The Bullpen of November

Marcus was forty-two and running on fumes, literally and metaphorically. His morning runs through Prospect Park had become a desperate ritual—four miles of asphalt and autumn leaves, lungs burning, each stride an attempt to outrun the zombie he'd become. He'd catch his reflection in shop windows sometimes: hollow eyes, skin the color of old parchment, a man who'd forgotten how to be alive.

The corporate job was killing him slowly. His boss, a man whose nickname was "The Bull" for his bullish approach to everything and his prodigious talent for delivering bullshit, had called another 7:00 AM meeting. "We need to squeeze more juice from the vitamin," The Bull had announced yesterday, using his terrible metaphor for their declining wellness product line. Marcus had nodded along, feeling his soul curdling.

He stopped at the edge of the baseball field where he and his brother used to play catch. Twenty years ago, before the overdose, before the silence fell over their family like wet wool. His brother had been the pitcher—wild, talented, self-destructive. Marcus had been the catcher, safe behind the plate, always there to receive whatever was thrown at him.

Now the field was empty. A single baseball lay near home plate, weathered and gray. Marcus picked it up, feeling the stitching under his thumb. He'd stopped taking his vitamins three weeks ago. What was the point? His brother was gone, his marriage was over, and he was halfway through his life with nothing to show for it but a pension plan and a collection of dress shirts that made him feel like a corpse at a wake.

The Bull's voice echoed in his head: "You're not thinking about the vitamin's potential, Marcus. You're not thinking about the *bull market* of wellness."

Marcus laughed, a dry, ugly sound. He wound up and threw the baseball as hard as he could toward the backstop. It made a satisfying metallic clang. He wasn't a zombie. Not yet. He was just a man who'd forgotten what it felt like to hold something real.

He checked his phone. 7:42 AM. The meeting started in eighteen minutes. Marcus began running back toward his apartment, toward the bullshit, toward the life he'd built brick by suffocating brick. But for the first time in years, he was thinking about vitamins—not as supplements, but as the very substance of life itself. And he was starting to suspect he'd been malnourished for a very long time.