Running from the Bull

David stood on the pitcher's mound, watching his twelve-year-old son Lucas miss another ball. The spinach smoothie he'd forced down that morning roiled in his stomach—a symbolic gesture, he'd told himself, a start toward something better. Three years of these green sludge mornings, and what had changed? He was still fifty pounds overweight, still sleeping in the guest room, still showing up to a job where his boss Ethan spent half the day peddling bull about "synergy" and the other half in his office with the door closed.

The baseball sailed through the air as Lucas adjusted his stance. David's mind drifted to the steakhouse downtown, to the corporate lunches where Ethan held court like a bull in a china shop, recounting exploits that grew more outrageous with each retelling. You had to hand it to him—the man could sell. David had just nodded along for six years, collecting his paycheck, his soul eroding like limestone in acid rain.

"Dad?" Lucas's voice cut through his thoughts. "You okay?"

David blinked. "Yeah. Just thinking." He watched his son spit into his glove and settle back behind the plate, and suddenly it hit him: he was raising himself. Lucas would spend his twenties nodding at bull, his thirties drinking spinach sludge, his forties realizing he'd forgotten how to want something real.

The zombie brainwashing of corporate life—consume, perform, repeat.

"I'm done running," David said.

Lucas lowered the glove. "What?"

"From everything." David started toward the dugout. "Let's go get ice cream. Your mom can wait."

That night, he packed a bag. The confrontation with Sarah had been inevitable—years of half-measures and postponed conversations. She'd cried; he'd felt less than he expected. What did that say about him? That he was already gone?

But it was the message from Ethan that finally stopped him cold: the project he'd spent six months building, the one that was supposed to be his ticket out, was being "reassigned."

David's finger hovered over his phone, thick pulse beating at his temples. Outside, a woman jogged past his window, her breathing visible in the November air. She looked alive. He looked at himself in the black glass—pale, hollowed out, another dead thing that didn't know it had stopped moving.

The morning smoothie caught up with him.

He opened the window and vomited into the rhododendrons. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Packed the laptop back into its bag.

The Subaru was packed by dawn. Ethan could find someone else to nod at his bull. Sarah would be angry, then sad, then better. And Lucas—Lucas would understand, someday. That his father had finally stopped running from the one person who deserved honesty: himself.

David started the engine. It turned over on the third try, and that felt right too. Nothing easy anymore. He checked the rearview mirror once, then put the car in drive.