The Seventh Inning Stretch

Marcus stood in the hospice room, his father's hand cooling in his own. The old man had stopped eating three days ago, though the orange slices still sat on the bedside table — a small, defiant rebellion against the end. His father had always insisted on having an orange after every Sunday baseball game, peeling them with surgical precision, the citrus scent cutting through the stadium's stale beer and popcorn air.

"You're going to be a zombie without your vitamin C," his father had said during those final good years, before the cancer turned him into something unrecognizable. Now it was Marcus who felt like one — moving through borrowed time, hollowed out by anticipation and the strange, suspended grief of not-yet-loss.

He'd skipped the company's annual baseball outing today. His boss had given him that look — the one that said *team player* and *career suicide* in equal measure. But Marcus had spent thirty-seven years trying to be the person his father wanted: reliable, steady, the kind of man who showed up. The kind who caught line drives and kept his promises.

The heart monitor stuttered. Marcus waited, breath held, for the long tone that would unmake his world.

Instead, his father's eyes fluttered open. "Did you see that rookie?" The old man whispered, voice like dry leaves. "In the '96 series. That swing."

Marcus had been seven in 1996. He'd sat between his parents, baseball glove too big on his hand, while his father explained the geometry of the game. Now he squeezed his father's papery fingers and lied. "Yeah. Beautiful."

His father smiled faintly. "Good." He closed his eyes again.

Marcus reached for an orange slice, peeled back the rind with trembling hands. The smell hit him — sharp, bright, violently alive. He brought it to his father's lips, and the old man took a fragment, chewing slowly, deliberately. A final act of defiance.

The monitor flatlined ten minutes later.

Marcus walked out into the sunset — bruised purple and violently orange, the sky burning at the edges. He didn't feel like a zombie anymore. He felt like something new: a man who had missed the company baseball game to watch his father die, and somehow, incomprehensibly, that felt like the most important thing he'd ever done.