Swimsong

This hasn’t quite climbed up the ladder into being a story… but I think I like it as it is. It’s really for all short-sighted swimmers or anyone prone to embarrassing accidents.

 

‘A collision with another swimmer is not unusual,’ she said, ‘except  when the beach is about two miles long and there are only two people swimming in the sea.  That is unusual – even surprising.’

 

‘She was doing back crawl,’ he said.

 

‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘ You were not doing back crawl, and she was considerably younger than you.’

 

‘Age has absolutely nothing to do with a swimming collision.’

 

She rolled her eyes.  ‘Collision makes it sound as if you were speeding along, like one of those Olympic swimmers. You don’t swim nearly as fast as one of them- nor do you have the shoulders, nor’, she said, glancing critically at his stomach, ‘ the narrow waist. Bumped is a better way of describing what you did. You bumped into the only young female swimmer in this entire stretch of the ocean.’

 

She made it sound quite shameful.

 

‘I was doing the crawl,’ he said.

 

‘You still don’t swim very fast even when you are doing the crawl,’ she said. ‘Your crawl is like… crawling- a sort of two year-old’s speed.’

 

‘I don’t look where I’m going when I am doing the crawl and she didn’t look where she was going when she was doing the back stroke.’ He was going to tell her that the young woman had laughed when they had collided but he didn’t think that that would help the situation. ‘An innocent collision,’ he said. ‘You’re making a meal out of nothing.’

 

‘There is no such thing…’ she paused to apply her lip balm and said, with what he thought was an entirely unjustified air of triumph .’… absolutely no such thing,’ and here she snapped her lip balm shut, ‘ as an innocent bump… in or out of the ocean.’