The pitcher just struck out Esperanza Duarte. Right then redemption was up to me. I have the biggest legs of all the Lady Mantises. Daddy used to always say people here like it when you can do something special but not too special. Our town isn’t really small. We don’t have rolling hay fields or anything like that. It’s not big either, though. Teenagers like me and T don’t have much going on; of course there is more to do than go shopping and get pregnant. There’s softball.
I tried to give Esperanza a look, something that said, “Don’t worry about it. You did your best. The pitcher has an arm like a moose’s throat. You’re still incredible, and everybody knows it.” I tried to make the face Daddy used to make when I struck out, but Esperanza didn’t look back. My sister, T, yelled and threw random things around the dugout. “How did you miss that pitch?!” T screamed. “The ball is the size of a monkey’s skull. She threw it so slow it might as well have had a monkey attached to it!” Esperanza curled up like a 5’10” potato bug. Coach Watson always lets T get away with chewing out the rest of us. Coach had thick furry arms and smelled good enough to follow anywhere. Esperanza told me once that it’s bad luck to have a team name that ends with an s. I want to be slim like T. We’re only ten months apart, but she’s the golden tree, and I’m the brown shrub.
—
Before his accident, Daddy used to bring me and T to our games. Now Mama does it since she doesn’t trust us with the car—says our minds wander. At the funeral she told Pastor Short she felt surrounded by dark spirits. Pastor Short knew how to lay hands on his congregation to push the dark spirits away. Pastor Short had a degree in dark spirits. Pastor Short was the dark spirit whisperer.
It was an accident, how he died: sleep apnea. That’s when you just about choke to death every night but wake up just in time to stay alive. That doesn’t happen always—the waking up, I mean.
Everything T and I knew got split into halves, before the accident and after. Before, Daddy helped us train. I was up to 300 pounds on the leg press. Now I can barely do 180. Before, T had to run three miles a day just to prove to Coach she deserved to be a Lady Mantis. Now she’s out of breath running from first to third and gives the rest of us shit for missing impossible pitches.
T made up this game for just the two of us. We each get points for injuries. The worst are called diamonds and get us a thousand points easy. Small hurts are peanuts and only get twenty-five or under. Anything more than that we have to debate. After Daddy’s funeral, T asked me how many people had on white hats. I told her three. She thought about it. “How many people didn’t have on a tie?” Forty. “How many guys, dumbass?” T clarified. Just our twin cousins Ronald and Donald. She said I was right. We learned something new then. Pain helped us remember. Soon we taped needles to pen caps so we could prick our fingers in class. Sometimes I let the needle scrape just under my thumbnail or harder between my Scars knuckles. If it bled too much, I had to wait. Our grades improved.
—
After Esperanza’s strikeout I was up. The other team chanted “Lady Bug Slugs.” Girl with the moose-head arm let a fast one go. No matter what happened, I was going to connect. I swung for all of us: me, T, Daddy, and Esperanza. I hit the ball. I hit the ball with my left elbow. Before impact I knew I was getting my first diamond. The bone disintegrated like a dandelion in the wind. Except instead of petals of fluff, I got vomit-inducing pain that spread from shoulder to heel. I only busted my elbow, but everything hurt. It was like my body forgot which part was broken and said, “To hell with it. She’s all messed up.”
T and I might not be so special. Maybe we’re the opposite of lucky. Most people spend their whole lives trying to avoid every uncomfortable feeling. For us, discomfort was the only thing that put a face on the clock. Time is just a wobbly blank surface full of smoke. Pain made the wind blow and the ground still.
—
T claimed some of her points just because. One night we heard a couple of cabinets slam in the kitchen. She went to investigate. T came back with a box of raisins and said she caught Mama with her hand on Pastor Short’s crotch. It looked like she was trying to open a drawer with an awkward handle. T claimed fifty for that. I said OK. After T had sex her first time with the coach, she said she earned twenty. I said OK. T made fun of me for my crush on Esperanza in a way that said: I feel sorry for you, but you’re safe here. Esperanza had eyes like a bush baby and really sharp incisors. When I saw her hug Gerald Preston after Mantis practice, I wanted to claim a million. I never said anything.
—
T was right. The pain helped our memories. In mid-collapse from the ball collision, I got that clarity people talk about when they talk about death. I saw the twenty-seven pairs of green eyes, ninety brown ones, twelve blue, and fourteen gray in the stands. Two men screamed “You’re a goddamn liar” simultaneously. Pastor Short applied a layer of lip balm with his pinky. T hated him for her own reasons. They weren’t mine. Coach Watson took off his cap. I knew that one day when I got older and somehow felt bigger and there were no more secrets between us I would remember him almost never. My mother stood in the shade, so I couldn’t make out her head. Whatever unnamed muscle of parental affection inside of her was weaker than my daddy’s. I wanted better but settled on forgiveness.
A mosquito plunged its blood tube into Esperanza’s wrist as she brought her hand to her mouth in eye-watering shock. Right then I knew she loved me. T inhaled a popcorn kernel and proceeded to choke on it. I was happy. Esperanza asked the EMT if I would be OK. He said, “Fuck yeah, but she caught a good one.” With those super big, round animal eyes Esperanza looked at me for a number of searing gorgeous seconds and mouthed the words “good luck” before the doors closed. Commercials for doughnuts and erectile dysfunction played in the car radios that passed. Incomprehensible conversations of babies echoed in the hospital. That barbed wire whisk that made scrambled eggs out of my arm showed me the thin layer between true consciousness and sleep where needles and caskets and monkey skulls are all the same impermanent things. The clock in the stadium read 5:16 when the ball hit. The nurse gave me Percocet at 5:44. Things got fuzzy after that. Maybe something about love.
VENITA BLACKBURN earned her MFA from Arizona State University in 2008. Her recent stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Faultline, Bellevue Literary Review, Devil’s Lake Review, Feathertale Review, and for audio download through Bound Off and Sniplits. Other honors include finalist for the 2010 Indiana Review Fiction Prize and finalist in the 2011 Open City RRofihe Trophy Short Story Contest. Her home town is Compton, California, but she now lives and teaches in Arizona.