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1.
“You should sign up for Blaseball,” Eddie muses to Manuela one day as she’s reading the news and they’re half-out the door.
“Mm.” It’s become a habit. Manuela should do this. Manuela should do that. Manuela does nothing and stays at home all day and maybe teaches ASL at the community center on Thursday afternoons. At least Eddie has a job at the hair salon.
“Battin’ precognition,” Eddie mumbles.
“What?” She turns to them, squinting at their lips.
“Pattern recognition,” they enunciate. “You’d be good at stealing signs.”
“Mm.” She flips the page. Pretends to be interested in the discovery of a tunnel to Hades beneath Detroit.
“You can’t stay like this forever.” Their voice cracks. “We can’t- …”
Manuela sits in an empty house. She turns back to the sports section and reads.
2.
There are no signs to be stolen, as Eddie had suggested. Everything is off-the-cuff. Nothing is prepared, it seems. Manuela’s team, from New York, is in a division with teams from Los Angeles and Yellowstone. And not in a division with neighboring city Boston. There is a team named the Shoe Thieves.
She shows up once for practice, gets told she’ll pitch fifth. Then she gets a call telling her she’s pitching the third game because someone messed up the schedules. She throws on a penny jersey over her dress shirt at two minutes to gametime.
Manuela blows her first game in the bottom of the ninth, seven to six. One hundred forty two pitches. Her hand is bleeding by the time she leaves the mound.
“Aren’t there supposed to be relief pitchers?”
Nobody knows. If they do, they aren’t telling.
3.
There are a pair of Millennials players who sit on the same bench before the game.
Their names are Reese and Chandra. Neither of them can sign. Reese speaks quietly and Chandra speaks quickly and they almost make Manuela regret not spending an extra thousand on a better hearing aid.
Neither of them looks fit to play the game, hyperventilating in the locker room as they do. Reese has an anxiety disorder. Chandra would probably have one if she could afford a therapist, she says.
Chandra says many things. She says she wasn’t always a dryad, and that it was a cruel joke; she’s a pyromancer, you know. But she says she’s gotten into fire safety since then, and she can’t remember a time she’d burnt herself since before she was hexed.
4.
Her hands hurt less when she isn’t focusing on them. On off-innings, Manuela sits in the dugout and watches the other pitchers. Sometimes, she watches her own team play.
Chandra is a bad batter. Chandra is great at defense. She can throw a ball to first faster than Manuela throws it to the batter.
“Why don’t you pitch?” Manuela asks her.
Chandra’s laugh is like the autumn breeze. “I’d only play one every five games.”
She says that as if she likes playing Blaseball.
“Besides, who would look after Reese?”
5.
Eddie comes to one of her games.
She sees them in the stands in the bottom of the fifth. They’re wearing that bright-white suit and carrying that flowery parasol and she’s surprised she didn’t see them sooner.
It’s the dead of night. The moon is orange and the clouds are grey and there’s enough light pollution in New York to call it a game day.
She sees Eddie’s fleeting smile between her pitches. Strike, strike, ball. Single. Out.
“Battin’ precognition,” she mumbles, almost to herself, as she slumps into the dugout bench.
“What?” Chandra cocks her head.
“Pattern rec-” Manuela pauses. “Look at the pitcher’s hands. If they throw it like a frisbee, it’s going to move out of the strike zone. Don’t swing at those.”
Manuela throws strikes but not strikeouts and too many walks to count. But the defense pulls through, turning a runner on first into a double play, turning a single on bases loaded into a runner out at home before a pop fly ends the inning.
Chandra goes four for six that game. The Millennials win, ten to five.
6.
Manuela Lang does not remember Game 25. Please, stop asking.
(She didn’t have to be pitching. She’d just done it for convenience of schedule.)
They’d lost. How were they supposed to carry on?
(There wasn’t even a break. The umpire turned to Manuela, face-mask still smoking. If she didn’t throw the ball, she would-)
Reese was screaming. Reese didn’t stop screaming.
(Her ashes weren’t like the logs of a campfire or the remnants of a fireplace. They were still shaped like her.)
It happened in the top of the inning, so the umpires had enough time to find a replacement before her turn to bat.
(They were still shaped like her. Arms contorted in a final plea to the heavens.)
Someone carried her body off the field so the Spies’ shortstop had a place to stand.
(They were still shaped like her.)
7.
It’s been at least a week. It’s probably been a month. Chandra’s ash is still seared into Manuela’s skin.
She showers every day. It isn’t enough. The air still tastes like smoke on her tongue.
Once you’ve been in the shower for long enough, the temperature starts to take effect. You start sweating even as water rushes down your skin.
Sweating feels like darts of fire pricking Manuela’s back, threatening to blossom into a full-blown inferno.
She has to get out. She has to get out now. She has to run, she’s going to-
Eddie finds her huddled on the tiled floor in a puddle of water. They turn the shower off and sit next to her until she’s cold enough to want a towel.
8.
The wake happens on Game 100. The Crabs and Tigers are duelling for a semifinals spot on national television. The Millennials are sitting on the couches in a funeral home. Fourteen people don’t fill the space.
It’s closed-casket. It would have been anyways, even if the game had let up and the team could grieve normally, even if they didn’t have to wait half a year just to have a day off.
There was a family burial, around two days after Chandra’s death. Reese slipped out of the game halfway through to attend, Manuela hears.
Other than Reese, who has to sit down after breaking into tears reading his eulogy, the team’s goodbyes are awkward. Dagmar mentions yoga together. Garnet has a platitude about witchcraft and nature. But the fact remains that Chandra has been dead for three times as long as most people knew her.
Manuela had something prepared- a quote from a poem- but she doesn’t read it. It feels cheap after Reese’s heart-written farewell. Most of the Millennials are silent, too.
9.
The team comes together on the field after the elections. There will be an offseason for a month, and then games will resume. They talk about everything and nothing. They talk about the weather.
The batters take to the field and practice their defense. Manuela watches them from afar as they hurl balls at each other, joke about the fits of their gloves. Reese stands apart from the rest of them. He’s wearing long sleeves.
She approaches him afterwards. Neither of them has anywhere to be without Blaseball, so she takes him to the nearest taqueria with prices below ten dollars.
“Even eating meat is too much,” he confides on the brink of tears, picking at the vegan burrito. “It- everything-”
Reese was on second base. When she burned, he was the only person nearer to Chandra than Manuela herself.
10.
At least he’s doing better now.
Chandra’s family doesn’t blame him, Reese tells Manuela after the ASL session. In their grief, they’d pushed him away, but took pity on him when he lost the apartment he and Chandra were sharing. He’s staying with them, now.
He’s not excited for the on-season, but he’s eager for the distraction it will bring. Manuela thinks she understands.
“Maybe we’ll win it all,” Reese says. For her, goes unspoken.
Not hopefully, of course. But there’s an element of determination in his voice.
“Dream big,” Manuela says, and packs up her stuff.