By Richard Moriarty

It had been years since the city stopped maintaining the baseball field next to the picnic shelter and the playground, so the playing surface looked more like the prairie pastures that stretched out for acres on either side of the road connecting the park to the center of town. The diamond of dirt that used to be an infield was gummy from winter snows and rains; the pitching mound was obscured by switchgrass that had grown taller than the kids who used to pitch there. Behind home plate, there were rows of metal bleachers painted bright green before decades of sun faded them into an opaque blue. A heap of worn-out tires had been discarded under the bleachers by the owner of a local auto shop after he shut down his store. Sometimes people who grew up nearby would drive past the park and remember the field that was buried beneath tallgrasses and debris. With the windows down on a cool evening, they might hear the thwack of a bat against a ball or the shouts and hollers from parents sitting on the bleachers. Beyond the outfield fence was a row of trees and a wooded trail that ran alongside an abandoned railway; if you walked the trail just before dark or the first light of morning, you might feel the ground shake from a train car churning eastward. You might smell the smoke from its coal-burning engine, watch it rise up through the trees and float out over the old field. If you grew up playing there, you might walk past and taste a remnant of shredded bubble gum, or maybe the chewing tobacco you used to pack inside your lower lip. Remember how it felt to dig your cleats into the dirt; to chase down a fly ball in the outfield, sending blades of grass flying in your wake; to swing at a fastball and send it soaring above the outfield fence and the trees and the clouds; to live in that moment when it seemed the ball would never come down.

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Richard Moriarty lives in Durham, North Carolina. He teaches creative writing, literature, and composition at Alamance Community College. His stories have appeared in Gulf Stream Magazine, mojo, and Watershed Review.