Curveballs in the Dark

The vitamin C bottle sat on his nightstand, a daily ritual that felt increasingly absurd. Marcus swallowed two orange tablets without water, his eyes fixed on the stray cat that had taken to sleeping on his fire escape. The cat — a patchwork of gray and white, like a cloud that had seen better days — would stare back at him through the glass, yellow eyes unblinking.

Forty-two years old, and Marcus had finally inherited his father's arthritis. The baseball glove collecting dust in his closet seemed to mock him from memory. He could still feel the sting of a fastball, could still recall his father's voice from the bleachers: "Keep your eye on the ball, kid." His father had died three months ago, and somehow the pain in Marcus's joints felt like a betrayal.

The cat meowed at dawn, and Marcus found himself opening the window for the first time. It limped inside, favoring its left leg, and Marcus noticed the dried blood on its paw. He cleaned it with peroxide, wrapped it in gauze, and the animal purred against his chest like a small, broken engine.

"We're both falling apart," he told it, pouring himself another vitamin — this time B-complex, as if that could fix the hollow feeling in his chest.

The cat stayed. They watched baseball highlights together, Marcus explaining the nuances of a perfect curveball to an audience that couldn't care less. In the quiet of his apartment, with the cat's warmth against his side, he understood something his father had never taught him: the game wasn't about winning. It was about showing up, inning after inning, even when your shoulder ached and you couldn't hit worth a damn.

Two weeks later, the cat disappeared. Marcus found himself standing at the window, calling out to an empty fire escape, vitamin bottle in hand. The game had ended without warning, no final score, just the silence of a room that felt suddenly larger.

He left the glove on the fire escape that night. Someone would need it more than he did. The vitamins went into the trash. Some things, he decided, you couldn't supplement away.