E. Nolan
It was Glen, our second baseman, who waited at the edge of the grass, unaffected by the violent screams of the parents and coaches and uncles and older cousins, as the right fielder chased down the opposing team’s blast, and when the relay throw came to him, he caught the ball with his body already rotating toward home, toward me, and let off a rocket aimed directly at my mitt. Our team was not good, even though we had some natural ballplayers, and although it was still only early spring, it was clear once again that our team would end up in the cellar, dead last in a league of better-trained teams, hell, of teams that had actual coaches who weren’t half-alcoholics taking turns to sneak off for smoke breaks, but today we somehow found ourselves up by one in the last inning against the best team, a group of near professionals, basically groomed for the sport, and if this runner who was charging down the third base line, the kid with the beginnings of a beard who must’ve been thirteen or even fourteen but certainly not twelve like us didn’t cross the plate, we could actually win a game. Soon after, I would quit baseball and Glen would move away to far off Kansas, the other side of the globe from Long Island, coming back to visit only once a few years later when we were in tenth grade. He hadn’t grown that much taller, and by the way he carried the weight he’d gained it was clear that he’d stopped playing, too. Standing around in an empty medical facility parking lot, the orange glow of the security lights illuminating us just enough for us to see each other in the dark, we smoked cigarettes and drank forties, while Glen, wearing what we thought might be a cowboy hat, spat streams of Cherry Skoal juice onto the asphalt that was still littered with sand and strands of seaweed from a recent hurricane. He told stories about Kansas stuff like whippets and kegerators, his accent already different than the rest of ours. Standing in his strange company I remember being unsettled, shaken about the childhood that he seemed to have discarded. If we were no more than the memories we continued to clutch, what happened to my old friend Glen’s? Did they slip through his grip? Get knocked away, rattled loose? Could he have possibly kept the important ones hidden, buried back in his Kansas backyard under a few handfuls of prairie soil, like the throw? Because it was perfect, an absolute gem, and under those lights that made us feel like grown up players, the lights that blinded out the night sky as well as the rainclouds that were sneaking in, how the dust on the diamond already smelled wet even though raindrops had yet to fall, the ball popped in my heavy glove and I got run over at the plate, pummeled like getting hit blindly by an overhead shore break, the wind knocked out of me for the first time in my life. Lying on my back, regulating my breathing, trying to get oxygen back into my system, the umpire hovered over me, not asking me if I were okay, but shouting at me, like one man to another, “Show me the ball! Show me the ball!” and I raised up my mollusk of a mitt, opening it with the last of my energy, and prayed that Glen’s throw was still inside.
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E. Nolan’s fiction has recently appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Trampset. He has an MFA from the University of Florida and is a reader for CutBank. Connect with him @normanuniform.