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My son pulls a line drive through the gap just about every at-bat. Claims he does it by letting the game happen to him, letting the bat meet the ball. Because bat and ball want to collide, he says, and effort skews the alignment. He wears Eleven, as I did, but in every other way. I’m in the hometown bleachers as he watches the ball into the catcher’s mitt, so patient, his whole life ahead of him to waste; he’ll take three strikes looking if they’re not quite where his bat wants them. I’d still be unmarried and undivorced with that attitude, but the game is easy for Eleven Junior. When I played, I wanted to rocket balls over the fence like a man with a vendetta, but mostly they glanced off my bat into the dugout sending teammates scrambling. When my boy’s hittin’em hard, there’s no better place than the ballpark, but I must do two things at once: observe the game and make stories on my laptop, where I’m the All Star. Tappity-tap. My characters play games I invent from positions I assign. Tappity-tap. Spouses and lovers toe the infield grass, relatives and workfriends pace their outfield patches, each with a part in the pageant, everyone focused on home. Senior is pitching to Junior. He shakes off signs until the catcher surrenders and lets him hurl it. I close my computer. Junior’s at the plate in a Bunt Situation while his coach pointlessly taps his earlobes, testicles, and elbows. Everyone glares at me as if I’d shouted out “Take Him Yard!” instead of just thinking it. Dads and coaches can’t just let the game happen to their kids. I watch him shrug and take another strike and wonder whether what he does will be of any consequence.
Original Copyright © FEB 27, 2007
Revised Copyright © MAR 05, 2026
This car is too big for our abbreviated family. Dad drives, and I sit in the back where he can see me, as if I would budge, just the two of us since the accident that reduced us by half. Beside him is empty. Beside me too. He has a metaphorical way of holding the wheel at twelve o’clock with his left hand backwards like he’s itching for a hard right or fighting a skid, like he’s shaking his fist at whatever’s ahead, ready to flip the bird. Equally newsworthy, his favorite parking space is alongside any unattended female, and we always find ourselves in the checkout line with the cutest cashier. I learn what I observe, not what I’m told. It’s clever for a man his age to tell them what we’re up to, to frame himself as a single dad buying game cartridges with his son. When they smile, if it’s at him, he appreciates me with gum and batteries. Just once he should tell them why he’s single and who was driving if not drunk then nearly, and who was climbing over the seat to be with him when we ran into a barricade that was meant to stay put and did. We saved no one, Dad and I. We flew through the moon roof like dollar-store superheroes with the wrong set of skills. I would have been belted in, like now, like Mom and Junior were. Dad never believed in them. The belts, I mean. He doesn’t look at the passenger seat. He doesn’t look at me. But if he has to brake suddenly, which happens a lot, he reaches back to restrain Junior, while I’m the one sitting here. I don’t get it. The living were always better off without Dad’s kind of protection.
Original Copyright © February 21, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 23, 2026
Very Short Novels 