The Fox at Third Base

Mara found the iPhone on the kitchen counter at 2 AM, its screen glowing with a message that wasn't meant for her eyes. *Can't wait for Sunday. Third base, same as last time.*

She stood there, surrounded by the wilted spinach she'd forgotten to put away, and realized their seven-year marriage had been playing out like a baseball game she hadn't known she was losing.

Sunday. He'd told her he was playing in that corporate softball tournament. The one she'd packed his equipment for, cheering him on with coffee and those healthy breakfast wraps he pretended to like. The spinach had been her idea — something about iron, about wanting him to live forever when she was already feeling him slip away.

She remembered the fox.

Three weeks ago, driving home from his mother's, a fox had darted across the road, its coat burning orange against the asphalt. David had swerved, cursed, kept driving. But Mara had turned in her seat to watch it vanish into the woods, wild and impossible and utterly uninterested in their carefully planned life.

"Did you see that?" she'd asked.

"See what?" He'd been checking his iPhone, scrolling through something more important than survival.

Now she understood why the fox had been running. Why anything wild would run from a world that wanted to tame it, domestic it, reduce it to wilted spinach in a plastic container and marital obligations performed like required plays.

The iPhone buzzed again. *You coming?*

Mara picked it up, her thumb hovering over the screen, and thought about last chances and wild things and whether she'd ever really been his wife or just someone filling a position on a roster he'd outgrown.

The spinach would keep. Everything else could wait until morning.

She slipped on her shoes, took the car keys, and drove toward the softball fields where married men played at being boys while their wives waited up like worried parents.

Somewhere in the darkness, she hoped, the fox was still running.