Bottom of the Ninth

Mark hadn't felt alive since the divorce. Six months of moving through his apartment like a zombie, performing the rituals of living without the sensation of actually inhabiting them. Wake, coffee, work, sleep, repeat. His body continued its functions while something essential had hollowed out inside.

Then came the cat.

She appeared on his fire escape one Tuesday evening, scrawny and fierce, watching him through the glass door as he watched baseball—another ritual, another attempt to feel something through the proxy of other men's triumphs and failures. The Yankees were down by three in the bottom of the ninth. Mark's beer sat warm on the coaster.

"Go away," he said, though he knew she couldn't hear him through the glass.

The cat stared back with yellow eyes that seemed to know things about him. Things he'd rather not examine.

He started leaving food out. Then water. Then one rainy night, he opened the door, and she slipped inside like she owned the place, which perhaps she did now. She slept on his chest while he slept on the couch, which felt less pathetic than sleeping alone in his bed. She demanded presence, demanded he be there in the room with her, not just physically but actually there, and for the first time in half a year, he started to be.

She was watching the baseball game with him—more accurately, watching him watch the game—when his phone buzzed. His ex-wife's number. The sight of her name on the screen used to make his chest collapse. Now, with the cat's weight warm against his side, it was just a name.

He didn't answer. The Yankees rallied. Two runners on, full count. The cat purred as if she'd always known it would come to this, this moment where everything could change, or nothing could, and either way, the sun would still rise tomorrow.

Mark petted her fur and felt his heartbeat steady. The crack of the bat echoed through the apartment, and somewhere beneath the numbness, something small and genuine stirred. Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was everything.