chlorine

I remember spinning around and around with a long shallow blue meshed pool skimming net and being able to just focus for the first time in my life on one thing that was still while everything else was in motion.  Surely there were sounds like helicopters, like emergency responders, as my eyes locked on the stiff netting that turned everything around it into thin ribbons of speed.  Later that night I threw up in my bed and cried some more because I didn't know what was happening, I didn't know what was coming out of my mouth and it was orange and it burned and I thought, then, it must have been fire.  I had this light blue electric blanket (the same blue as the pool skimmer net) and it was really soft and I puked all over it and it smelled so bad and I tried to keep it in like Jackie Kennedy did with her husband's skull-bits and brain-parts and then it all smelled like pool chemicals after that.  They ran in and said something to each other about me overdoing it today and the heat but they didn't know what I saw on the screen before all of it, before the propellering, it was droplets of blood from noses and rusty scythes and payphone receivers ticktocking like metronomes to the rhythm of televised death.