The Last Inning

The baseball game droned on the television, volume turned low so it wouldn't wake the kids. Mark watched from the armchair he'd occupied too many nights lately, nursing whiskey that no longer provided the comfort it once promised. Sarah had been asleep for hours — or pretending to be, the way she did now, like they were both just zombies moving through the motions of a marriage that had died somewhere between her promotion and his father's funeral.

He heard it first: the sharp yip from the backyard, distinctive and wild. A fox. He'd seen it twice before, a rust-colored phantom slipping through the chain-link fence, carrying something lifeless in its jaws. There was something honest about it — the hunt, the survival, the lack of pretense.

Mark stood up, his joints protesting. The whiskey glass left a ring on the coaster, one more small mark of their time together. He thought about lightning — how it struck without warning, how it changed everything in an instant, how people always said it never struck twice in the same place. They were wrong about that. You could be struck again. You could be broken again.

Outside, the air was thick with coming rain. He found the fox at the edge of the property, watching him with eyes that held neither judgment nor pity. Just recognition. Of what, exactly?

Sarah's key in the lock. He hadn't heard her car. She'd said she was working late again, and he'd stopped asking which late meant an office project and which meant something else. He stopped asking anything at all.

The fox vanished into the darkness, and something in Mark shifted. The familiar ache crystallized into something harder, something decisive.

Running. That's what he was doing, had been doing for months now — running from conversations, running from the truth, running from the life they'd built together like a house of cards that neither wanted to knock down but neither had the energy to prop up anymore.

The first drops of rain hit his face as Sarah opened the back door.

"Mark? What are you doing out here?"

He turned toward her, and for the first time in three years, he didn't look away.

"I think," he said, his voice raspy from whiskey and disuse, "that's enough baseball for one lifetime."