The Fourth Inning of Everything

The cable dangled from the wall like a dead snake, coaxial tip exposed and fraying. Mark stared at it for three minutes before realizing the game had started without him. The screen flickered with static, then cleared to reveal empty stands and players warming up on pristine green grass.

Forty-two years old and living in a one-bedroom apartment where the previous tenants had taken the remote but left the wall-mount. He'd spent the morning moving boxes, each one containing a curated selection of a life that no longer fit. Lisa had kept the house. The dog. The fucking Crock-Pot.

She'd kept Buster—the golden retriever who'd slept at the foot of their bed for eleven years. "He's old," she'd said, "and you're never home." Buster had licked Mark's hand one last time from the porch, tail thumping against the wood like a slow, fading heartbeat.

Now Mark watched baseball alone, which felt wrong in a way he couldn't articulate. Baseball was supposed to be father-son, husband-wife, beer-and-brats shared. Instead he had warm tap water and a cable connection that kept cutting out.

The pitcher wound up. Mark's phone buzzed.

FROM: Lisa (4:12 PM)

Buster won't eat. He just sits by the door.

Mark typed: Try the wet food.

Deleted it.

Typed: He'll adjust. Dogs adjust.

Deleted that too.

On screen, the batter connected. The ball arced toward the warning track, a perfect parabola against sky that looked nothing like any sky Mark had ever seen. The crowd noise swelled through the cable, tinny and distant, like someone laughing in another room.

His father had taken him to games at Fenway. Hot steam rising off the concrete, the smell of beer and roasted peanuts, his father's voice explaining ground-ball-to-short situations that made perfect sense until Mark tried to explain them to Lisa, who always said baseball was three hours of standing around between five minutes of action.

"You either get it or you don't," his father had said, and Mark had thought that was profound at seventeen.

The ball cleared the fence. Home run. Mark felt something shift in his chest—not quite sadness, not quite relief. Just the particular hollow feeling of recognizing yourself in a stranger's story.

The cable connection held long enough for the replay. The ball spinning against the stadium lights, white stitches blurring, ascending and descending in its predetermined arc, caught by gravity the way everything eventually gets caught.

Mark picked up his phone again.

Is he crying?

A minute passed.

Yes.

Mark stood up, found his jacket, and headed for the door. The apartment was silent behind him, the game still playing to an empty room, cable feeding stories to no one, broadcasting to nothing at all.