The Seventh Inning Stretch

The cable guy had been in Marcus's apartment for forty-five minutes, replacing the box that had died somewhere between the seventh inning of a blowout game and Marcus's own seventh month of solitude. The young technician—name tag read Tommy—had the kind of thick, dark hair that Marcus had lost somewhere in his thirties, the kind that caught the fluorescent light when he bent over the entertainment center.

"You got a signal now," Tommy said, straightening up and testing the remote. A baseball materialized on the screen mid-swing, the crowd noise filling the sudden quiet of the living room.

Marcus nodded, reaching for his wallet. "Thanks."

"You know," Tommy said, pausing at the door, "my ex-wife used to hate when I watched baseball. Said it was just grown men running in circles."

The words hit Marcus like a physical blow. He'd heard something similar once, from lips he'd last seen in a rearview mirror. Her hair had been everywhere those first months together—on his pillow, in the shower drain, woven into the fibers of his existence like something living. Now there was just the opposite: the particular clean absence of someone who'd carved herself out of his life.

"Sometimes," Marcus found himself saying, "the circles are the point."

Tommy considered this. "You still watching?"

"Every game."

"Then you're not running away from it." The cable guy offered a crooked smile, something unexpectedly gentle in his eyes. "Some of us just run faster."

After Tommy left, Marcus stood in his living room with the baseball game murmuring in the background. He thought about cable—how it connected everything, invisibly, beneath streets and through walls, carrying all the things people said to each other across impossible distances. He thought about his ex-wife's hair, dark and tangled across his chest that last morning. He thought about running—how he'd spent seven months sprinting from memory, only to end up exactly where he'd started.

On screen, the batter connected. The ball arced toward the outfield, and for a moment, everything hung suspended in the sweet possibility of flight. Marcus found himself leaning forward, breath caught in his throat, waiting to see where it would land.