The Fourth Inning of Everything

The fox darted across Elena's lawn at dawn, a flash of rusty red against the snow. She watched from her kitchen window, coffee in hand, thinking about how wild things just knew when to move. Meanwhile, she'd been hovering at the edge of leaving Marcus for six months, frozen in that terrible space between knowing and doing.

Marcus was downstairs right now, probably watching sports on cable—his third hour of screen time today. She could hear the muffled commentary drifting up the stairs. Baseball season again. The game had been his religion since they met at that dive bar in Queens, back when she found his obsession charming instead of suffocating.

"You're overthinking," her sister had said last night. "Remember that vitamin D deficiency scare? You were ready to move to Finland for better sun exposure. You catastrophize, El."

But this wasn't catastrophizing. This was the slow accumulation of moments like last Tuesday, when she'd come home early from work, trembling with good news about the promotion she'd finally landed, and Marcus had barely looked up from his phone. "That's great, babe," he'd muttered, already turning back to some argument about fantasy baseball statistics.

The fox paused, looked toward the house, then slipped into the woods. Smart animal. It knew when things had gone stagnant.

Elena's mother used to say that relationships were like bears—you could hibernate through the winter, but eventually, you had to wake up and either hunt or starve. She'd never understood what that meant until now.

She set down her coffee, went to the bedroom, and pulled her suitcase from the closet. The vitamins on her dresser—the ones Marcus bought in bulk, the ones she took religiously despite not believing they helped—caught the morning light. Proof of how long she'd been trying to be someone she wasn't.

Downstairs, the television roared with crowd noise. Some lucky bastard had hit a home run. The crowd went wild. Elena zipped her bag and thought about how she'd wasted years waiting for her own life to begin, stuck in the dugout while everyone else played.

"Marcus," she called from the top of the stairs. "I'm not coming back."

The cable news cut to commercial. For once, he actually heard her.