Three Strikes at Midnight

The baseball diamond lay empty beneath a bruised sky, the kind that makes you think about everything you've fucked up in your life. Marcus sat on the hood of his Honda, the metal still warm from the day's heat, watching the first tendrils of lightning stitch themselves across the horizon.

He'd come to the park every night since Elena left three weeks ago. Something about the cracked infield dirt, the way the backstop cut into the purple twilight, reminded him of when they'd first met—both of them twenty-three and drunk on cheap beer and possibility, watching his little brother's high school game.

Now, at forty-two, Marcus found himself eating cold spinach from a plastic container, something she'd mocked him for even as she kissed the green flecks from his lips. "You and your fucking health kicks," she'd said, laughing. But it wasn't about health. It was about control, about having one thing in his spiral of a life that he could manage.

Another lightning flash, closer this time. The air tasted of ozone and impending rain.

His phone buzzed. Elena. Maybe she was coming back. Maybe she wanted the rest of her things. Maybe—

"You still at the field?" she asked when he answered.

"Every night."

Silence stretched between them, charged as the atmosphere above him. "I never understood why you loved that place so much."

Marcus watched a lightning bolt strike the transformer down the street, plunging the neighborhood into darkness. "Because out there," he said, gesturing to the invisible diamond, "even when you strike out, you get to stand at the plate again. Bottom of the ninth, two outs, and you still have a shot."

"People don't get unlimited chances, Marc."

"I know."

"I'm seeing someone."

The spinach soured in his stomach. "Oh."

"But I keep thinking about you. About us. About baseball games and cold spinach and how you never give up, even when you should."

Lightning illuminated the infield, perfect and momentary. For three seconds, Marcus saw everything clearly—the marriage he'd neglected, the chances he'd wasted, the bottom of the ninth he was still somehow living through.

"One more pitch," he said into the darkness. "Elena, let me have one more pitch."