The Pool Boy

Prologue: MayI stared up at the sun and blinked once, twice, and three times. Before causing a self-induced episode of blindness, or a migraine, I closed my eyes and saw my future. I envisioned a blue pool, a clean spirit and body, like a glass orb in a museum or the inside of a kaleidoscope, swirling. Sweat rolled over my cheeks and the cords that lined my neck. The heat felt as if it were over a hundred degrees. It would stay there until the end of August, or longer. A young man dangled in the folds of my mind, but I didn’t know his name. A stranger. Someone beautiful and charming. Someone younger than my middle-aged self. He swam in a vast abyss of blue-blue water, stroke after stroke, head under the silky liquid for over three minutes, sunken, water-logged, and capsized…something. Eventually he stepped out of the pool—my pool!—and he was only a boy, a pup, so very young, someone beyond handsome, almost god-like, and just right for my needs. A younger man. Perhaps too young for me. The perfect specimen of masculine beauty. He dripped with water from the pool, stepped up to me and shook my hand, introduced himself to me, no longer a stranger, and eventually I smiled, welcomed him into my tiny social milieu, into my semi-sightless world of an older and wiser man, allowing me to fall in love with him during a summer of sticky heat, bliss, and lust. And when I opened my eyes, bedazzled and unsure of the realities around me, grasping at sanity and clarity, this is what I: saw heard felt tasted smelled…that summer, so long ago, in my own youth. Part 1: June