Bottom of the Ninth

The stadium lights flickered as another summer storm rolled in. Sarah sat alone in section 214, her husband David's jacket draped over the empty seat beside her. He'd promised to make it—his last baseball game before the deployment—but his iPhone had buzzed three innings ago with that familiar work emergency tone.

Outside, lightning cracked the sky in electric veins, illuminating the scoreboard: 4-2, bottom of the eighth. Sarah fingered the vitamin D capsules in her pocket, prescribed for the depression she couldn't quite shake. Three a day, the doctor said. As if sunshine in pill form could replace whatever had hollowed out between them.

Her phone vibrated. Not David. His mother. Sarah's thumb hovered over the screen.

Then the crowd roared—lights-out smash toward right field. The baseball arced upward against the darkening sky, a white sphere climbing toward heaven. Sarah watched it rise, suspended in that impossible moment between ascent and fall, and understood with crystalline certainty that David wasn't coming back. Not to this seat, not to this marriage, not to the life they'd built on mutual compromises and quiet resentments.

She swallowed the vitamins dry. The storm broke.

Later, she'd learn his iPhone had died somewhere outside Kandahar. But tonight, with rain soaking through her clothes and strangers huddled under shared umbrellas, Sarah simply watched the game continue without her, feeling somehow both annihilated and alive.