The pool motor hummed. A young man in his late 20s lay faceup on a sun-faded swan, pushing himself in slow circles with one toe. He'd timed the lap at forty seconds. He'd tried to beat it.
He couldn't.
He sighed, looking up at a passing plane.
"Thoughts on the weather?" he asked the swan.
The swan kept its vinyl beak shut. Of course it did. It was a pool float.
He drifted back to the wall on his floating swan.
He reached with his toe and stopped it short.
He squinted at the surface of the water. The ripples were wrong. They slid in thin lanes toward the far corner of the pool.
'The ripples' he thought
More ripples begin to appear in the pool all headed towards One Direction.
Something was pulling them, he could tell. He could sell this because the hairs on his arms stood and pointed the same way.
The pump stuttered. A dot in the sky stopped pretending to be a plane. It swelled. The swan kept its beak shut and offered no advice.
Based on the rate at which the dot was expanding he knew it would reach him in seconds. He ran the math anyway. Altitude, angle, time to shelter, time to fail. He could stand. He could sprint. He could not win.
The first thing to arrive was the heat. A blast of heat that burnt your nose, eyes and dried your mouth. Then a second blast air, thick and shoving. Glass gave up in a single note. The swan rose under him and flipped. His vision was engulfed in a blinding light.
Silence came after.
The scent of chlorine abruptly turned to nothing. The float was gone. The pool was gone. Everything was gone, his vision was black. He wasn't falling. He wasn't floating either.
"I tried everything I could," a voice said. It wasn't loud. It was undeniable.
"Hello?" he said. "Who said that? Where are you?"
"I know you'll have fun," the voice said.
Silence.
Weight pressed into his skull, then his fingers, then his legs. The black thinned to charcoal, then gray. Light swelled. Sound followed, the crying of infants. Both climbed until they scalded.
He screamed.
The sound that answered was shrill and keening. Not a man's. A baby's.