Devil’s Knuckleball by Eric Altemus
The surgeon removed a baseball from my renal bed. That’s what they told me when I first woke up. The pain was like a blast furnace; my face pressed against a flare. I laid there for hours in the aftermath, my incisions itching like fire ants. The sheets bled sweat and shame as I vomited into the bedpan. True fear, I believed then, was separation from the capsules on the nightstand and the resulting dream: the world burning and writhing until the dose kicked in.
High on hydrocodone in my apartment, I imagined playing catch with my favorite players: Ichiro Suzuki, Christian Yelich, Justin Verlander. October light splayed like a housecat as they warmed up. The sellout crowd cheered for the immaculate grass. Large, costumed sausages raced around the warning track, promising the end of affordable insurance premiums. How could you possibly know about the pain of defeat? I asked the old bratwurst, who’d come in last place. Laparoscopic morcellation, anesthesia, immunotherapy: this impossible language of hospital debt. Of course he said nothing. He left me standing at home plate before the ninth inning, holding my catcher’s mitt.
5-6-4-3: I watched them throw around the diamond again before the next pitch. The bases were loaded. Here it comes, I thought. Don’t fuck this up. Washed by the opiate fever, the ball floated toward me, diving and whistling like a children’s toy. I watched it miss the bat; I begged it not to roll between my knees. When it finally landed in my leather palm, it left the webbing streaked with blood. No, I couldn’t comprehend it then: everyone applauded as I peeled my kidney out. The game was over, the final out secured. Off in the distance, I could hear Mother’s ghost bring the vacuum in. My bedroom carpet came alive, crackling with the sound of crumbs being killed.
Eric Altemus is a graduate of Oregon State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing. His fiction is forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Fiction, and has been previously published in the Tuskegee Review, New Plains Review, Willow Springs, Sou’wester, and the Rappahannock Review. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.
