Three Inning Rule

The goldfish had been floating sideways for three days when Elena finally decided to bury it. Not flush—that seemed too unceremonious for something Marcus had won her at that shitty carnival in Asbury Park, the night they'd decided to move in together despite knowing better.

She dug into the basil planter on their fire escape with a soup spoon, the evening sun slanting through the baseball stadium lights across the Hudson. From their fourth-floor walk-up, she could hear the crack of bats and the swell of the crowd— Yankees versus Red Sox, always more violence than sport when those teams met. Marcus used to watch with religious devotion, beer in hand, screaming at the television like his father had, and his father before that. Some traditions were harder to break than addiction.

"You're burying it in the basil?" The voice behind her made her jump. Marcus stood in the sliding door, tie loosened, that exhausted look she'd come to dread settled into the lines around his mouth. His briefcase sat abandoned inside—work had been eating him alive for months, or maybe it was just them.

"It's good fertilizer," she said, not turning around. "Better than the toilet."

He stepped onto the fire escape, closing the distance between them with careful hesitation. "I got spinach gnocchi from that place you like."

She nodded, watching the goldfish's orange scales catch the dying light. It had been beautiful once, in that plastic bag filled with water, shimmering with possibility. Now it was just dead matter returning to earth, like everything eventually.

"Elena." His voice cracked. "We can't keep doing this. This halfway thing."

The crowd across the river roared—someone must have hit a home run. She thought about how baseball was really just a series of failures, how even the best players failed seven times out of ten, and how we still called them heroes. Maybe that was the problem with them: they kept swinging for the fences instead of accepting the base hit, the small moments, the imperfect middle ground.

"I know," she said finally, patting the disturbed soil with the back of the spoon. "But let's eat first. The gnocchi gets cold."

She didn't turn to see if he'd agreed, just watched the stadium lights flicker on, one by one, illuminating the field where someone was always about to win, always about to lose, where the only certainty was that eventually, the game would end.