What We Buried at Home Plate

The baseball diamond lay abandoned under floodlights that no one had bothered to turn off—something about budget cuts, or maybe just municipal apathy. Elena's hair had started silvering at the temples last year, though she dyed it religiously, another ritual in our church of denial. We'd been married sixteen years, living like zombies in that split-level where every room held the ghost of some conversation we'd stopped having.

I should have been at work. Instead, I was sitting behind home plate, drinking warm gin from a flask, watching the fog roll in from the lake where we'd once gone swimming before we learned that drowning doesn't always happen underwater.

A fox emerged from the dugout—lean, russet, impossibly alive. It carried something in its mouth: a child's baseball cap, faded blue, size small. My son's, from three summers ago. The fox dropped it at my feet, eyes gleaming like it knew something I didn't.

"You leaving?" Elena's voice cut through the fog. She stood at the chain-link gate, wearing her coat over pajamas, silver roots showing in the harsh light. She'd stopped dyeing it weeks ago. I'd pretended not to notice.

"I don't know," I said.

"The fox has been coming here for months," she said. "I followed it once. It has a den under the concession stand. It's raising kits on old hot dog buns and field mice." She stepped onto the dirt, barefoot. "They're thriving in the rot."

The fox returned, carrying something else: our wedding photo, gnawed at the edges, dragged from wherever I'd hidden it. It placed the photo between us.

"We can be zombies," she said, "or we can be the fox. Your choice."

The fog lifted. For the first time in years, I saw her clearly—the lines around her eyes, the gray hair she'd stopped hiding, the impossible courage it took to stand there barefoot in the cold.

"I'm tired of being dead," I said.

She held out her hand. "Then let's live."