The Lightning Split the Seventh

The corporate softball game had dragged into the seventh inning when Marcus realized he'd become the thing he'd always dreaded: a zombie in a button-down, sleepwalking through his own life.

He stood along the first-base line, his ex-wife's baseball cap folded in his pocket—a ghost he couldn't quite excise from his wardrobe or his heart. Three years after the divorce, and he still wore her memories like a second skin. Around him, coworkers laughed and high-fived, their enthusiasm lost on him somewhere between the second round of Bud Light and the pitch that had sent his own teammate sprawling.

Then lightning split the sky.

It forked across the bruise-purple clouds, illuminating the field in a stutter-flash of white. The game halted. Everyone looked up. Everyone except Marcus, who found himself staring at his own hands, at the cap clutched there, at the life he'd been half-living since she'd left.

"You okay, man?" It was Sarah from accounting, the new hire with the messy ponytail and the sharp eyes that seemed to see too much. She'd been watching him all evening, he realized.

Marcus opened his mouth, closed it. What could he say? That he'd been going through the motions of existence since his marriage collapsed? That he was thirty-five and felt eighty? That the lightning had struck something dead inside him and he wasn't sure whether it had killed him or woken him up?

"Just thinking," he said finally, forcing a smile that felt alien on his face. "About how some things, you can't see them until the light hits them just right."

Sarah nodded slowly, like she understood something he hadn't said. "The storm's coming in fast," she observed. "Sometimes you need the sky to crack open before you can see what's been there all along."

As the first raindrops began to fall, Marcus put on the cap—the one that still smelled faintly of her perfume—and felt something shift. Not closure, exactly. But the lightning had illuminated the truth: he wasn't dead yet. Just undead. And there was a difference.

The game was called. The crowd scattered. But Marcus stood there a moment longer, letting the rain wash over him, feeling like he might finally be ready to play again.