Warm sun flashed across his inner thigh — it was 10 am on a Friday and Alex had just taken his shorts off in public.
Down the steep slope of smooth grass, dotted with cream-pink-coffee colored bodies, shimmered the shifting lapis mosaic of Barton Springs. Cool, crystal water — deep and cool — deep and cool and lanced with sunlight into its deepest recesses.
Alex’s skin prickled in spite of the heat. He blinked. Women kept dancing in and out of the corners of his eyes. As if aware of the limits of his vision they pirouetted at the periphery, exposing a smile, flashing a patch of not-quite-tanned, pale/burned skin. Alex remembered his state of undress.
He’d come straight from tennis and hadn’t packed his swim suit. Now, only a wafter of nylon protected his honor from The Cry of Alarm, The Sinuous Security Arm, The Awkward-Stilted Conversation at one of Jaime’s dinner parties, all leading to and culminating in, inexorably, The Groveling Instagram Apology.
He had to get to the cold water.
Tucking and lifting in one movement he stood up. Leaning back against the decline he descended, grass sprouting softly between his toes as dappled light dithered across his calves — already screaming in delight at their newfound importance.
In the bottom left corner of his left eye he saw a caramel woman in half-crescent shades. Her curves ballooned like blown bubble gum as she looked up, enraptured, at her white-marble boyfriend. The sun baked them till she melted and spread out, dripping over his hard-chiseled coldness.
Quickly to the water now.
Alex could see the waves within waves — the ripples of light, rippled by ripples of water, rippled by rippling humans who rippled from monkeys that rippled up plants which rippled the sunlight into life.
Within those shifting sine waves Alex knew he could dive down forever without touching the bottom. That everything real was infinitely deep and complex and thus could not be completely understood nor mastered and thus was worthy of the attempt. He understood too, even as his feet shifted from grass to clammy concrete, that the waves contained him in their infinity — and vise versa — that he and the waves were part of a mutually constitutive structural functional organization — slamming itself into itself, again and again, gasping for air between moans of pain/pleasure.
Splitting and recombining, diffusing and cooling — till hot friction slams into you again — splitting and recombining, splitting and recombining, waves, ripples, plants, monkeys, humans.
Alex jumped out into the air, throbbing heat spreading, arching, rising…
And then submerged in the deep coolness.
Charles Bradbury, 10/02/21