The world is ending and I came to this baseball game because, I mean, what else was there to do? Sit in my apartment alone and scroll through Twitter—excuse me, X—reading about the imminent asteroid impact? No thank you, I’d rather do that among this crowd of people who also took advantage of the local baseball team announcing admission was free today because, hey, none of the executives are going to be around to care about the finances tomorrow. This is what I get for breaking up with my boyfriend, uprooting my life, making a fresh start in a city where I knew no one—just before we get the news that it’s all going to be over soon. Now I don’t even have anyone I know to get drunk with, to hold my hand as the impact hits. Sure, Jeff sucked, but at least he would have been someone to ride this out with. Now it’s just me, this free beer, and this big crowd of strangers. Somewhere on the field some guy catches a ball and the few people who are actually paying attention to the game cheer half-heartedly before looking up to scan the sky.
Mainly I think this baseball game is still happening because if there’s one thing people are good at, it’s pretending things are normal even when they’re very, very not. I look down at the blank scorecard in front of me. My dad taught me how to keep score when I was a kid, and I suddenly wish I was that kid again, at a baseball game with my dad, except he died last year of a heart attack. My phone pings again, yet another group text of people I once knew talking about how scared they are, but I delete the messages and silence my phone, turning what little attention I have back to the game. I’m not about to die in the middle of deciding which emoji most properly conveys “holy shit it’s the end.”
I look around the stands, see the nervous expressions on everyone’s faces that they’re trying to hide. I catch the eye of a cute guy three rows back and I smile. Maybe I’ll go up to him, see if he wants to find somewhere to fuck: go out with a bang, am I right? But then a girl comes down the aisle and sits next to him, and they start making out. I briefly consider asking to join them anyway before deciding against it: threesomes are much sexier in theory than they are in reality, and there’s no need to spend my last minutes on earth stuck in some other couple’s weird relationship dynamic.
A roar goes up from the crowd, and I turn back to the game, realizing with a start that it’s somehow already the bottom of the ninth. The bases are loaded, and the local hometown hero is at the plate. The crowd’s roar grows louder, because of the game, I tell myself, even though I’m not entirely sure that’s true. Hometown Hero stares down the pitcher, lifts his bat. Hometown Hero swings, and the bat cracks, and the ball soars, and the roar crescendoes, and I squint out into the sunlight, trying to find the ball, or the asteroid, or both, and then the light is too blinding and I close my eyes and I wait to find out what happens when everything lands.
