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\u2014excuse me, X\u2014reading about the imminent asteroid impact? No thank you, I\u2019d 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\u2014just before we get the news that it\u2019s all going to be over soon. Now I don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Mainly I think this baseball game is still happening because if there\u2019s one thing people are good at, it\u2019s pretending things are normal even when they\u2019re 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\u2019m not about to die in the middle of deciding which emoji most properly conveys \u201choly shit it\u2019s the end.\u201d<\/p>\n
I look around the stands, see the nervous expressions on everyone\u2019s faces that they\u2019re trying to hide. I catch the eye of a cute guy three rows back and I smile. Maybe I\u2019ll 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\u2019s no need to spend my last minutes on earth stuck in some other couple\u2019s weird relationship dynamic.<\/p>\n
A roar goes up from the crowd, and I turn back to the game, realizing with a start that it\u2019s somehow already the bottom of the ninth. The bases are loaded, and the local hometown hero is at the plate. The crowd\u2019s roar grows louder, because of the game, I tell myself, even though I\u2019m not entirely sure that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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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\u2014excuse me, X\u2014reading about the imminent asteroid impact? No thank you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":20693,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[803,911],"class_list":["post-20249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","tag-apocalypse","tag-baseball","writer-chelsea-hanna-cohen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20249"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20249\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20694,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20249\/revisions\/20694"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}