Summer of the Fourth Out

The papaya sat on the counter, its mottled yellow skin already giving slightly under my thumb. Marcus had brought it home from that bodega on 3rd Street, the one with the dusty windows and the cat who always slept on the stack of Atlantics. This was before everything, before the silence grew thick enough to choke on.

"You're going to miss it," I said, not turning from the window. The baseball game was starting—sounds of the crowd drifting up from the bar downstairs, that collective roar that meant something had happened, something important.

He didn't answer. The cat, a ragged calico who'd adopted us during our first year in this apartment, jumped onto the counter and sniffed the papaya with disdain.

We used to go to games together. Spring weekends, cheap seats in the bleachers, his hand warm on my knee. Baseball had been his religion, something his father taught him before the dementia took everything except the statistics from 1986. He'd explained the geometry of it once, the way the infield forms a perfect diamond, how a well-placed bunt can undo a whole season's worth of strategy.

"A fox got into the garden last night," he said finally, his voice coming from behind me. "Your mother's tomatoes. Gone."

I turned. He was wearing that shirt, the blue one with the collar fraying at the edges. The papaya had fallen to the floor, split open like a secret. Orange seeds scattered across the linoleum.

"Foxes don't usually come this far into the city."

"This one did." He stepped over the mess, toward the door. "Some animals adapt. Some don't."

The crowd below erupted again. Someone had hit a home run. In baseball, you can fail seven times out of ten and still be a legend. In love, there are no such percentages. You don't get to strike out three times and still come back to the plate in the ninth.

I watched him walk out, the door clicking shut with terrible finality. The cat began to lick the papaya from the floor, and I realized I had no idea which of us was the fox, and which was simply waiting to be eaten.