Girls Over The Edge | Susan M. Breall
The thrill of blue, the smell of cold water hitting warm concrete, the chatter of girls by the edge of the pool. It was a white-hot day, a day without current or motion. She sat, awkward and apart from the other girls. She wanted to be like them, so she dangled her feet on their side of the pool. She rubbed at her sunburned legs as she listened to their laughter and pretended to understand it. She knew she was not like them, with their bronzed bodies and colorful swimwear. She was a sun-bleached outdated magazine cover, a pair of discarded eyeglasses cast aside on a shelf.
As she looked up at the wide expanse of sky a boy her same age approached. He had her coloring, her same beyond-white skin tone, her same pale blue eyes, red hair, and freckled cheeks. He gave her a warm familiar smile, then walked over to the beautiful chattering girls and pushed them, one by one, over the edge of the pool. She continued to look up at the wide wonderful sky during the screaming and flailing of limbs. One girl could not swim.
He was more than a brother. He fought every nasty boy who threw banana slugs at her legs. He knocked a boy unconscious who forced her to eat garden snails. But the beautiful drowning girl meant no harm, so when she stopped looking up at the sky and looked down at the pool’s edge where her brother stood, she screamed for a lifeguard who then came running from the back alley behind the changing rooms where he was making out with his girlfriend. The lifeguard pulled the beautiful drowning girl out of the deep water that was about to devour her. She thought how fortunate for the beautiful girl that she happened to be right there at the edge of the pool.
About the Author:
By day Susan M. Breall handles cases involving abused, abandoned, and neglected children. By night she writes short stories. She is the 2022 winner of the Gateway Review flash fiction contest. Her stories appear in numerous anthologies including The Raw Art Review, Kairos Literary Magazine, Running Wild Press, The Write Launch, Impermanent Facts, Paragon Press’ Martian Chronicles, and Dreamers Writing.