Lost & Found, End of Summer

They close the community pool the way you fold a towel: corners meeting, sand still arguing. Mia, last lifeguard on the schedule, is assigned the lost-and-found. The bin coughs up what people forget when they’re busy being water: goggles with one cloudy eye, a neon foam noodle with teeth marks like a shy shark, three towels that tried to be flags.

She lays everything on a picnic table and makes a taxonomy: Things That Will Come Back for Themselves (car keys on a flamingo lanyard), Things That Think They’re Important (phone case with glitter waterfall), Things That Are Important (a child’s orange sandal with a sea-life sticker). In the pocket of a sun-bleached hoodie she finds a note, folded into a square the size of a graham cracker: “Coach, I did six laps without stopping. I am a dolphin now. —L.”

Mia looks toward the deep end, empty and lawful. She pictures L spluttering through five laps and discovering the sixth like a door that opens if you ask it right. She pins the note to the corkboard beside the rules no one reads—No Running, No Diving, No Dolphin Jokes—and adds a sticky label: Claimed by the Pool.

She washes the goggles in the sink that has seen every kind of summer, hangs them like small moons on the fence to dry. A storm pushes its shoulder against the sky; fallen leaves pattern the water like orange freckles. The maintenance light shudders on, brave and ridiculous at 4 p.m.

When she locks up, she leaves the gate with the gentleness reserved for sleeping things. On the way out she slips the orange sandal into the mailbox with a note to the address on file. “You forgot this. The pool remembers.” She doesn’t know if that’s true. It feels true the way wet hair feels heavier than it weighs.

In the parking lot the wind shifts—cooler, new. Summer lets go without making Mia say it first. She drives home with the windows down and the smell of chlorine feeling almost like a promise kept.