The Eighth Inning

Martin stood at the edge of the hotel pool, nursing his third drink of the evening. The sunset had bled across the sky in strokes of violent orange, the kind of color that made everything feel final, like the world was ending in spectacular fashion just as the corporate retreat reached its crescendo. Above him, on the balcony of the second floor, his colleagues—the ones who still had energy—laughed with practiced enthusiasm. He could see Sarah from accounting, her mouth stretched in a smile that didn't reach her eyes. She looked like a zombie, freshly animated and sent to mingle.

He'd almost forgotten why they were all here. Something about synergy. Something about paradigm shifts and thinking outside boxes. The jargon had blurred together somewhere around the second keynote speech, delivered by a man whose teeth were too white and whose eyes were too empty. Martin had spent the entire presentation thinking about his son's baseball game last Saturday—the way the boy had stood at the plate, bat cocked, muscles coiled like springs, how he'd missed the third strike and cried in the car afterward. He'd told his son it didn't matter. That was the lie you told children: that effort counted more than results. But here, among these people in expensive suits, they all knew better. Effort was for the zombies who hadn't figured out the game yet.

"Thought I'd find you here."

He turned. Elena from HR stood behind him, carrying two drinks. She held one out to him—something pale and complicated with an umbrella.

"Hiding," he said, taking it.

"Me too." She sat on the pool's edge, legs dangling in the water. "You know what the worst part is? We're supposed to be networking. Building relationships. But we're all just pretending to be people we're not."

Martin watched the reflection of the orange-hued sky ripple across the pool's surface. "You ever feel like you've been sleepwalking through your life? Like you woke up one day and you were forty-two and you don't remember how you got there?"

"Every Tuesday," Elena said. "Sometimes Thursdays too."

They sat in silence for a moment. In the distance, someone had turned on a radio—a baseball game, commentators murmuring about innings and errors. The bottom of the eighth, close game, everything hanging in the balance.

"You know what my father used to say?" Martin asked. "He said life was like baseball. You get up to bat, you swing, sometimes you connect, most times you don't. But you keep getting up there. Game after game. Season after season."

Elena swirled her drink. "Your father sounds like a wise man."

"He died alone," Martin said. "But he meant well."

Above them, the laughter continued. The zombie coworkers mingled, drinks in hand, moving through motions they'd performed a thousand times before. The orange sky deepened toward purple. The radio announcer's voice rose excitedly—someone had hit a home run. A moment of perfect connection between bat and ball, everything going right just once.

Martin finished his drink and set the glass down beside the pool.

"Tomorrow," Elena said quietly. "We do it again."

"Yeah." Martin stood up, joints aching. "Tomorrow."

But for now, they sat watching the sky darken, two people who'd forgotten how to play the game, suspended in the eighth inning of something they no longer understood.