If you look hard enough in any shiny cityscape, you’ll find places where the gild and glitz end, and the rot sits deep and speaks a history of poor maintenance and imperfection. That’s the real city.

The batting cage was one of those places. Nestled under an electronic billboard which alternated between ads for wrinkle cream and accident lawyers, it stank of sewers and old dirt. The fence was bent, the lines worn, and just outside, a darkness set in so deep it was like a felt curtain buried the world away. Entering the cage was traveling to a foreign land where the bright lights of Buckhead City melted away, and there was only you and the game.

That was exactly how Harry liked it. Baseball was in his blood, passed down in a tradition of watching from fathers to sons for over a century. Whatever life threw at him, whatever the professional league pulled or new sports garbage came up, no matter what was going on outside, baseball was pure. Viewership had toppled, money was running out, teams were limping on, but it didn’t matter; Harry was a diehard. And the batting cage was a temple, forgotten by the masses but still open for Harry to meditate when he needed it.

And he needed it now. He hardly noticed the attendant as he waved his phone to pay entrance. His mind was elsewhere. He needed to lose himself, to cleanse his thoughts. Sport as exorcism.

Once inside, the only sound was the occasional clank of a machine firing a ball and some other lost soul either whiffing the air or putting synthetic wood to fake leather, a home run that would never be caught or a simple grounded single that might have saved a team in a losing match. No one spoke; words were blasphemy. Only the sound of bat and ball was needed on such hallowed ground. There was no one to cheer or cry out, no teams to save or destroy. Only the self. No one else.

Harry grabbed a scuffed batting helmet and plopped it on so it could engage its boot sequence while he pulled on his gloves. It adjusted almost immediately, and a blinking blast of neon fired off a speech in hexcode before coming up to speed. Wind direction, pulse rate, atmospheric pressure, all registered suddenly in front of his eyes in dull orange. He hardly noticed. He was thinking about her instead. Long curls, rich, the color of chocolate, bouncing slightly as she walked away.

He blinked. The neon message read STEP UP TO THE PLATE WHEN READY. He exhaled, selected a bat made of a polymer that looked and felt like wood but had never been anywhere near the inside of a forest, and moved into the marred white lines of the batter’s box.

Somewhere behind a dark screen, a machine whirred to life. A ball slid onto a firing mechanism. The helmet flashed GET READY.

A slight breeze registered. Harry thought he sensed a faint hint of her soap. The ball fired, the helmet spitting out information. In the big leagues, these things could warn the batter of a slider, fastball, or breaking ball even before the pitcher had finished throwing. Small, worn down batting cages don’t have big league money, even now with the teams in dire straights. Harry clipped the bottom tip of the ball with the bat and sent it sprawling. FOUL BALL blazed across his eyes. Vanilla lingered in his nostrils.

He stepped back out of the box, positioned the bat between his legs, and undid and redid his gloves. They cushioned his fingers and palms, and though they were fine, he fitted them again anyway. The helmet was shouting at him to get back in to take another swing. He ignored it. His mind was running through a million places. Where was she? Was she at a bar, smiling at some guy who could buy expensive liquors and looked at her the way some hunter spies prey? Was she at a diner, shooting messages off to friends over a hot mug of chicory? Maybe she was out for a walk, the same breeze tickling her forearms as it tickled his. He swung the bat out from between his legs and used it to tap the tip of his helmet. The neon messages distorted only slightly.

Focus. Take another swing.

Harry stepped into the box again.

This time he could do it, he knew it. This time, out of the park. The machine kicked on again. The helmet flashed its warning. There was the sound of the ball firing.

He could see the eagerness of her smile as she leaned forward to kiss him.

STRIKE flashed before his eyes, blinking rhythmically like clockwork. Harry shook his head and blinked away the memory. He stood up straight and looked up at the sky. Again, the machine came alive and fired off a ball, STRIKE displaying on the inside of his helmet as it whizzed past him. He hardly noticed.

Instead his eyes were focused on the orange haze of streetlamps forming lines across her face, interlaced with shadows, as she said her goodbyes.

It took a moment for his vision to return to the real world, centering on the plastic grin of a impossibly attractive model winking and trying to hawk him wrinkle cream in the sky. A moment later, it was the logo of a law firm, a cartoon fist tightening around a gavel, complete with action lines. Harry sighed and tore his eyes away from the billboard. There was no help there.

He raised the bat. No, there was no fixing things. She was gone. He didn’t like it, but things hadn’t worked, and what was done was done.

A ball shot forward. There was no time to think. Harry let his body react. His hips twisted as his shoulders rotated wide, elbows slightly bent, the bat now an extension of himself. He didn’t see the baseball but felt it as it connected with the synthetic wood, the cracking sound following immediately but lasting an eternity as it rang in his skull. He followed through as a shapeless streak whipped in the opposite direction it had just come at him. DOUBLE pulsed violently before his face like a holographic slot machine.

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Evan Conaway is a long time lover of science fiction. He holds a Master’s in Library and Information Studies and works as a grip in the film industry. Currently, he resides in Atlanta, GA.