"Before Your Eyes"

A Short Story

What’s the setting? Well, everything around me feels black, but I know it’s mid-afternoon on a cloudless Tuesday. Actually, I’m not sure if it’s Tuesday, but I don’t think that matters. Currently I’m staring down the barrel of a .38 Special waiting for Death to swing his scythe. I suppose that seems like the conflict, braving death and all, but it’s not. Conflict involves a protagonist and I guess that’s me. In my story it is, anyway. And so the conflict is not facing death but rather braving the question of who I am as I am standing on the edge of the cliff before it crumbles into the abyss.

My life flashed before my eyes…

I

I used to play baseball. It was everything you might imagine it would be. T-ballers, coach pitch, little league, pony league—all waiting to win their respective games on their respective diamonds of differing size and population, waiting to get their turn to bat or to catch the next fly ball so their parents can applaud their success, and waiting to eat corndogs, hotdogs, hamburgers, and french fries while they watch their friends play the next game. Such was the atmosphere of my county’s youth baseball outings.

We mimicked Major League Baseball teams for name and jersey color. My team wore green and sported yellow A’s on out caps for Oakland Athletics, and we were playing the Baltimore Orioles. I was the catcher for our no-win little league team. We always lost, and tonight we knew we would lose. It was upsetting and some kids took losses harder than others, not to mention the perfectionist parents who would scold their children for not being good enough, or, even worse in my opinion, the parents who would tell their kids that loss teaches them values in life. You won’t hear parents telling the same things to cancer kids.

I guess these are things I thought about as I sat on my haunches in front of the umpire as the next-to-bat approached. Kids around the field chanted “here batter, batter” trying to throw the skinny boy off his game. And that was the plan, to catch him off guard. For the two previous batters I signaled our pitcher to throw curve balls, high balls, and low balls. So that is what Number Six was expecting now. I signaled three fast balls in a row to which this expert player struck out.

This was a tactic we recently discovered and employed. We would throw curveballs and the likes to the bad hitters and straight, fast balls unexpectedly to the good ones. It seemed to be working. At the current third inning the Orioles were leading five to one. We managed to slow their lead. Unfortunately, we did not have any good batters on our team. We had a mix of poor hand-eye coordination, fly balls, and slow runners that didn’t know how to lead or play pickle. I had bad hand-eye coordination myself.

We went up to bat and I wasn’t one of the three leadoffs, which was all the Orioles needed to bring in the next inning, so I didn’t get to bat, but I would sometime in the fifth inning if everything went as it had been. By that time the Orioles scored another run and we were still stuck at one. I was second to bat and watched the kid who scored our first and only run strike out within four pitches. I was next.

My heart raced as per usual as I got into step behind the plate. I scraped my feet across the ground like I saw the pros do and tapped home plate two times with my bat. I pulled the bat over my shoulder and stared the pitcher down. I noticed him looking at whatever sign the catcher was giving him. I didn’t know what to expect. Here was where my hand-eye coordination came into play. And… throw: low ball, no swing.

“Ball,” the umpire said.

I relaxed and tensed the bat over my shoulder as the catcher tossed the ball back to the pitcher, and waited for the next throw: fast ball through the middle, no swing.

“Stee-rike one.”

Relax, I thought.

Throw: fast ball, swing, miss.

“Stee-rike two.”

I sighed but kept my head and eyes level. My heart was racing and I tried to keep my breathing steady to no avail. Two fast balls in a row meant he was trying to throw me off, but I swung, so he probably thought three fast balls would be way out of the park. He was right.

Throw: fast ball, swing, hit. Way out of the park.

This was the part I forgot to tell you before. I was a terrible batter, but I was a great runner. I ran like the wind, cowboy. It was kind of pointless really, since it was an obvious homerun, but I heard everyone chanting my name. Adrenaline was pouring into every part of my body for so many reasons—the crowd, the running, the excitement of my accomplishment. It was a small win, but a win nonetheless.

My team was telling me what a great job I had done, and at the top of seventh inning we were tied six to six. In the end we did lose nine to eight, but you couldn’t tell. My team’s parents crowded around their children praising us for our comeback and how we almost beat our opposition. We lost by a hair, but that game became the most memorable comeback of the season. It was the most runs we’d ever had in our streak of losses. We may have lost, but it was a victory nonetheless.

II

Before we got married, Sadie was my high school sweetheart. She was the first and only girl I ever went all-the-way with. I’m sort of proud of that. She’d been around the block before and was worried I’d want to see other girls, but the way I figured it was you don’t fix things that aren’t broken and if there’s something better out there it doesn’t matter unless you know there is or if what you have is bad or mediocre. That was the other thing. Sadie and I had many a good time, but she would freak out when things settled down or got locked into patterns of monotony.

I was only seventeen and didn’t play baseball anymore, though I still watched it religiously. Sadie wasn’t as into the sport as I was, but she would pick a random team to root for. When I and my friends talked sports I would ask her what her team of the day was and she would say White Sox, and I’d get mad. The next day I’d ask again, and she’d say Yankees, and I’d get really pissed. To be fair, I loved the entire sport with all its teams and every player. But when it came to my Boston Red Sox, well there is no other Sox team and the Yankees can go to hell.

Every once in a while a player would come out having used drugs or steroids, and Sadie would say, “See. This is why I don’t like baseball. It’s full of grown men playing games like boys, bragging like men, and trying to manlier by doing drugs and hulking out.” I would just be upset that another good player got caught. And they were all good players, even if they weren’t all good people.

Sadie and I didn’t fight often, and when we did it really wasn’t all that bad. However, there was this one time when we really got into it. We were watching a Red Sox game at my house when she got bored and decided to strike up conversation. I didn’t mind that she did, but I didn’t respond well to her joke.

She said, “I’m thinking about getting a Yankees tattoo on my left breast.”

I responded with a joking intent, but was actually serious at the same time, so maybe she saw through that. I said, “You’re not getting a tattoo anywhere.”

She replied in anger, “I’ll get a tattoo wherever I damn well please.”

“I didn’t mean it like tha—“

“No, don’t lie to me. You meant it whether you meant to say it or not.”

“You know I don’t like tattoos. They are just as wonderful as any other piece of art, but they—“

“Detract from a person’s natural beauty, right?”

“Yeah.”

“How about I stop shaving my legs? That’s natural beauty for you.”

“It’s not the same.”

“And why not?”

“Well, for one, you’re removing something rather than adding,” I said, which was not the best wording, and I probably should have started with my second point.

“So I should go get a breast reduction?”

“Not. The. Same.”

“Why. Not?”

“Because your hair will grow back!” I said, which didn’t help.

“You’re missing the point,” she said.

“Yeah. You’re right. What are we fighting about again?”

“You! You trying to say what I can and can’t do with my body. Just because you love me doesn’t mean you own me.”

“I do love you,” I said.

“Don’t do that, dammit.”

“Look. Listen. I hate tattoos…”

“I know,” she started.

“Hold on,” I said. She sighed in return, but I ignored it. “I hate tattoos. I really, really, really don’t want you to get any, but you can do whatever you want with your body. I might not like it, but you can and I will love you all the same.”

“I don’t want a tattoo,” she said quietly.

“I know,” I said.

“I hate you,” she said.

“No, you don’t.”

“No. I don’t.”

[TO BE CONCLUDED]