. Wide bubbles of their laughter would surface in the instants before their pigtailed heads, and they would inevitably giggle towards the lifeguard, which caused him to look away from them as much as possible. Later, another lifeguard discovered what they had been doing. In crayon, they painted a seven foot mural of the pool, with aquatic animals as patrons. They had drawn themselves as larval stage dragonflies (with pigtails), and they had drawn the lifeguard as a hermit crab. Just before the pool closed, a new lifeguard named Frances had been hired. She wore the most raggedy bathing suit the lifeguard had ever seen on the body 8
of another lifeguard. It was nearly see-through from the rot of the chlorine, but no one else besides the lifeguard seemed to have noticed. Frances had worked as a medic in the U.S. Army and said she had never once apologized to anyone other than herself, and even those times were few. She was a vegan who ate meat when she felt like it, and she had also been in the merchant marine. During most of her breaks, she floated on her back, her belly high above the water like a navigation buoy, asleep. There is a color-coded chart which tells the lifeguard how much chlorine to add to the water during times of chemical distress. So when a mysterious algae began creeping down the walls of the deep end, and the room began to fill with the smell of a fish tank, the lifeguard followed this chart and added more and more white powder to the water, until patrons began complaining that their eyes and their skin were burning very badly. Some suggested that even more powder should be dumped in the pool. Others, led by Frances, thought the algae should be left to run its course. Then the city got a grant from the Wal Mart Foundation to build a pool that was somehow fed from the water that leaks out of the aging system of water pipes underground. There are even fish and baby alligators and herons on the banks, which were constructed by a company that builds realistic habitats for zoo animals, though the lifeguard has never been. On the night before the pool was set to close forever, just before lifeguard closed the door on the dark room, Frances, like a panther and without notice, yelled back into the room, “HELLO!!??!” and her voice bounced back and forth from the cinderblock walls to the surface of the weed-infested pool, and the lifeguard could feel his eardrums shake. The lifeguard, unsure how to respond, yelled, “ HELLO!???!!” and as the sound echoed, the frogs and the crickets started calling back and forth across the pool. 9
Page 1 and 2: w h a t h a s w a t e r w a s h e d
Page 3 and 4: INDEX THE LIFEGUARD CHRIS STAUDINGE
Page 5 and 6: The boy is okay but the lifeguard i
Page 7: He remembers the ripples and curls
Page 11 and 12: kitten, eyes pasted shut, beseech o
Page 13 and 14: ound, sea can bound forth and lap u
Page 15 and 16: DUST zaf yumru i am sitting on the
Page 17 and 18: “The grass withers, the flower fa
Page 19 and 20: “This wasn’t here last time,”
Page 21 and 22: HALF DEAD Jennifer Samani M y plant
Page 23 and 24: 23 CREST TROUGH RIFFLE BAPTIZE CENO

What has Water Washed Away

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