Free Write - The Pool

This free write was very different. Julia is still in Switzerland, but D-L and Rick didn't go to a cafe. They did the ten minutes in their living room. Next week, if all goes well we'll be in the same country and back at Martel's tea room.

Rick's Free Write

Ever want to scream but don’t want anyone to hear it?

You can simulate a scream, open your mouth wide but with no sound.

But there’s nothing quite like a full-body wail that shakes your entire corpus, right down to the toes. Maybe even vibrates delicate pottery. Scares the dog or cat into hiding under the bed. Enough to make children cry and adults cringe. Trigger the neighbours to call the police because they think there’s a murder in process.

But you’re not looking for anyone else’s reaction. Just the satisfaction of venting, letting it all out. No sound, no questions.

So you find a place and time when you can rattle the rafters in private. Like the bottom of a swimming pool. In the shower, directly into the muffling water stream. Under the duvet. In the car when you’re alone. In the middle of the woods (sorry, bears).

The things that make me want to scream are often electronics. Computer. Mobile phone. Television. Car. Or people who do cruel things to others. Abuse or kill children. Deny medical care. Steal, especially legally. Absurdly restrict rights. Politicians mostly.

I tend to be a slow boil. I can slough off a lot of annoyances. But eventually I reach a point when the kettle whistles. Sorry, then, to anyone in range of my voice.

D-L's Free Write 

Jack zipped up his white puff jacket. It was cold sitting in front of the pool which was covered with red maple leaves. Why management hadn't drained the pool, Jack had no idea. 

Jack looked at the building. All the flats but his were boarded up for the winter, their owners and renters returning to their city job. 

His wife Helen, her real name, and Hélene, her chosen name, was away. She was an airline stewardess and when she got in late with an early morning turn around, she stayed in Boston rather than drive to the Cape.

Jack sometimes went into the city to meet her. The last time he did that, he spied Beth, Wife No. 1 for 32 years,. She'd been his high school sweetheart, and mother of his three daughters.

Only two of the girls still spoke with him, furious that he had left their mother for a woman he'd fallen in lust with. The third daughter, was just as mad, but she felt that the problems were between her parents.

Beth looked good. She'd taken off the weight that she'd added over the years and had a new haircut that took years off her life. Helen/Hélene  at 28 was younger than both Jack and Beth.

Boy had he messed up. He wished he'd never taken that flight where Helen/Hélene came on to him. Of course, he could have said no.

He jumped into the icy pool, no longer heated, and sank to the bottom. He remembered taking great gulps of water.

* 

The next thing Jack remembered was a nurse standing over him. 

"Welcome back," she said. 

Not far enough back, he thought.  

Julia's Free Write 

Somewhere the sun was shining: just not in her corner of the world.

Of course, she shouldn’t complain – after all she was the one who no longer appreciated seeing the sun every day when she was a young adult.

Bu then she hadn’t understood the meaning of “eternal gray” at that point either. Early November and her world sinks below a bank of high fog. This makes for glorious pictures of the “sea of fog” if one rises above it – around the 1’500 metre mark.

But not below.

So escape was her motto, if even only for a day.

And what a day – she found the sun, the fall colors and revived mentally.

OK, November in the alps is a dead season with almost everything shut in the small villages. Something to stave off hunger in one’s pack is a necessity.

That still doesn’t explain the nightmare the flowing night: a man iced over in a pool!

Shades of things to come?

About the Free Writers 

Rick Adams is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices.com, a weekly newsletter reporting the airline industry  top stories . He is the author of The Robot in the Simulator. AI in Aviation Training.  

Visit D-L.'s website  https://dlnelsonwriter.com, She is the author of 15 fiction and three non fiction books. Her 300 Unsung Women, bios of women who battled gender limitations, can be purchased  at https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/300-unsung-women-d-l-nelson/1147305797?ean=9798990385504 

Visit Julia's blog. She has written and taken photos and loves syncing up with friends.  Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/