鲸鱼打火匣

看The American God 到后半本了，抄一段和游泳相关的，讲的是主人公Shadow的一段幼年经历：

As a kid Shadow had been small for his age, all elbows and knees. The only photograph of Shadow was a kid that Laura had liked enough to frame showed a solemn child with untruly hair and dark eyes standing beside a table laden high with cakes and cookies. Shadow thought the picture might have been taken at an embassy Christmas party, as he had been dressed in a bow tie and his best clothes.

They had moved too much, his mother and Shadow, first around Europe, from embassy to embassy, where his mother had worked as a communicator in the Foreign Service, transcribing and sending classified telegrams across the world, and then, when he was eight years old, back to the United States, where his mother, now too sporadically sick to hold down a steady job, had moved from city to city restlessly, spending a year here or a year there, temping when she was well enough. They never spent long enough in any place for Shadow to make friends, to feel at home, to relax. And Shadow had been a small child ...

He had grown so fast. In the spring of his thirteenth year the local kids had been picking on him, goading him into fights they knew they could not fail to win and after which Shadow would run, angry and often weeping, to the boys' room to wash the mud or the blood from his face before anyone could see it. Then came summer, a long, magical thirteenth summer, which he spent keeping out of the way of the bigger kids, swimming in the local pool, reading library books at poolside. At the start of the summer he could barely swim. By the end of August he was swimming length after length in an easy crawl, diving from the high board, ripening to a deep brown from the sun and the water. In September, he returned to school to discover that the boys who had made him miserable were small, soft things no longer capable of upsetting him. The two who tried it were taught better manners, hard and fast and painfully, and Shadow found that he had redefined himself: he could no longer be a quiet kid, doing his best to remain unobtrusively at the back of things. He was too big for that, too obvious. By the end of the year he was on the swimming team and the weight-lifting team, and the coach was courting him for the triathlon team. He liked being big and strong. It gave him an identity. He'd been a shy, quiet, bookish kid, and that had been painful; now he was a big dumb guy, and nobody expected him to be able to do anything more than move a sofa into the next room on his own.

It's July, and there should be rain.
All types of rain flocked in town, like puppies' eyes, doves' feathers, and children's soft kisses.

We should dive into pools.
All kinds of pools, pool formed by teardrops, pool in aliceblue, pool with icy flames that swallows.

And I shall write songs.
One with lyrics, one without, and one that is a technicolor story, talking about the summers in our lives.

很久都没游泳。上回是在一座大厦空无一人没有泳道的池里，快要被回声和水影淹没，很长时间都没再游。这回却是痛快的伸展，干净的淡蓝色的水，潜在水下看池底砖格从眼前掠过。忽悠一簇气泡，大人的腿，孩子的脚丫，还有女孩身上的花朵。

你多像科幻小说里的一年呀

2010 你好 :)

A gift from Pinosui...