The Fourth Inning Stretch

The coiled **cable** behind her television set reminded Mara of the way their relationship had become—tangled, impossible to straighten without pulling something loose. She sat cross-legged on the floor of her apartment, sorting through boxes of Simon's things he'd left behind when he moved out two weeks ago.

She found his **baseball** glove first—worn leather, cracked at the thumb, smelling of summer evenings they'd never shared. He'd told her he played in college, another lie in the catalog of small deceits that had accumulated like sediment in a riverbed. She'd believed him because she wanted to. That was the thing about loving someone—you became complicit in their fiction.

Her phone buzzed. Her sister, calling about their mother's doctor appointments again. The older woman had stopped taking her **vitamin** D supplements, claiming the pharmaceutical industry was poisoning them. Some days Mara wondered if her mother was onto something—not the conspiracy, but the instinct to resist.

Mara's **hair** fell into her eyes as she reached for another box. She'd cut it short the day after Simon left, as if she could shed parts of herself the way trees shed leaves. The stylist had asked if she was sure. She wasn't sure about anything anymore.

She found the photograph of them at that bar in Chicago, pressed against each other, drunk on possibility. Simon had called her a stubborn **bull** that night, said it was what he loved most about her. Now she wondered if he'd meant she was simply something to be steered.

The truth was, she missed him. Not the lies, not the performance of himself he'd manufactured for her benefit, but the mornings when neither of them spoke, the quiet accumulation of two people making coffee in the same kitchen. That was the tragedy, wasn't it? You could miss something that was never really real.

Outside, spring rain began to fall. She left the boxes half-sorted, made herself coffee, and watched the water streak against the window. Some messes couldn't be cleaned up in an afternoon. Some cables, once tangled, stayed that way forever.