Roars don't scare the pitcher under a blinking light: 701-701. Outlaws versus the Extras, and Screw's walk-up music is a simple mix of bongos and trumpets in the most watched game in baseball's history by an audience of sapient random objects, sharks screeching loudly, green monsters dancing on a tall wall, and a dozen mariners stuck on the rooftop, flashing SOS.
To the mound she goes: the Original flexes her foreleg, cracking every bone and tendon. A credit to the Outlaws for having her number up on the list. The meanest swing of the hoof, of deceptiveness, knows the ins and outs of the ball. Cut them loose.
The Screwball on the other side, the not-her. Nervous, easy to outwit. Her namesake will do: let the ball curve towards her, clockwise like a screw in action.
Strike one.
Now there's expectation. They share glares. The organist apparently slams all over the keys, unexpectedly reflecting the batter's crazed, paranoid state of mind.
Another curving in.
Strike two.
Still got it. The batter's eyes twitch and sweat. The catcher's desperately signaling any other pitch but that. The enemy knows.
Strike three. Was a Screwball.
The bleachers go wild, the Outlaws storm the field, dunked by the energy drinks and the chocolate smoothies on tap: the riot of the never-ending game. Deadlocked at 701-701. The bottom of the inning is up next. She heads to the dugout for rest, to wait until she is called up once again, a fact her mates ignore if their constant praise and hoof-bumps are of any indication.
That same blinking light blinks again. Seen through the windows, through the ceiling, atomically dim through the cracks—it perseveres for her in the skyline, for her.
Past the team, brushing past the lockers and the cafeteria where shepherds commandeer pies and colors-turned-into-jawbreakers. Hot air blasts her in the parking lot, cars and bikes and aircraft sprawled over with guzzling smoke and soap bubbles (a few non-sentient Screwballs pull around horse carriages). Valets and robbers, cops and robbers, sing and dance for her, ask for her autograph, market to her many new forms of fun should the stadium-city expand.
Past her projections, she endures the chase after the light until the parking lot and its stadium are demolished from her sight. That bright light casts ever-long shadows against the verdant trees, sparkling up obnoxiously yellow notes pinned or taped onto the trunks—her hoofwriting, telling her that she did plant these things, that there is some unnameable reward where the light reigns. Leaves and shrubs blossom into her colors, into cotton candy with copious lavenders.
Into the center, into the light—warm as lava, comforting as acid—a-swirling comes the box from which that illumination is born. Burning hooves grab hold of the cheap fabric covering a crown, letters spelling out A DAUGHTER. It's not to be worn. The jewels aren't jewels, for they are images: she herself lies front and center.
The silhouettes that encircle her likeness say her name, ghosts given life somewhere a thousand miles back. One liked turtles. Some smelled like lemonade and freshly cut grass. A fonder one wore glasses.
To clutch it tighter, the wooden frame and picture still within, still brown and graying and colorful in all the right ways. She shrieks her soul into it, daring to crack the crown in her impossible grip, until the hours pass when she is taken kicking and screaming back to the ball game.
I do care if I ever get back.