Childhood at the Pool
A cycle of three 100-word flash fictions about coming of age at the Cold House City Pool.
FIRST KISS
Most Tallatippah kids got their first kiss either at the Cold House City Pool or at a Baptist youth lock-in.
Neither was romantic, but both places made people act… different.
In summer, girls lounged along the sides, sun on their shoulders. Boys showed off from the high dive and came up grinning and bloody-nosed from bad landings.
Younger kids watched this mating ritual while testing their courage diving to touch the drain.
Everybody remembers who kissed who first at the City Pool.
For some reason, the water always seemed warmer after sunset, and the lifeguards mostly looked the other way.
MERMAIDS FOR A SEASON
Every summer, two or three middle-school girls at the City Pool decided they were mermaids.
They lounged on the concrete, wet hair hanging. Slipped silently into the water whenever adults came too close.
Younger kids tried it briefly and got bored, but those girls stayed mermaids all summer.
Dads grew irritated carrying their mermaids to and from station wagons, but eventually the girls figured out the magic for switching between feet and flippers.
Then school started and the girls cut their hair and kept legs the rest of their lives.
Next summer there were always two or three new mermaids.
RITE OF PASSAGE
The high dive at the City Pool was impossibly high. The ladder shook. The board swayed. You could see half of Tallatippah County from the top.
Every child who grew up around Cold House remembers standing there, knuckles white on the rails, trying to decide whether they were still a child or not.
Some jumped clean.
Some bellyflopped hard enough to bruise their ribs.
Some stood with their toes hanging over the edge, weeping with terror and vertigo.
Some climbed back down ashamed, tears and snot streaking their arms and chests, but nobody ever made fun of them.
Not there.
“The high dive at the City Pool was impossibly high.”
That line carries almost the whole architecture of childhood inside it.
What I loved here is how nothing is exaggerated. The pool becomes myth simply because memory stayed there long enough. The mermaids, the first kisses, the shaking ladder — all of it feels deeply local and strangely universal at the same time.