"We Bluegills" (Robert Travieso 1998)

"We Bluegills" (Robert Travieso 1998)

Fiction

"From our side of the pool we Bluegills watch the boys from the Coast Guard saunter out of the visitor’s locker room to a complicated group clap that resounds in layered echoes all across the natatorium; over the sloshing pale green of the pool water, out onto the lacquered deck tiles, bang against the concrete ceiling and back down again, and from the roar in the stands it seems they must have brought their own fans, or else turned ours instantly against us. The Coasties all look, to a man, all of them, like bachelorette strip-tease dancers, or gigolos even, each one of them shaved and tanned and buffed to a shine with a crew cut in a black Speedo, each emerging from the tunnel out into the fluorescent light one by one by one, from the shortest man to the tallest, in perfectly timed increments, each stopping to pose for a beat at the edge of the entranceway with his hands upon his hips before strolling on toward the visitor’s bench, the whole line of them eventually laid out before us like a de-nested matryoshka doll, the entire rise and run of them forming a perfectly apportioned slope of blunt brushcuts, and a foot below that, a perfectly angled plane of broad shoulders."

Robert Travieso

One Story 111 (2008)

2008

2008

One Story

Robert Travieso

http://www.one-story.com/index.php?page=story&story_id=111

19 pp.

eng

Manuscript

Travieso, R. (2008) 'We Bluegills' One Story 111.

Travieso, R. (2008) 'We Bluegills' One Story 111.

One Story

Short story