Taking the Field
Taking the Field
By Jen Mierisch
Sure, I’ll tell y’all how I ended up here. Not like we got much else to do.
It all started a couple years ago, that day the internet went down. Nine a.m. on the dot. Of course my son and daughter-in-law couldn’t work, and my granddaughter Vickie couldn’t do her schoolwork. Me, I was retired. I’d worked outdoors, for the Groundskeeping Division, what used to be called the Park District, so I wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass anyhow.
Vickie, let’s see, she was born in 2070, so she was nine then. She’d about outgrown the rooftop playground. I took her there that morning, but she climbed the monkey bars a few times and asked to go back inside.
Yes, Mona, I know I never shut up about Vickie. Cut an old woman some slack, will ya? That kid’s about the only thing that gives me hope for the future anymore.
Anyways, Vickie was bored stiff with no school and no online games to play, and her parents had gone downtown to help fix the internet. That’s how she ended up rummaging through my closet. She walked into the kitchen while I was fixing Campbell’s soup for lunch, holding my old Little League baseball glove from the early twenties.
Whaddya mean, “What’s Little League”? Guess some of you are too young to remember outdoor sports. Vickie didn’t know either. “It’s my baseball glove from my Little League team, the Lightning Rods,” I told her. “Back before all the pandemics, before it got too hot and toxic to be outdoors for long, we had teams that played games. Like your ‘Hey Batter’ game, but with people instead of pixels.”
Well, her eyes kind of glazed over then, like the time I told her about trick-or-treating. Oh, for the love of God, Crystal, don’t look so spooked. It was just wearing costumes and going house to house for candy. Nothing demonic about it, I don’t care what you read on the web.
Well, that’s when I decided. My granddaughter might be doomed to spend most of her life indoors, thanks to how her elders screwed everything up, but goddammit, she was going to play catch at least once.
West of town, there’s a storage shed that Groundskeeping hardly uses, next to a big empty field. The air’s better out there than in the city, you don’t hardly need a filter mask.
It was sunny that day, and we had quite the view back toward downtown. A nice warm breeze was blowing, and we could see all the high-rises against that yellow sky, which is really kinda pretty when you don’t think about the pollution.
That field hadn’t been mowed in forever. I got out the riding lawnmower, sat down, and put Vickie on my lap. “You ready?” I asked her. “Uh-huh,” she said, sounding nervous, because of course she had no clue. I started the motor, put one arm around Vickie and the other on the wheel, and floored it.
It took twenty minutes to mow that overgrown field, but it felt like two, the way Vickie was laughing and hollering. She’d never had so much fun in her whole life, especially when we took those corners. We hit a bump and bounced about four feet in the air, and she screamed like she was on a roller coaster. Anyone remember those? Yeah, Shonda, you know what I’m talking about.
Then I showed Vickie how to throw and catch. She caught on right away, too. Smart kid. Chip off the old blockhead, as I used to tell my husband when he was alive. He was gonna play in the majors, you know. They disbanded the American League right before what would have been his rookie season.
I know nobody sleeps great anymore, not even kids. Too many computer screens, too many chemicals. But take it from me, when we got home that night, Vickie didn’t even want to play games, even though the internet was back on. While I microwaved our dinners, she chattered nonstop to her parents, and that night, she slept for ten straight hours.
That weekend, Vickie asked to go to the field again. “Maybe,” I told her. “There’s still some things we need.”
“Like what?”
“Sacks to use as bases, chalk to mark the lines, and a bat. The storage shed should have those, if they didn’t throw ’em out.”
“OK, what else?”
“People,” I said. “Baseball’s a team sport.”
Vickie got that deer-in-the-headlights look.
“Aren’t there some kids your age in the building?”
A couple minutes later, we stood outside the door to 23B.
“I think this is where SpiderGirl27 lives,” she said. “Uh, I mean Joanie.”
“Well,” I said, “go ahead.”
She just stared at me. And folks, when I realized that child didn’t even know how to knock on a door, that’s when I made my choice, and damn the consequences. Maybe humans are destined to become antisocial slugs with cyborg brains, but it wasn’t gonna happen on my watch.
And that’s how the Century League got started.
It was illegal to use that field, of course. Took two months for anyone to notice. The kids loved it, and they didn’t even mind wearing those heavy filter masks. Added to the challenge.
So here I am, serving out my time at Armitage Women’s Prison with you lovely ladies. I reckon I’m the oldest one here. Call me Grandma if you want.
Aww, you’re sweet to say so, Tammy. But it ain’t bad. It’s only a one-year sentence, it’s been a nice change of scenery, and the food’s better here anyway. I can’t cook for shit.
Walk here with me, to the corner of the roof. If you squint your eyes and look way out, toward the south side, you can see it: the League’s new field. Vickie’s team captain, you know. I gave her my old glove for luck. And if you’re quiet, sometimes you can hear the crack of a bat, smacking that ball like lightning.
Jen Mierisch is a website administrator by day and a writer of odd stories by night. Jen’s work can be found in the NoSleep Podcast, Fiction on the Web, NewMyths, and numerous anthologies. Jen can be found haunting her local library near Chicago, USA.
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