The Seventh Inning Stretch

Marcus felt like a zombie by 3 PM every day—that particular corporate variety of undead where you're technically alive but something essential has hollowed you out. He sat in his cubicle, the fluorescent lights humming their usual funeral dirge, watching the rain trace silver paths down the window. Water, always water. It had been raining for three weeks straight, as if the sky itself was mourning something it couldn't name.

He was running late again. Not that it mattered. The quarterly review would happen with or without him, another ritual performance where they all pretended his career wasn't circling the drain. His phone buzzed—Sarah, again. *We need to talk.* The four words that had preceded every significant loss in his adult life.

Outside, the downpour had momentarily thinned to a drizzle. Marcus started running toward the park, his dress shoes slapping wet pavement, the ridiculousness of it all hitting him like physical pain. At thirty-eight, he'd become someone who made bad decisions in expensive clothing.

He found himself at the baseball diamond where he'd played Little League, back when his father's approval seemed achievable through sufficiently impressive athletic performance. The field was empty, floodlights reflecting off puddled water like broken mirrors. A single baseball lay in the mud near home plate—a dirty white pearl dropped by some universe with a perverse sense of symbolism.

Sarah had left him two months ago. Not because of another woman, but something worse: she'd stopped seeing him entirely. "You're already gone," she'd said, and the terrible part was she was right. He'd been haunting his own life for years, a zombie moving through the motions of marriage, career, adulthood, with nobody behind the eyes.

Marcus picked up the baseball. The leather was slick with rain. For a moment, he was eight years old again, his father's voice carrying across the field: *"Keep your eye on the ball, kid."* The same man who'd taught him that real men didn't cry, didn't feel, didn't break.

He threw the ball toward the backstop. It sailed wide, disappeared into the darkness beyond the fence.

The rain began again, harder this time, and Marcus didn't move. He stood on that baseball field, water streaming down his face, and finally let himself mourn the life he'd never actually lived. The zombie died that night. Something else—something frightened and uncertain and painfully alive—woke up in its place.