The Shallow End

By Bridget Goldschmidt

/ Second Place, 2025 Plentitudes Prize in Flash /      

They were all playing in the pool that day: Midge, the other kids from the apartment buildings, and her father. He was like a big kid himself. Everybody said that, especially her mother. Sometimes she had a smile on her face when she said it. Often, she didn’t.

Her father could play rough, forget Midge was just a little girl. “You’ll hurt her, Larry,” her mother would warn when things looked like they were getting out of hand. “Aw, she’s tough,” her father would counter. “A regular little monkey. Arms like spaghetti, but strong as anything.”

So he’d toss her in the air like a boomerang; dangle her over the terrace railing 10 floors up while her mother yelled at him to stop and he called back, “It’s all right, Dee, we’re only playing”; encourage her to hang upside down from the jungle gym. Once or twice, she’d fallen, but what was a skinned knee or a banged elbow? “Walk it off,” her father urged. “Only babies cry.” Midge may have been little and skinny, but she was seven years old already; she was no baby.

And it wasn’t just her father’s idea of fun. Midge loved the sensation of flight, leaving the earth far below for points unknown, hurtling through limitless space, only to land in the safety of his arms. A few bumps and bruises aside, he’d never let anything bad happen to her.

That day, after her mother had gone upstairs to make dinner, they were playing a game of Marco Polo, or pool tag, that had degenerated into a free-for-all, the bigger kids splashing a lot and trying to duck each other, her father most of all. Then they all piled in and began ambushing each other, descending into deep pockets of frothy bubbles and dappled light, and then bursting out from under, gasping for breath, their cries and shouts exploding in the air with the shock of fireworks.

This was the same pool where her father had taught her how to swim the summer before, towing her far into the deep end and then letting her make her own way back. And she had, water stinging her eyes and trickling from her mouth, arms and legs flailing, but swimming just the same. “Good job!” he had boomed, scooping her out of the pool to swing her aloft in triumph.

Now he was an angry giant, batting puny forms away with both hands as they tried to pull him down. Midge reached up and seized the back of his neck, the same sensitive spot that her father would grasp, his fingers firm along the knobs of bone just under the skin, to steer her in the right direction when they were out walking. “C’mon, Smidge,” he’d say, using a pet name for her pet name.

That day, she held onto his thick neck with as much strength as she could muster, hoisting herself out of the water to lie along his broad, sunburned back. He threw an arm back and flung her off the way a dog might flick a paw by its ear to swat away a fly.

Midge catapulted across what seemed half the pool, falling with a splat into the shallow end. She sliced head-first through the water, which slowed her descent, and hit the bottom with a thud she felt but didn’t hear, the corner of her temple connecting with the smooth concrete while the rest of her floated upward at a crazy angle, almost like she was one of those bendable plastic dolls whose heads could be twisted in any direction but not snapped off.

She let herself rise up to the surface, her face just above the water, ears still below so sounds remained muffled, staring at a broad, clear sky of the same chlorinated color, which looked as though a windshield wiper had scraped it clean. Everyone else kept playing.

She had never before thought of her body as something that could be broken forever in an unguarded moment, dropped and shattered like a china cup, beyond use, beyond saving. Right here, without anyone even noticing it.

Midge scrutinized the sky as though it could tell her something. There would be no more somersaults on concrete, no more daredevil dives off unknown heights, no more launches into space.

Standing up in the chest-high water, temple smarting as her neck signaled its future stiffness, she pushed her way to the pool’s edge, pulled herself out, and walked over on shaky legs to sit in her little folding beach chair that was a miniature version of her father’s. She shivered a little in the warm air. That was enough time in the pool for today.