Three Seconds

The storm arrived in the bottom of the seventh, lightning fracturing the sky above the stadium like an old memory refusing to stay buried. David watched his ex-wife's new boyfriend demonstrate the proper batting grip to their son, the man's large hand covering the boy's smaller one with practiced intimacy.

"You never took him to a game," Sarah had said during the divorce, but she was wrong. He had. Twice. The memories flickered in his mind's eye—fragmented and unreliable—like the goldfish swimming circles in the bowl that sat on his home office desk, its three-second span of attention somehow enviable.

The crowd roared as the batter connected. David watched the baseball arc toward the lights, white against purple-dark clouds, a perfect trajectory that would never land where intended. That had been their marriage: explosive energy, misdirected force, the wreckage scattered.

His father-in-law had called him bull-headed the night everything fell apart, standing in the backyard beneath a different storm, different lightning, the old man's face flushed with bourbon and disappointment. "You charge at everything like it's a threat," he'd said, and hadn't he been right?

Now David sat three rows back from his former family, a spectator to his own replacement, feeling the first cold drops of rain. His son laughed at something the new man said—a real laugh, shoulders shaking, head thrown back. The kind of laugh David hadn't drawn from him in years.

The umpire signaled for a delay. Players scattered toward dugouts. The new boyfriend placed a hand on Sarah's shoulder—possessive, tender, correct. David stood, his movements careful and small, and walked up the concrete steps toward the exit, leaving behind the ghosts of all the ways he'd charged at life like a threat, breaking everything he tried to hold.