The Seventh Inning Stretch

The orange wedge sat in my palm, sticky-sweet and artificially bright. Sarah used to peel them for me when we first moved in together, stripping the pith with surgical precision until only the perfect segments remained. That was before everything calcified into resentment and silence.

Below us, the baseball game dragged into the seventh inning. The crowd roared as someone hit something significant—I'd stopped paying attention around the third. Sarah sat three seats away, phone glowing against her face in the dim light. She'd moved there after I asked her, for the third time that month, whether she'd ever actually loved me or if she'd just needed someone to help fill the empty spaces.

"I don't know, David," she'd said, with the same exhausted tone she used when discussing our dead goldfish's water filter. "Maybe I'm just not built for permanence."

I'd bought the goldfish on impulse, years ago at a carnival where we'd won him in a plastic bag. We'd named him Captain because he swam in circles like a ship lost at sea. Sarah cried when he died—actually cried—but not like this. This was worse: the slow erosion, the way she'd once quoted that goldfish theory, that fish can't remember anything after seven seconds. Maybe that was better. Maybe we were all better off not remembering how things used to be, before the apartment became a museum of small disappointments.

The orange segment burst between my teeth, tart and cloying. Below, the baseball players moved like ants in a controlled experiment. The man beside me spilled beer on my shoe, didn't notice. Sarah looked up, caught my eye, and I saw it again—that flicker of something like recognition, like she was seeing me for the first time in years. Then her phone buzzed and she looked away.

I thought about goldfish, swimming in endless circles, forgetting everything after seven seconds. Maybe they were the lucky ones. They didn't have to watch love decay in real-time, couldn't track the thousand small deaths that accumulated before the final one.

The orange taste turned bitter in my mouth. I stood up, stretching my arms toward the stadium lights that seemed impossibly far away. Sarah glanced up, surprised. I smiled at her—really smiled—and she hesitated, then smiled back.

"Want the other half?" I asked.

She considered this, phone still clutched in her hand like a weapon. Then she nodded, slowly, and I sat back down, and we shared the rest of the orange while the baseball game continued around us, sweet and messy and somehow enough.