The Pool

The room is long and nearly white, made from smooth marble that has been cleaned so often it now shines. The stone is complex, not one uniform shade, but with a tendency towards white with flecks of black and gray thrown in. Tiny cracks that look like capillaries and lighting run through the marble, journeying through stillness and stone. There is a dark rectangular doorway on each end of the room, without a door, it promises only blackness. The walls of the marble chamber are completely straight, designed and constructed with perfection. The floor is made from the same pale stone, exuding the same strength and silence as the towering walls. There is a stillness about the room, a hollowed space buried deep, far from noise and movement, quick lights and endless jabber. It is still and solid, lit only by a few large candles flickering from the iron candelabra high overhead.
Mirroring the rectangular shape of the room is a pool. It sits full of cool water in the center of the space, its shape beginning just ten feet from each of the four walls. Within the waters are large slate stepping stones, not quite resting on the bottom of the pool, but hovering halfway below the water’s edge. Thick green plants have grown up from the lowest point, their shiny green stems and thick leaves glisten in the mixture of water and candlelight, competing for space with the steppingstones and reaching forward, towards the surface.
A pale-skinned girl in a small red bikini walks gently from stone to stone. She steps slowly, her toes moving through easy walls of water, her toes finding the hardness of the waiting slate steppingstone as she moves. Her pointed nipples are covered with tiny triangles of bright red fabric, as is the crack of her round white ass. A thin film of water glistens on her like tiny jewels and she moves slowly, feeling each ripple of water move across her bare thighs, stepping carefully from stone to stone in the quiet pool. The gentle lapping of water is the only sound in the room and she looks down, her eyes moving past her pointed breasts and round stomach and towards her shape-shifting legs rippling below the water’s edge, her lower-half brushing past the thick-leafed greenery crawling slowly, endlessly towards the light.

Suspended

The water of the bay is dark blue with a deep undertone of green that emerges from the caverns below the surface in hints and whispers. Small gasps of green explode on the tips of little water ripples as they rise and fall second after second after second, small moments of watery life and death as it moves over the predominantly calm surface of the bay. There is no tanker or sailboat in sight, just the wide blueness of the bay as it stretches into the horizon.
To the northwest, the San Francisco skyline is ten miles in the distance and I can see the hazy purple silhouette of the tallest buildings as they rise from an obscure mist of pale fog at their base. Behind the buildings, rays of sunlight manage to stream in through hazy white cloud cover. Bright bursts of gold sunlight shines down in long streams of gleaming brightness, filling in the background of the city.
To my left, just a few hundred feet from me, is the long metal bridge that connects the land of San Francisco to the land east of the bay. The bridge is two stories, with eastbound traffic on the lower level and westbound on the top. There is never a break in the flow of cars and the rushing movement of motorized machines gurgles like a river in the distance.
The bridge is so close I could almost jump to it, but I am on another surface. I am on a wooden platform, suspended over the water of the bay by two ropes that hold me and the platform above the water’s surface. On each side of the platform, in the center, is a hole. A yellow fibrous rope has been strung through each of the holes and is held in place with a thick knot below the platform. The ropes rise and rise and are eventually covered by the white layer of clouds. I cannot see what they are attached to, I cannot see what holds me.
Because of my weight and the design of the structure with only two ropes, the platform has tilted to one side and I hold onto the yellow ropes as best as I can to keep from falling into the water. I alternate between looking at the water and looking for the source of the ropes in the clouds. The green and blue ripples of the water rise up and down, like the painted figures on a carousel.