Week 2, Theme 1

Prompt: This theme is a still life: a painting---in words---of a set of objects. The arrangement can be found or composed. Bring these things to life with precise description. Describe rather than analyze (or rather, analyze by describing). Do not use the first person. You don’t have to be Cézanne. Remember Dylan Thomas’s used furniture store.


The puke green and off-white tiled wall framed a scene in which water droplets stuck to every surface. Like worker ants amassing, the droplets had gathered together on the kickboards, on the tiles, and on the garish red and white plastic pieces of the beached lane line. Some combined to form rivulets, tiny highways that careened down every slanted surface, furiously and mindlessly moving water from one wet place to another.

The lane line was heaped in a tangled pile, splaying out of the floor and wall on which it lay. The snaking undulations that the rope-like material wound in its disarray recalled Medusa’s devilish hair, except for the coloring; the red and white and red and white and red red red, at the end, plastic pieces that surrounded the rope lent the snakes a certain candy-cane quality that obviated any threat they could pose.

The sides of the plastic pile were buried in the alternating yellow and blue of kickboards. Some were propped up while some lay flat, suctioned to the slick floor by shared droplets and rivulets of the chlorinated water. The kickboards had a gummy surface. Their material was difficult to place: not quite plastic, but not of earthen materials either. Perhaps prehistoric swimmers had taken play dough-like material and formed it into the bullet-shaped sheet of gummy, stuck it over the fire to harden for a few hours, and then started kicking exercises.

Reigning on top of the pile of amiable snakes was a single, half-deflated, fading yellow-green inner tube. Why this object had reached the zenith of the scene could not be known; perhaps the misfit materials had crowned it their leader in the frantic confusion surrounding their exit from Mother Pool, the only place where they could ever fit.