The Bottom of the Ninth

The iphone glowed at 3:47 AM, another notification from someone who didn't care if he slept. Mark's thumb hovered over the screen, then dropped to his chest. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt anything resembling joy, just this hollow rhythm of wake, work, scroll, sleep, repeat. A zombie with a 401k and a mortgage.

Sarah lay beside him, breathing soft and steady, but they hadn't really touched in months. Not like before. Now they were just two corpses sharing a bed, both too exhausted to haunt each other properly.

The baseball app was still open from earlier. Mets versus Braves, bottom of the ninth. He'd been watching alone at the bar again, the old married guy nursing his IPA while college kids laughed too loud. He used to love baseball—the crack of the bat, the impossible geometry of a curveball, the way time seemed to suspend between pitches. His father had taught him to keep score when he was eight, those elegant pencil marks capturing everything that mattered.

His father died four years ago. Mark had missed the call. He'd been in a meeting, his iphone silenced, the way it always was now. By the time he saw the voicemail, his father was already a memory someone else was carrying.

He picked up the phone again, opened the photos. There was one from 2019—him and Sarah at a game, she wearing his oversized Mets cap, both of them squinting against sunset, drunk on cheap beer and the certainty that they had forever. She looked at him like he was something. Like he was someone.

Now she looked through him.

The final score flashed on the screen: Mets 3, Braves 2. A walk-off. He'd missed it. He'd missed everything.

Mark deleted the baseball app. Then the work apps. Then everything except Sarah's number.

He set the iphone on the nightstand, screen down, and placed his hand on his wife's sleeping shoulder. She didn't stir. Tomorrow he'd wake up and try to be a husband again. But for now, in the darkness, he let himself feel something real.

He lay there, breathing, no longer a zombie, no longer asleep. Just alive, for the first time in years.