It is night. Or early morning.
There is a fog. Or a mist.
The chain-link backstop of a baseball diamond emerges…
The sounds of gravel under tires rises…
A bright taxi, alternating between yellow and orange colours, alien to the area, rumbles up…
The back door opens and spits out a stranger…
On the rear window is scrawled a message in what at first appears to be a non-sensical amalgam of letters and numbers. There is a sense that the message is intended.
The cellphone rings. The text message splashed across the screen matches the gibberish which is now being annihilated by the taxi’s defrost.
Looking around offers no answers.
Suddenly called onto the diamond as an emergency replacement, the glove won’t fit. The thumb insert has been reversed, rendering the equipment useful only for swatting at the warmups thrown from the first basemen.
Rescued at the last moment, the original second basemen takes his position. A return to the dugout offers the sounds and smells, but eclipses most of the sights. The sun is behind, the shadows are deep, and the sound of the crowd loudest from the right.
Meandering to the edge of this hold, relatives are gathered amongst the many faceless onlookers. Some have long since left the earth.
Anti-semitic epithets spill from the opposite end of the diamond. An obese figure leads the cacophony.
His face is suddenly mere inches before…
A fist soon reaches it, and the roar subsides…
Blood begins to trickle from his right nostril, and his eyes go empty…
The heavens crack open…
Clouds rumble in…
The sunlight emerges as white outlines to wavy billows reaching down…
The torrent starts suddenly…
The ground begins to shift…
Like the pool scene in Poltergeist, the displacement of earth is fast and furious…
The game is called – but the storm continues.
The undulations of the cloud are soon overpowered by a great tide that sweeps in from the forest in centerfield…
Great crests and liquid ridges burst across the outfield, jarring loose the dirt and flinging the granules like bullets across the sky…
Home plate has become a wide hole in the gathering brown viscosity, holding a fetid pool reflecting forms looking in…
Players are scrambling…
The coach is smoking cigarettes, indifferent…
There is a cabin offering retreat…
It has long been abandoned, but is now resurrected as a hopeful haven for a small group of survivors…
One wrestles open the door slowly, expecting danger from within…
The ferret steps over his feet, muzzling its young…
It goes unnoticed by the lead, but sends the others into momentary retreat.
There is a musty smell…
The rain has slowed.
The field has receded into the distance…
Time stops.
If you build it, they will come.