Harlan came to feeling groggy, like he’d swallowed Benadryl and Scotch. He remembered taking ball one, high and outside, then squaring up for the second pitch. He’d wound his bat around a few times like a windmill, his little pre-pitch ritual to show he still, at thirty-four, meant business.

After that? Nada.

Now he lay on his back and blinked up into the sun where a ring of eight faces peered down at him, a medley of curiosity and distress.

“Told you he ain’t dead,” said Runk, their catcher. He whacked Phillips in the ribs with the back of his hand.

“You good, H?” Phillips said. Phillips played short, and so considered himself something of a leader.

Harlan blinked again, licked his lips, tasted sweat and dirt.

“Shouldna been crowding the plate,” said a voice outside their perimeter. A few of Harlan’s teammates turned to look, including Runk, who started like he was going to charge the guy.

“Hey fuck you, you dump,” he spat, red-faced. “You almost took off his melon.” Phillips shushed him and corralled him like Harlan, and Runk, knew he would.

Harlan didn’t blame the other pitcher. Did he have a bad goatee and dress in a full uniform like a grown child? Sure. But had Harlan been crowding the plate? Absolutely. He always had, just like his father had taught him. Shrinks the strike zone, he’d said to Harlan one afternoon at the sandlot when he was nine. In this game, you gotta stare down some scary shit if you want to survive. He was terrified as the pitches whizzed by his chin, but he did what he was told. He got the sense that this was his father’s way of proving his love and that by holding his ground, Harlan was earning it.

“Rocked you right in the ear flap,” Nuñez was saying to him now. He’d crouched down closer to Harlan and was patting him on the chest. “Don’t worry about that jagoff. Guy thinks he’s Wild Thing or some shit.”

Nuñez was Harlan’s closest friend on the team. Left fielder, still fast as a jackrabbit. He’d even played Double-A ball in Akron, the closest any of them had come to the Show. At first, they’d bonded over a love of the speedsters—Rickey Henderson, Kenny Lofton—but gradually, lubricated by two-buck pitchers at Connolly’s, they shared bits and pieces of their own lives: Nuñez calling up photos on his phone of his twin girls dressed in frilly pink everything, Harlan telling Nuñez that he and Jessie were thinking about having a kid of their own. “Just do it, H,” Nuñez had said. “Think of it like a nasty curve. You’re never really ready.” What Harlan stopped short of saying was that they’d already been trying. And trying. And trying. That the issue wasn’t with Jessie, of that much they were sure.

“Take your time, H,” Phillips said, and as soon as he said it, Harlan heard the opposing pitcher chirp again, this time encroaching on their huddle.

“This is starting to feel like a forfeit, fellas. We get the dub, three-to-one?”

“Give us a goddamn second, chief,” Phillips said. “You cleaned his clock. You’re lucky his eyes are open.”

“Guess I put too much mustard on it for him,” the pitcher said, real snotty, and that’s all it took for Runk to twist up his face, chuck his cap in the dirt and spin off after the guy shouting, “Thought I said can your fucking yap.” Phillips ran after him, yanking on the ratty shirt with Runk’s name and number on the back (McGlovin on the front), which Phillips had pressed up for everybody.

Almost one by one, Harlan’s teammates peeled off to join the fray: Shelsky, the overweight third baseman who owned the landscaping business, Moyer in centerfield who taught science at the high school, batted ninth and was always just thrilled to be there, and even Tully at first base, who was pushing fifty, had been divorced three times and drove an S-Class. That left Nuñez, who dipped his head as if in exhaustion. “Shit,” he said under his breath. He looked at Harlan and said, “I should . . .”

Harlan gave a little nod, so Nuñez stood up, fired a finger gun at Harlan, then turned to throw his weight into the scrum, which was now seventeen strong, a dusty, amorphous waltz that had migrated to short centerfield.

Harlan closed his eyes, breathed in and out slow. The shouts, the smell of baking dirt. The sound of someone punching a watermelon and then the sight of his Little League teammate, Griffin Parsley, a name Harlan would never forget, rolling on the ground at home plate, screaming murder as blood sprayed—actually sprayed, like a ruptured hose—from between the fingers that covered his face. The pitcher was already crying, the parents already rushing from the bleachers. In the end, what had shocked Harlan most, more than Griffin’s broken nose, for that’s what it was, more than his high-pitched screams and the blood that mixed with the dirt to form a rusty clay, was that they had resumed the game after Griffin was helped off the field. And Harlan was up next. The pitcher who had hit Griffin in the face was a wreck, so they called in a reliever, a string bean with glasses who shakily sailed a few warm up pitches over the catcher’s head into the backstop. While the pitcher warmed up, Harlan’s father pulled him aside and put an arm around him. “What did we learn last week?” he said.

“Toe the box?” Harlan said.

“That’s right,” his father said, squeezing his shoulder. “They can smell it if you’re afraid. Be a man.”

Harlan never got the chance to ask his dad who they were, just as he never got the chance to say, “I’m not even ten.” He never got the chance because within six months, his dad was dead, ravaged by the cancer that had spread from his prostate, that he didn’t even know was there.

He pictured the look on Jessie’s face when he got home and told her what had happened. That, in a way, he’d almost been waiting for it his entire life. And he would tell her that before they met, back when all he cared about were these ballgames and the beers that followed, he never imagined he could love someone this much.

Harlan opened his eyes and gingerly removed his helmet, let it roll off his head. He slowly raised himself until he sat upright with his legs splayed out in front of him. His left ear was ringing a little, but the wooziness had passed. He spat into the dirt and observed the brawl-that-would-never-be. It seemed to have died down, thinned out to satellite shoving matches of four and five. He could still hear Runk’s voice above everyone else’s, Runk, who would play this role for life. This was the last time Harlan would see most of these guys. It wasn’t so much a decision as it was a reality that had risen up to meet him. Not Nuñez though. Nuñez he’d stay in touch with, maybe even invite him and the wife and the twins over for mixed grill. He knew his childhood dream of being a ballplayer, the dream his father had passed down like a sacred heirloom, was officially ending on this scorcher of a Sunday in Southwest Ohio. He would go home and tell Jessie as much, tell her he was ready for the truth. And he would, for the first time in his life, admit that he was scared, like he should have done on an afternoon some twenty-five years ago, as his father started his wind-up, and he leaned too close to the plate, bracing himself for the oncoming rush.

Brendan Gillen is a writer in Brooklyn, NY. His work has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and appears, or will appear, in Wigleaf, Taco Bell Quarterly, New Delta Review, HAD, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House and elsewhere. His debut chapbook, I've Given This a Lot of Thought, is available now via Bottlecap Press. His first novel, STATIC, is forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press (July '24). You can find him online at bgillen.com and on Twitter/IG @beegillen.