Dead Stars on the Diamond

Mark swallowed his daily handful of supplements with lukewarm coffee — vitamin D for the soul he didn't have, B-complex for energy he'd stopped feeling three mergers ago. The pills clinked against his teeth, a tiny mechanical rhythm that matched the dead-eyed shuffle of his morning commute. He was thirty-eight and moved like something that had already been buried.

The divorce papers sat on his kitchen counter, signed and final. Elena had left because she'd fallen in love with someone who still knew how to laugh without checking his watch. She'd taken the baseball tickets too — season passes to see the Giants, third row, right behind the dugout. They'd had those seats since their second year of marriage, back when baseball meant something, when the crack of a bat and the smell of beer and roasted peanuts felt like belonging to something ancient and reliably American.

He drove to work on automatic, his body functioning while his mind replayed that last game they'd attended together. September, pennant race, everything on the line. Elena had leaned in during the seventh inning stretch, her shoulder warm against his arm, and whispered that she'd met someone.

The batter hit a home run three seconds later. The crowd erupted. Mark had watched the ball sail into the Bay and thought: this is what it feels like to be destroyed while everyone else is cheering.

Tonight, he'd go back to the park alone. He'd bought a scalped ticket, section 312, nosebleeds. Something about returning to the scene of the murder. He'd sit there surrounded by couples and families and drunk friends, all that noise and life, and he'd eat a lukewarm pretzel and feel exactly like what he was becoming — a creature who used to be human, moving through the motions of humanity without remembering why any of it mattered.

His phone buzzed. A work email. Something about quarterly targets.

Mark deleted it without reading. The zombie part of him could handle work tomorrow. Tonight, he had a game to attend. Tonight, he'd remember what it felt like to be alive, even if the memory hurt like swallowing broken glass.

He dry-swallowed another vitamin. B12 this time. For energy. For the strength to walk through fire and come out the other side, or at least the strength to watch grown men play a children's game without weeping in public.

The zombie exhaled. The zombie picked up his briefcase. The zombie walked out the door into the merciless California sun.