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Community Corner

Lake Isn't EP's Only Empty Body of Water

Writer Ben Loory has written Echo Park's dilapidated and drained pool into a new collection of short stories.

Every Echo Park resident who has ever taken the northbound 101 from the neighborhood knows the public pool that’s nestled into the curve of the onramp. Until a couple of years ago, when the pool closed, the last thing you’d see as you flew away into the nether region of the freeway was children swimming and splashing around. You didn’t know there was a shark in the pool.

You didn’t know because no one knew, unless they were the writer Ben Loory, whose short fiction collection Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day was published a few weeks ago by Penguin. Loory is a resident of Angeleno Heights, a former screen writer, whose stories start out sounding like pitches for strange indie films but turn into something more as the odd images and juxtapositions accrue. In one story (one of my favorites; I gobbled them like chocolate truffles) an octopus, who reminds me of a gothic version of the children’s animated character Oswald, lives in an apartment, and collects spoons. Spoons are what he cares about, and he is not too happy when his nephews from the deep arrive and want a tour of the city.

The second story in this collection, “The Swimming Pool,” was inspired by the now-closed public facility on Bellevue, Loory told me in a brief email exchange. The pool has been drained now. In a small irony, the creeping plant that was meant to block bathers from drivers’ view has only filled in this year. I went down to the pool this morning and took the pictures above. The shark was gone (dumped perhaps into the lake), along with the swimmers, preserved only in Loory’s terrific fable. 

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