Strikeout at Last Call

The sports bar was dim, the kind of place where regulars carved their initials into the sticky tabletops and no one asked your story. I sat watching the baseball game on the television mounted above the liquor bottles— a flickering altar to other people's victories.

Marcus— The Bull, everyone called him, though never within his hearing— had called me into his office that morning. The corporate pyramid was being restructured, he'd said, using those soft words that meant something hard. My position was being "streamlined."

Eight years climbing toward a summit that kept receding.

The bartender slid a water glass across the worn wood. "On the house," she said, not meeting my eyes. Maybe she recognized the look of someone whose world had quietly collapsed.

My phone sat face down on the bar. I hadn't checked it since leaving the building. Didn't need to. I already knew what I'd find: texts from colleagues offering perfunctory sympathy, from Jenny asking if I was okay, from—

No. I wouldn't think about her.

The baseball game went into the bottom of the ninth. Some player I'd never heard of stepped up to the plate, the weight of an entire city's hopes riding on his swing. I watched him adjust his cap, spit on the ground, settle into his stance. All that ritual, all that concentration, and still he swung and missed.

Strike one.

You build something. You believe in it. And then you find out your second-in-command has been quietly undermining you for months, sly as a fox, waiting for her moment to step into your corner office while you were busy worrying about team cohesion and quarterly targets.

The water was warm now. I swirled it in the glass, watching the liquid catch what little light there was.

"Last call," the bartender said.

I nodded. Finishing the drink, I stood up. My legs felt strange under me, like they belonged to someone who hadn't quite decided where to go next. Outside, the city waited— indifferent, infinite, possibility disguised as darkness.

I started walking.