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The Ghost Runner by Vic Nogay  Photo by Briana Tozour on Unsplash Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai Podcast. Veteran Monsters pitcher Mick McCullough thundered up the dugout steps to take the mound in the bottom of the 7th. Every muscle in his body was leaden, every joint rusty. It was a sweltering, tense Friday night—a home game for the Rockets with the Monsters in town—rivals clashing on the 4th of July. … You got this, Mick! … Stand tall, old man! … His coaches and teammates urged him on, but Mick was fading, and he knew it. All season he’d felt off, shaky, slowly coming undone. And tonight, pitch by pitch, his arm was giving out. Maybe he should have spoken up, passed the game off to the guys in the bullpen to finish it out, but at his age, he knew this was the last time, and he just wasn’t ready to say goodbye. He swallowed hard, the lurking death of his dream shrouding his focus. When he reached the mound, he circled it. Feigning nonchalance, he looked around the stadium, up into the stands, soaking it all in. The hot air sizzled as the sun went down. … be sure to stay after the game for the fireworks, folks … The announcer’s voice bounced around from the bleachers to the backstop—the reverberation, disorienting. Head foggy, arm throbbing, Mick toed the rubber as the Rockets rookie phenom Edgar Jimenez stepped up to the plate. Mick took the sign for low and away, wound up, and delivered, but the pitch sailed high and tight buzzing past Jimenez’s ear. He went down hard narrowly avoiding the ball, and he took his time rising from the dirt, stacking the crumbled pieces of himself back up like a building being demolished in reverse. He stared Mick down the whole time. Mick gave a halfhearted shrug and shook out his arm. Jimenez spat in Mick’s direction, adjusted his helmet, and walked it off. Mick stashed the ball in his glove and his glove under his arm, took his cap off his head and ran his fingers through his long hair, sweat greasing it into submission. The routine was meant to calm him, but his lungs sputtered, and his legs shook. Breathing deep, he looked up and saw his own haggard frame on the jumbotron in centerfield—his eyes caught the sharp edge of the sun peering through just beneath it. Sparks of light danced across his vision as he shook off the glare. Determined to recover, Mick settled in for the next pitch. But this time when the ball left his hand, he felt a pin stick deep in his shoulder, then pop and release. Wilting in pain, he grimaced and watched Jimenez absolutely crush it. The sound the bat made on the ball. was a ferocious boom no one could quite believe. Was it even possible for a wooden bat to be that loud? It was a massive bomb by the home team to tie the game. Cheers exploded from the seats. Then the boom came again. Unmistakable now, unobscured by the serendipitous crack of the bat the first time around. Mick startled and turned so he was staring where the ball had flown over the wall. That’s when the fireworks began to fly—the display meant for the end of the game—not up to the sky, but down towards the players on the field. A malfunction, a mistake, an attack, or a curse. The crowd ducked behind the seats, shrieking in fear. The players did the same, but on an open field, there was nowhere to hide. Some of them ran for the dugouts. The others lay prone in the grass, digging their fingers into the earth as if the crisply mowed blades of grass could save them. BOOM! BOOM! It seemed endless… but everything ends. When the explosions finally stopped, smoke had enveloped the park like a shroud. The final glinting beams from the red-orange sunset couldn’t burn it away as the sun would fog, so the smoke hung thick and yellow, bright, though no one could see a thing. Rain had been forecast for the late-night hours. Countercurrents of clean air cleared the way for the coming storm, slowly revealing the diamond’s horrors. The dugouts and stands stirred as the living rose to take in the scene. The outfield grass and infield dirt were dotted with remains like bugs drowned in the hot wax of a deep pillar candle. Jimenez had just rounded first, caught as if stealing. The Homeplate umpire had been blown upright against the backstop fence—crucified, as umpires often are. He was passing slowly between life and death, holding his watch like a sentinel over this sacred ground. After a moment of stillness, wraiths of the freshly dead surfaced above the bodies on the field, the air thickening into opacity. As they appeared, the game seemed briefly to pick up where it left off. The ghost of Jimenez celebrated as he crossed Homeplate, oblivious to the carnage around him. The ghost of Drew Potts in the on-deck circle lumbered confidently to the plate, nodding to the umpire up on the fence. And there was Mick in the center of it all. The body of the old pitcher lay dead in the dirt, but the ballplayer’s ghost lingered above the mound. Suddenly aware, the teammates and rivals regarded their spectral forms, then looked to the ground searching for their lifeless bodies. Upon finding themselves, one by one, the spirits began to slowly fade. The fresh air fish hooked itself into the tattered edges of their phantom frames and unspooled them, taking them away, bit by bit, to wherever it is ghosts go. Potts clutched his bat, incredulous, and assumed his batting stance. A frantic young Jimenez tried to sprint back on the field. And desperately, Mick held his glove up towards the plate, pleading for a brand-new ball. But no ball came, and the wind moved through. Vic Nogay (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize- and Best Microfiction-nominated poet and writer whose work appears in Fractured Lit, Barren Magazine, and Lost Balloon, among others. Her micro chapbook of poems, "under fire under water" was published in 2022 by tiny wren publishing. She is an Associate Poetry Editor for Identity Theory and lives in Columbus, Ohio. Find her online at vicnogay.com
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