The Longest Inning

Marcus sat on the edge of the bed, baseball glove clutched in his lap like a dead thing. The leather was cracked now, same as everything else.

'Cable's out again,' Elena called from the living room. Her voice carried that particular flatness it had developed over the past three months—the vocal equivalent of a shrug. 'No game tonight.'

He'd been looking forward to it. The Mets, bottom of the ninth, something closer to grace than he'd felt in weeks. Now just static on the screen, blue light flickering against walls they'd stopped painting the year they stopped trying.

Marcus joined her on the sofa. Between them sat the sphinx statuette she'd brought back from Egypt—her last solo trip before everything got complicated. Stone eyes stared past them both, riddles unasked, unanswered.

'Remember what you said about it?' Elena asked, tracing the winged creature's worn edge. 'That thing about riddles and answers.'

'That was three years ago.'

'Seems relevant.' She turned toward him, and there it was—that look that meant they were about to have the conversation again. The one they circled like base runners who'd forgotten how to slide home. 'What walks on four legs in the morning, Marcus?'

The baseball glove creaked in his hands. Outside, a neighbor's dog barked at nothing. 'You want to do this now?'

'I want to know when you stopped showing up.' Her voice cracked, just once. 'I wake up some mornings and you're already gone—not physically, but somewhere I can't reach. No cable in the world can fix that.'

The sphinx watched them with stone indifference, keeper of questions that had destroyed better men than them. Marcus thought about baseball—how you could fail seven times out of ten and still be considered great. How some balls you hit fair just kept going, while others landed foul by inches.

'I'm scared,' he said finally. 'That I'm already at the three-leg part and didn't notice the middle.'

Elena's hand found his across the cushions. 'We're still in the game, Marcus. But you've got to step up to the plate.'

The cable flickered back on—bottom of the tenth, someone at bat. They left it running as background to something more important than any game could ever be.