The Drowning Season

Elena adjusted the brim of her father's fedora, the **hat** smelling faintly of tobacco and rain. She'd stolen it from his closet before the estate sale—a small rebellion against the efficiency with which her mother was erasing him.

She drove to the old minor league **baseball** stadium where they'd spent every Sunday of her childhood. The team had moved to a shiny new complex years ago. This place was rotting into the earth, bleachers collapsing like rotten teeth. Elena climbed the warped stairs to Section 214, their exact seats, and watched the **water** rise in the cracks of the concession stand below. Three days of rain had turned the parking lot into a lake. Everything was dissolving.

That's when she saw him—a man standing near home plate, sketching in a notebook. He looked wrong here, too polished in his wool coat. He noticed her and waved, strangely unembarrassed at being caught trespassing.

"I'm documenting the decay," he called out. "Before they demolish it."

Elena came down. The man was sketching the collapsed outfield wall. "I grew up here," she said.

"Me too." He smiled. "My dad caught a foul ball once. Kept it in a glass case on his dresser like it was holy."

They walked the flooded concourse together. His name was Julian. He was an artist, between projects, between wives. They were both between things, washed up like debris after a storm. He told her about his daughter who lived in Seattle. She told him about the closet full of her father's clothes she couldn't bring herself to donate.

Near the abandoned gift shop, someone had spray-painted a crude **sphinx** on the wall, its face eroded by weather. "I wish it would give me an answer," Elena said. "About how to keep going."

Julian took her hand. His palm was warm, dangerously alive. "The riddle's not something you solve. You just **bear** it until it changes shape."

They kissed in the shadow of the sphinx, salt on their lips—from tears or the humid air, she couldn't tell. The water kept rising, swallowing the infield, swallowing the past.

Later, in her car, Elena removed her father's hat and set it on the passenger seat beside her. The brim had collected rainwater. She drove home with the windows down, feeling something unclench in her chest, feeling the air move through her like she was hollow in a way that might, eventually, fill up with something new.