The Last Inning

The sphinx had been watching Marcus for twenty years—first from the paperback mythology book his mother kept on the coffee table, then from the tattoo on his shoulder. Now, stripped to the waist in the hospice bed, the creature's wings stretched across skin that had become too loose, too pale, too ready to let go.

"Remember pickup games at Lincoln Park?" Marcus wheezed, his voice a shadow of the baritone that had once called signals from behind home plate.

Elena nodded, though they both knew she couldn't remember something she'd never witnessed. They'd been friends for seven years, lovers for three, and she'd still arrived mid-story.

"Third base," Marcus continued. "Summer of ninety-eight. Heat wave broke records. You'd slide into home knowing your legs were shredded, and we'd all limp to the diner afterward, pretending we weren't dying."

The baseball analogy wasn't lost on her. The body count. The injuries accumulated over innings nobody asked to play. Marcus's cancer had been a fastball high and inside—impossible to dodge, impossible to forgive.

"The sphinx," Marcus whispered, "always asked the same question. What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in the evening."

His fingers found her hand, dry and papery as autumn leaves.

"I used to think the answer was about stages of life," he said. "But it's not. It's about what we carry. Who we carry. Four legs when someone's holding you up. Two when you think you're standing alone. Three when you realize you've been leaning on something you never named."

He coughed, a wet sound that made the monitors spike.

"I'm sorry," she said, the words inadequate as currency always is.

"Don't be." His eyes found hers, suddenly lucid. "The sphinx ate those who couldn't answer. But sometimes"—his grip tightened, almost painful—"sometimes the mercy is in the not-knowing."

He died two hours later, during the seventh-inning stretch of a game playing softly on the television neither of them was watching. Outside, summer gathered itself like a pitcher winding up, ready to throw whatever came next.