Eleanor Underwater

You can see so much from the bottom of the pool. That’s why Eleanor likes it there in the pressing blueness of the eye-burning, chlorinated water, six, nine, twelve feet of distance pinning her flimsy body to the rough-spackled floor. She whispers witnessed secrets into sheeny bubbles that flee and burst on the surface. Green-ribbon veins on her mother’s sturdy thighs, manicured fingers pruned and flashing in the wobbly sun. The shocking jagged scar on her grandfather’s flabby hip, peeking from ballooning trunks. The thick fingers of her older sister’s boyfriend, groping greedily in the expanse of her tight bikini bottoms, moving like worms beneath the clutching spandex. Her older sister turning mermaid when she dives, hair streaming back from her scrunched face, betraying an exhilaration she doesn’t show to Eleanor or her boyfriend, just here, briefly, before she comes back up for air. 

Eleanor can hold her breath for a long time, longer than her mother thinks is safe, pulse pounding wildly as she stretches her lungs past their limit. She likes to wait for the frantic faces peering through the refracted light, searching for her own, purpled and puffy. She likes to let herself float upward, back-first, so her spine breaks the surface like a breaching whale, her limbs helplessly buoyant, so she can hear her mother gasp and scold and forbid her expressly from going under again once she flips over, belly-up and breathing. That’s one of the secrets she lets the bubbles take away, the mean fire in her gut that eats up all her mother’s fear like it proves her loving.

Miranda Hope Diaz is a public health scientist, fiction writer, and poet. She was awarded the Coppice Prize for short fiction in 2025 and her poetry has appeared in The Rumpus, Poetry Breakfast, and Cellar Door. Find them on Bluesky @mhd.bsky.social or visit mirandadiaz.com.

A Song for Miranda