BY STEVE BAILEY
Copyright is held by the author.
BLACK TILES glided below me in a straight line, like days: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday . . . Six tiles formed a cross on the wall, inches below the waterline. When I reached this point, I felt death, cold as the water. The lap lane, the life lane, ended. The black cross was a grave marker in an aqua cemetery. Then I turned and swam to the other end, reincarnating until another black cross greeted me. Death and rebirth were the themes of this exercise.
Winded, I took a break. In front of me, I saw a whiteboard next to the towel hooks with the heading ONE HUNDRED MILE CLUB JAN. 1-DEC 31. Scattered on it were names and numbers, recording the club members’ progress. One hundred miles in a year? Not for me. I’m doing the minimum required to avoid another heart surgery.
Laurie, 31, in black block letters, was in the bottom right corner. Whoever Laurie was, she was progressing well toward her goal. Thirty-one miles and the dreary winter of the new year were still with us.
I swam weekly, breaking each time to check Laurie’s advance. The number was always larger than before. As the weather got warmer, I switched to the outdoor pool, and when the water became tepid, I returned to swimming indoors and noticed that Laurie was halfway toward her objective.
One afternoon, I was alone in the pool except for a woman gracefully doing the American crawl five lanes away from me. I was at the pool’s far end when she got out of the water, but when I saw her approach the whiteboard, I swam breaststroke to watch her. With a large black towel wrapped around her tall, fit body, she bent down and wrote on the board’s bottom right corner. That was the only time I saw Laurie at the pool.
By the time summer morphed into fall, Laurie had done 85 miles. Then, the number stopped increasing. Throughout October, as the black line flowed under me and crosses presented themselves, Laurie’s number remained stuck at 85. When I caught a bus to the pool late that month, I found Laurie sitting beside another woman. I sat behind the two.
“Everything you will need to settle my estate is in my filing cabinet,” she said listlessly to her companion. Then sobs from both as they held hands.
That afternoon, I dove into lane six. I swam a mile and left the pool with every muscle sore. From then until the end of the year, I swam a mile in Laurie’s lane whenever I could, and after each mile, I added mine to Laurie’s count.
The crosses at the end of lane six were not grave markers but symbols of resurrection, and I felt warmth whenever I reached them. By Christmas, I had done the 15n miles I needed to complete the woman’s mission.
The day after New Year, I found the whiteboard wiped clean. Laurie 100 was gone.
***
Steve Bailey is a retired history teacher who has been a freelance writer for the last four years. His work has appeared in CommuterLit, The Bookends Review, 101 Words, Ariel Chart and others. He has self-published three novels and a collection of short stories and has been published in several anthologies. This work is listed on his website vamarcopolo.com, and his blog is https://vamarcopolo.blogspot.com/ He lives with his wife, Cindy, in Richmond, Virginia, near his two children and five grandchildren.