“The vestibule door opens onto a June morning so fine and scrubbed Classira pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion.”

“Sometimes I find myself standing on the edge of a pool of despair, filled by my tears...but not today.”

“Deciding to kiss Jake is like standing on the edge of a pool, staring down and wanting to take the leap, but fearing how cold the water will be.I hold my breath and jump.”

“When the inky blackness above shades to a deep blue and the stars lose their hard edge and begin to seem unreal, she rises, wrapping the thin sheet about herself, and steps outside into the morning chill.”

“The night stayed outside. She was surprised. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. Instead, blue things flew in, pieces of glass or tin, or necklaces of blue diamond, perhaps. The air was the blue of a pool when there are shadows, when clouds cross the turquoise surface, when you suspect something contagious is leaking, something camouflaged and disrupted. There is only this infected blue enormity, elongating defiantly. The blue that knows you and where you live and it's never going to forget.”

“I put a gentle hand to my chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming pool some distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in Nice.”