Timothy L. Marsh

LAST PITCH (Overheard from a Back Corner Table at the Kiskadee Coffee Shop)

The boy was going somewhere the girl didn't want to follow. There was a job in San Francisco, some debt the job would neutralize, but she'd never been the type to follow a man and worried about what she'd think of herself if she went along. "Don't think of it as following a man," he said. "Think of it as following a feeling you can't find anywhere else." It was February, Boston. It was a boy in love and the death of a sale. You know how that can go. A slick pitch to a withering market, a pause the likes of a liquidation, and all the empty sound that picks up the slack. The scrape of silverware. The turn of newspaper. The noisome ad for car insurance reaching out from house radio, filling the room with its frantic bargaining, then fading meekly into familiar music--an old jazz track you've heard for years, have sung a few times yourself.