He had a little radio, and on the mornings it snowed, he listened over and over to the lists of school closings until he knew them by heart: Kellerville area, Longstead area, Mount Holly area, all the outlying place-names, all the Our Lady of’s. Sometimes there was only a two-hour delay, and he wondered what it must be like, to have the boon of two extra hours like that.
"Gary” always felt like a misnomer to me, something I had to put up with to keep the peace.
I remember the next morning, puking, shaking violently, asking for God’s mercy. There was too much light coming through the blinds. I was a living, breathing version of “Hurt.”
I didn’t have headphones for my CD player, so when my parents were home I kept the volume low. At night when they went to bed I played it at a barely audible level and hugged the machine against my ear.
After every funeral, we play car tag. Lift keys from our front hallways, still dressed in black skirts and skinny ties, pair into the... more
This boy wants a cat for the idea of a cat. Real responsibility chokes him. This boy wants to embody the... more
We played in our cousin’s backyard. It was always pitcher’s hand out, right field out. If you did dish it right over the barbed wire into... more
The boys laced under cover of dark and ran the bases, or rather, ran to where the bases had once been. They floated over scars on the infield, phones glowing like shadow balls at the corners.
I will marry my fiancée in a few months
and that is a pitch I never saw coming
Three boys took their positions on the makeshift field. The flagstone wall edging the upper lawn was the outfield fence. One foul line... more
This is our second time playing but he’s still constantly clarifying, correcting. The game, this one or the real one, has strict rules. You can’t fuck it up. You need to understand every instruction, every play, need to speak the language, know the abbreviations.
They sent me out here to get the final two outs of the eighth inning, to be the set-up man for The Closer, to set up his rightful dominion The Save, but now instead of setting up The Save I am going to blow The Save before The Closer even gets his shot at The Save.
As the blows against each other’s ribs and the glancing strikes on their now helmetless heads escalated, I moved to get out of the dugout and pull them apart, but their father, Coach Christen, blocked the exit with a Louisville Slugger
He visited the library later that night still in his baseball gear, his eye black dancing with tears. I'm sorry, I said, but three strikes is three strikes. His batting glove let me know he understood.
It soon became clear that he wasn't laughing at our tableau. Just at me. At my interpretation of a professional batter.
When I was nine my grandfather taped every episode of Ken Burns’s Baseball and mailed me the VHS tapes from Kansas City.... more
The veteran second baseman
is fiddling with his glasses in the twilight: The calculated
third baseman is scanning over the crowd for his family...
Usually when my parents went off to lead one of these weekend retreats, they’d leave all four of us kids to stay at the same place, usually with another retreat family, sometimes even people we already knew.
It felt like a belly flop
crammed into a calcified bounce house
At the end of the 90s, the MLB’s closest analogue was the WWF.
The helmet is slightly too big, and the interior foam padding is the texture of damp dough, thanks to Paula’s fat, sweaty head.
At first I thought he meant food, but he never asked what I wanted.
Eighty-five percent of the Earth’s surface is tarp
The catcher will rest a hand—bare or double-weighted in leather—on the hunch of your shoulder.
