Artefacts of Failure

Twelve one-hundred word scenes about two truly terrible relief pitchers.

1.
So, they suck. Real bad.

Here they all stew on the bullpen bench, and Cal would like to be able to blame someone in particular but he’s seen the stats. This is a gallery of horrors and he’s in it, an artefact of failure sparkling in his glass case — they’re all in it, their motley crew of awfulness.

It’s clear to everyone including themselves that everything they touch shrivels and dies, a collective curse of ten rotating arms waging unintentional yet almost impressively thorough devastation like horsemen of a petty apocalypse.

He doesn’t know what they did to deserve this.

2.
It all happens exactly in all the ways it absolutely shouldn’t, in all the ways nothing should ever happen: down in Florida, at a dive bar, way past drunk, and with a teammate.

He doesn’t know why he’s there with Elias Mata, because the guy got up to the bigs last week and they don’t know each other, but then again maybe that’s why they’re knocking back tequila in a Mexican place together, for some sort of desperate attempt at a bonding experience.

Cal can’t fault himself for a lack of good intentions, but it doesn’t excuse what happens next.

3.
The letters on his back are a target and boy, is Cal an easy one. It’s one thing to be the mediocre son of a major leaguer; it’s another for the name you wear to be enshrined into immortality, on a bronze plaque that also spells out the word “perfect”.

It’s not that he resents his father for being one of the greatest lefties of all time. It’s just a little on-the-nose, that’s all.

Every time he hears the collective groan of the ballpark as he jogs out the bullpen door, he knows some legacies aren’t meant to be fulfilled.

4.
Slumpbuster, sure, that’s what they’ll call it.

They blow four games in a row, taking diligent turns at ruining everything. It’s the kind of hole that’s a statistical anomaly; the kind of statistical anomaly that’s a punchline; the kind of punchline that leaves only one option: drinking yourself under the table and going from there.

What’s unexpected isn’t Cal’s suggestion — after all this is just what happens when he’s left unsupervised with large amounts of alcohol, yet another way he can disappoint his father. No, it’s that Elias agrees.

Yeah, they should totally fuck.
Surely that will solve it all.

5.
The taste of shame heavy on his tongue, the stench of vomit acrid in the toilet bowl. The scratch of the razor gliding on Elias’s brown cheeks: radio static, a dembow tune, water down the drain. Cal’s head is swimming.

“Is fine. We don’t have to talk about it.”

And they don’t. But on the plane they squeeze into the same row, and in the pen they sit on the same bench, and in Kansas City they fall into the same bed, pleasures of the known harbor, sisyphean fatalism.

Their collective ERA is above seven and Cal forgets to care.

6.
Two weeks into the collapse, Elias comes into the game with a lead and gives up seven runs in all of one inning.

Skip leaves him in to melt down, maybe out of spite, maybe out of cruelty — who’s to say — and the home crowd watches the car crash with a burning, hateful thirst for sacrificial revenge.

Something inside Cal breaks that night.
It’s just the truth that they’re hanging on to the majors by the skin of their teeth, and when people say he’s only here because Atlanta doesn’t have a better option he knows they’re right.
But, fuck.

7.
For three years he grows up in a garish white flight stucco house in Alpharetta, the first-born son of a man with a short mandate to bring a World Series to the Team of the South.

He didn’t recall the air being this sweet, thick and thin all at once. Yet he’s back now, older and none the wiser, and though he’s from nowhere really this smells like home.

This place — this city sprawling, these hills looming out of sight, this forest swallowing the town in its lush embrace — it doesn’t love him back.

He figures it doesn’t have to.

8.
The team careens into untold futility like a runaway train to Hell. In the weightlessness of the drop, Cal wakes up in Atlanta one day with Elias at his side and he realises they actually like each other.

He likes the sickly-sweet black coffee Elias drinks. He likes his upturned eyes, his gap-toothed grin, his intricate cornrows, his tacky cologne; his love for old flamenco music, for his brother’s cats, for old game consoles, for vintage hats.

And there’s Elias, laughing at all his jokes.
And there’s Elias, cooking him his mama’s plátanos.
And there’s Elias, there’s Elias, there’s Elias.

9.
First as novelty, later as farce, they both beached here the way most mistakes start: with good intentions.

Sometimes Cal wishes he could be like Elias, less like an unkept promise and more like an awkward attempt at a feel-good story, fighting his way from Santo Domingo to the majors.
But after all, Atlanta’s front office could hardly have predicted that the bust prospect they sent to Seattle in exchange for the package Cal came with would turn into a Gold-Glover under the Space Needle.

So here they are, bailing out this sinking ship. Two boys together clinging, fulfilling their foray.

10.
The muggy Georgia summer blankets them away from view, faces peeking from the safety of its cover.
They lie there on top of the sheets, trying to keep cool, warm and heavy-limbed beneath the quilt of the city’s thousand great big oaks.

Peach-pink sun marbles the rich russet of Elias’s skin with the outline of the dancing leaves, delicate bronze lace, the quiet rustling silence of shaded shelter parting just enough for Cal to hear Elias’s slumbering breath.

Through the thick glass of Atlantan July, Cal holds onto him, a worshipful zealot, two hundred perfect bones cradled in his arms.

11.
And they ain’t good enough, and they ain’t pretty enough, and they suck so bad, and they shouldn’t be there, and everybody hates them, that’s fine, that’s fine, Cal could care less, it doesn’t matter.

He records his first career save on accident; when his dad calls to congratulate him, a temptation of hope in his voice, Cal wants to laugh and almost tells him about Elias Mata, sound asleep between his legs with the twists of his black hair soft against his stomach.

They’re the worst idea anyone’s ever had. There’s nothing to love here.

Well, except each other.

12.
Summer reaches a boiling point, scalding heatwave after torrential downpour, a constant state of instability, always on the verge of something nobody can quite pinpoint, a collective breath held in their chests.

Cal remembers — warm rain on his face, stormwater pooling in the dirt at his father’s cleats, the roar of the crowd, intoxicating. Baseball called to him for nights like these, where the mound is a stake you burn at but the firewood’s wet, where the last embers of a meaningful season smolder in your hands.

Over in the dugout, he hears Elias laughing.

He exhales, and winds up.