What does it take to drown

a precocious, athletic, non-swimming- non-floater,

4 foot-5 inches tall, 4, maybe, 5 years old child

in a pool, 6 feet deep?

Well, not much:

His teen age brother,

delegated to watch him

but who has just met

“the most beautiful girl in the world” in a bikini”

in the pools shallow end

whose charms make EVERYTHING ELSE disappear

in a “love at first sight” fog…

A Mommy or Daddy

gasping for some “me-time”

lounging in a pool chair

playing solitaire on their smart phone…

A zoned-out grandpa,

stuffed with turkey and a few too many,

and his two daughters and their idiotic but successful husbands,

so “What the hell, right?”

and the hectic shopping days before Christmas Eve,

Christmas Eve day, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day’s Santa suit that used to fit,

the day after Christmas clean up,

today

and one heedless cannon ball into the pools deep end

among 30 joyous, screaming, wildly happy, pumped-up on Christmas cookie sugar

other little kids and their teen aged siblings

swimming in the deep end, completely oblivious

to a little boy, flailing his arms,

sucking in something that’s only partly Oxygen,

that’s insufficient for the continuation of a life

as his family will always remember it from that day onward,

and 10-30 seconds,

and a scream.