Orange Peels at Home Plate

The lightning strike wasn't what woke Marcus—it was the phone buzzing against the nightstand at 3 AM, Sarah's name glowing like an accusation. He'd been running for three months now, literal miles through rain-slicked streets until his lungs burned, trying to outpace the memory of her packing boxes. But the body remembers what the mind refuses.

He answered anyway. "Your father's in the hospital," she said, voice stripped bare. "He was at the baseball field—coaching the district finals, you know how he gets—and then his heart just stopped."

Marcus hadn't stepped foot on a baseball diamond since the day his father told him a man who can't hit a curveball has no business calling himself a son. Twenty years of missed birthdays, graded silences, and now this.

The hospital room smelled of antiseptic and old age. His father lay gray against the sheets, an orange peel still on his bedside table—early stages of dementia, the nurse explained, he'd been obsessively peeling them for weeks, arranging the zest in perfect spirals.

"He keeps asking for you," Sarah said, leaning against the doorframe. She shouldn't have come. But grief has a way of erasing boundaries.

Outside, lightning fractured the sky again. Marcus remembered the summer he was twelve, sitting behind the backstop while his father coached, eating orange after orange, staining his fingers like violence, wishing someone would notice him instead of the game.

"I'm not sure I can do this," he said.

Sarah's hand found his. "You've been running your whole life, Marcus. Sometimes you have to stop."