The Fourth Inning Stretch

The orange sunset bled into the hospital room, staining everything with the color of old bruises. Mark sat beside Sarah's bed, watching her chest rise and fall with the mechanical rhythm of a creature that had already begun its journey elsewhere.

"You look like a zombie," she whispered, eyes still closed.

"Rough night at the office."

"You always say that."

Mark took her hand, feeling the terrifying fragility of the bones beneath her skin. They'd been friends since college, played baseball together on intramural teams, stayed up until dawn drinking cheap beer and mapping out futures that had nothing to do with hospice care or mortgage payments or the way a person could simply dissolve while you were busy living your life.

The television mounted in the corner was bolted to the wall with a thick black cable that snaked down like an umbilical cord. Some baseball game from 1998 played on silent loop, the players eternal and youthful and utterly indifferent to mortality.

"Remember when we broke that window?" Sarah asked.

"Which one?"

"The orange house. With the baseball."

"Oh," Mark said. "Yeah. You ran like hell."

"You stayed and fixed it. You always stayed."

Her eyes opened then, and in them he saw everything he'd been avoiding: the way she'd loved him for twenty years, the way he'd loved her back but never quite enough to risk anything, the terrible cowardice of their comfortable friendship, the way they'd both settled for safety while pretending it was choice.

"I'm tired," she said.

"I know."

"Not like that. I'm tired of being your friend."

Mark's heart stuttered. Outside, the last of the orange light surrendered to gray. He brought her hand to his lips, tasting salt and antiseptic and all the years they'd wasted being sensible.

"Okay," he said. "Then let's not be."

She smiled, and for the first time in six months of hospitals and treatments and careful optimism, she looked something like alive again.