Separate Innings

The baseball sat on the shelf where she'd left it — a minor league souvenir from their first date, the leather still bearing the faint ghost of her lipstick from when she'd pressed it to her mouth after his proposal. Five years later, she'd left him for someone who made her laugh, and that was somehow worse than leaving him for someone who made her money.

David stood in the apartment they'd shared, boxes scattered like the debris of a bomb blast. The final walk-through before turning in the keys. His stomach growled, but he hadn't eaten in two days.

In the refrigerator, behind expired yogurt and condiments they'd bought together, sat a single orange. She must have purchased it the week before she moved out — always obsessed with having fresh fruit in the house, even though neither of them ever remembered to eat it. The skin had already begun to shrivel, a premature aging that made David irrationally angry.

He took it out, peeled it aggressively, the citrus stinging his eyes. Cried into the sink while eating, standing in the kitchen where they'd hosted dinner parties nobody enjoyed, where they'd had the quiet fights that actually mattered.

Outside the window, the neighbor's cat appeared on the fire escape — a mangy tomcat they'd secretly fed despite the building's no-pets policy. It stared at him through the glass, yellow eyes unblinking, as if asking where she'd gone. David had never liked cats, but he'd loved how she'd coo to this one, leaning out the window in her oversized shirts, abandoning herself to the simple pleasure of being needed.

"She's not coming back," he told the glass.

The cat didn't move. Cats never did what you wanted them to.

He finished the orange, wiped his sticky hands on a kitchen towel that still smelled faintly of her vanilla hand cream. Then he picked up the baseball, weighed it in his palm, and without letting himself think, threw it as hard as he could toward the building's dumpster across the alley.

It missed, hit the brick wall, and dropped into someone's open window below.

A voice drifted up: "What the—"

David didn't wait to hear the rest. He grabbed his keys, left the orange peel in the sink, and walked out the door without looking back at the cat still watching from the fire escape.