The Seventh Inning Stretch

The baseball game played on silent in the background—another lost season, another meaningless Tuesday. Elena sat on the couch scrolling through her iPhone, thumb flicking upward in that automatic rhythm that had replaced actual conversation in their marriage. She didn't look up when Mark entered the room.

"He's gone," Mark said softly.

Elena's thumb paused. "Who?"

"Barnaby. The dog. I found him downstairs." He held up the empty goldfish bowl by way of explanation, as if the transmutation of one pet into another made sense somehow. "He was looking for the fish."

The goldfish had died three months ago. Neither of them had mentioned it since.

"Oh," Elena said. Her thumb resumed its scrolling. "That's sad."

Mark stood there for a moment, feeling like a zombie—no, not the movie kind with outstretched arms and brain hunger, but the worse kind: the living dead who went to work and paid bills and watched their marriage decompose in slow motion, cell by quiet cell. He remembered when they'd talked about getting a dog together, back when they still made plans that involved more than dividing household chores.

"El?"

"What?" She finally looked up, eyes flickering with that familiar irritation at being interrupted. The blue light from her phone made her face look alien.

"Remember when we went to that baseball game? That double header?" It had been raining, and they'd huddled under a shared poncho, drunk on overpriced beer and the electric certainty that they had forever figured out.

"That was seven years ago, Mark." She set down the phone finally. "Why are you bringing this up now?"

"Because Barnaby's dead, and I don't think you care." The words came out harder than he intended.

"Of course I care. It's a dog, Mark. He was old. Things die. Like the fish. Like—" She stopped herself.

The silence between them stretched thick and suffocating. Mark realized then what he'd known for months: they were already ghosts haunting each other's lives, going through motions that had lost all meaning.

"I'm going to stay at my brother's," he said.

Elena picked up her iPhone again. "Okay. Text me when you get there."

The baseball game entered the seventh inning stretch. Mark walked out the door, and for the first time in years, he felt something like relief.