Strike Zone

The baseball game droned on from the television, a dull roar of crowd noise and crack of bat that had been the soundtrack to their marriage for seventeen years. Mara watched the orange juice stain spread across the white tablecloth where Roger had knocked his glass, a violent sunset captured in linen. She didn't move to blot it.

"Did you hear me?" Roger asked, his fork hovering over his plate of lukewarm spinach and salmon. "I said I've been running every morning. Five miles now."

Mara studied the spinach stuck between his front teeth—god, hadn't anyone ever taught him to check a mirror? She'd stopped mentioning it years ago. Some small intimacies you just surrendered to in a long marriage.

"That's nice, Roger." She rotated her wedding band with her thumb, a nervous tic she'd developed sometime in the last decade of staying. "Five miles. From what?"

"From stagnation," he said, like he was reading a self-help book. "I'm forty-five, Mara. I need to feel alive again."

Outside, lightning cracked the sky open, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the kitchen's fluorescent light. The storm had been building all afternoon, the air thick with unsaid things, the kind of weather that made joints ache and truths surface.

"You know what I did today?" Mara said, her voice strangely calm. "I went to the bank. I moved half our savings into an account in my name only."

Roger's fork clattered against his plate. The baseball game suddenly seemed deafening.

"What? Why?"

"Because you're not running toward anything, Roger. You're running away. And I'm done being the thing you settle for when you get tired." She stood up, her chair scraping against the floor. "I'm not your home base. I'm not where you return when you've finished your rounds."

"Mara, that's not—"

"I'm leaving in the morning," she said. "The lightning cleared something up for me today. Some truths only show themselves in the flash."

She walked to the window, watching the rain begin to fall, thinking how strange it was that the world kept ending and beginning, over and over, in small kitchens everywhere, while baseball games played on unchanged.