thematically fickle

(This is my 150-word, written-in-10-minutes-or-less exercise about what’s behind that door.)

She sets her right hand on the door, palm flat against the warm wood. She gives it a push. She finds the door to be much heavier than she’d anticipated. She leans one tanned shoulder against it and puts all of her weight against that shoulder, sweating under the still-hot afternoon sun. The door opens, slowly, quietly to reveal a broad room. The saltillo tiled floors are cool beneath her bare feet. There is no wall on the opposite side. Nothing but ocean down there. Twenty or forty feet in front of her—she’s no good with distances—there is one shallow step down to another level of the room. Another forty feet, another step, a pool with no edge. Just the light blue of the water meeting the dark blue of the ocean meeting the pink blue of the sky, twenty or forty or thousands of feet away.