Pool Sex

1

She had tossed her clothes like rotten bandages to a pile in the corner, gripping the sides of the bathtub, letting herself down to carefully sink into the water. It was scalding hot, gaping her pores apart, prickling her gooseflesh up to show itself for venting, hot water leaking in through every open orifice to draw out her spirit and chase it up to vapor. She gasped and moaned in the shock of the pain. The steam had risen up from filling, fogging over the mirror. Immersing up to her chin in the burning pain, the room around her took on magical aura, as she into a sacred sanctuary locked off, no windows and the one door dead bolted well. Through the mist and the bubbles and prickle of epsom salts, the mural wallpaper, a pseudo-renaissance rendition of Atlantis, of King Neptune, of coral and water, came alive to form the exterior body of the Kingdom she sunk into, a purgatory to burn away every last impurity, tearing out a thousand tiny splinters from deep below her skin.

Water teased, at first, prickling pains poking at her skin as it enveloped her in the first descent. If she were feeling especially flirtatious she’d do it one limb at a time, legs and arms reddened to a lobster-scald before they timidly started lowering herself beneath the risen foam. By the time she had settled in, letting herself relax into the strangely tense posture at the bottom of the smooth white tub, the heat began to settle in. At first an embrace, then stripping, the hug yanking itself away by force to expose bloody-raw the flesh beneath, rubbing salt in it. Her head began to pound, her forehead screaming for relief. It was always that which brought her out, the warning sign before the pain could become truly ecstatic, the pounding heart and binding tension headaches ruining it before she could be truly hurt.

She left the water, dripping onto the folded tower beside the bath as Venus rising from her shell. She was virginal anew, sending off radiating heat from empty repositories already cleansed in the water of all the evil once held within them. Stumbling to the sink, she filled and held the frosted glass to her head, gulping down the cool water before tossing the remainder in the sink and crumpling to lay on her back, staring through shut eyes into the ceiling light.

2

The sun had come out filtered through cloud cover and white linen curtains, shining as a greywhite aura cast heavenly, like the interior halls of a fairybook castle nestled in fluffy white clouds. Candles were burning radiantly hot over liquid wax, pooling up in the squat three wick scented jars like cups of green tea. The heavenly glow nestled Cecilia as she reclined, garbed like a goddess herself in white layers of drapings and hosiery, nightgown, dressing gown, stockings, gloves, missing only a veil to be bridally swathed in satin and lace. She had a book cracked open on her reclined legs, propped up at the tail armrest of the sole couch in the room, opposite the windows against the wall.

“You called for me, ma’am?” The help, the one she always liked, with the vibrantly conspiratorial imagination, entered semi-docile.

“Catch.” Cecila snipped the book shut and spun it across the room, thumping him squarely on his ribs with the little hardback, a reprinting of Stowe’s London. “You’re from the city, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“What part.”

“East Treeside.”

“I don’t know what that means. Describe it to me. What kind of district is that? Who lives there? What does it look like?”

“Well, it’s a suburb, sort of near the downtown. Not too much there, just normal families, average homes, it’s not very exciting.”

“Like on King of the Hill?”

“I- suppose you could say that, yes.”

“Come closer, stand next to me.” He did as told, hands clasped behind his back as he cautiously moved beside her. His paunched, drooped body hovered over her like a leaning tower about to collapse, the sort of body acquired from having a lifelong diet of neither indulgence nor refinement, slight flab over minimal muscle from retail work, unthinking sugar intake, and lack of the niceties of class to let him know it was impure to even set foot in proximity of cola and ho-hos.

“You smell like the city. You smell like a Wal-Mart.”

“How’s that, ma’am?”

“Like Old Spice, like you wash your hair with body soap, or your body with shampoo. You smell like you have no skincare routine or hairdresser. You smell like consumption.”

He silenced himself, embarrassed and vindicated at being dressed down by his employer’s daughter.

“I want you to take me into the city.” Cecilia avoided eye contact with him, staring straight ahead, his pepsi-fat midsection blocking her periphery.  “I want you to show me around, drive me places, teach me about the city.”

“You want to do this now?”

“No. Not yet. I need to get a shovel first. I want to dig up the city, you understand? I want to see its layers, I want to be Indiana Jones.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“You’re dismissed.”

“Yes ma’am.”

3

He cracked open the frosted poolhouse door, instantly pricking up with sweat in the overwhelming tropical haze of Cecilia’s winter reign over unused building. She was reclined across a bed of scattered towels, stretched out to pose nude with the tension of a painting, edges softened by the steam and sweat as though she were made of pigment and oil. He locked the door and dutifully undid his plasticky clothes, kneeling to half-crawl, meeting her in the poolside.

His fats jiggled under sickly-pale flesh, expressing droplets of sucrose-laden sweat, saccharine energy pouring off him in the hazy air of the poolhouse. His penis was squishy, its hardness only filling the volume halfway. He was panting hard, his mouth puckered and his eyes squeezed shit, the boyish features twisted around like spun taffy. She stroked herself as she rode him far beyond his capacity, riding her own hand to her own script. He squealed when he came, filling up the condom with semen that felt more like cold piss, as she arched back and throw loud gasps into the air at the ecstasy of her right hand. He exited her, feeling defeatedly proud he had conquered her for whatever that was worth, throwing away the condom and awkwardly detaching from their towel-bed. As he stood up, Cecilia reclined, fattened like after breakfast black pudding, all glistening flesh and exposed anatomy swirled to gelatin on her plate.

Snow was still falling, chased down by sleet, gently thrumming and alighting before melting off the glass structure. It was in the thirties outside, barely high enough to melt, against which she kept the poolhouse as a tropical sauna. The help was panting, dessicated. Desperate recesses of his mind yearned for the winter to come and blow the glass apart, to drag him in long wandering traces across the frozen plains and forests, to drink from iced melting in his hands, to have his body sculpted by lethal winds to tight sinew, to have boiling tea pour like blood from his clenched fist, a desire flowed and then halted, sublimated through layers and complexities of detritus uptaken and sublimated until it emerged as the almost-nothingness he felt now, the vague discomfort at the heat and the vague attraction to the outside of the glass. Cecila was contorted and relaxed, body tensed in an impossible posture, licking her lips like a cat bloodied from mousing. The help barely noticed his own exhaustion, that same core he could dully feel but neither explain nor recognize drained, its finitude diminished, now spilled out irreparable like black organ blood on the jowls of the predator across the concrete floor from him.

He fell asleep still in her clutches, the snakelike air of the poolhouse constricting around him, choking every breath tighter and tighter on the plastic deckchair. Cecilia purred and slipped into the water, silently stroking waves, floating in motionary consciousness of dreams. In the winter, the pool changed its form, no longer the ritual partyhouse of the family but her throne, the garden of her consortion with the serpent. Heating the pool, heating the air, bringing in space heaters, laying towels all along the floor and sleeping in strange nests, she turned the glass enclosure into her body, the poisoned swamp to saturate her roots.

4

Exfoliation under streams of soft water warmed to perfection, gently caressing as she brought the razor to glide, shearing her legs smooth. The skin had already been warmed over, scraped to raw babyflesh with stone and soap, now ready, hairs laid exposed to be scraped and sliced as her skin was. When she finished, she let the razor fall into the trash, drying off in the secular dawn of external purity.

The sauna was warmed up and needed only dashing cups of water across its rocks to be set for her entry. She shut the door behind herself, music throbbing the walls and steam as she sat cross-legged. She drained out in heavy drips, sweat dragging out painfully, a concoction of her own venom and the filth she imbibed on her own.

The room wobbled and the murals turned to life, a bamboo forest wreathed in mist thick enough to aloft her into heavens, nearly collapsing onto the cloud cover as she left. Her head was pounding and swollen, begging for water and trepanning. She switched on the frigid shower, coming down form her cloudtop bed with the cool rains hammering broad ferns and leaves. With soap, she pooled into the lowest peace of a pool below a waterfall, nestled at an even temperature, safe from anything that could touch her, empty, clean, and warm.