The Bumblebee

Left field. Way out. It was always where they put him, a guarantee that the only trophies he would be getting would be for participation. Sometimes they let him swing the bat, but mostly he rode the bench. Daryl didn’t much care. Baseball wasn’t his idea anyway. His mom had told him he needed to get out more, needed to make friends, needed to play outside. When he hadn’t shown initiative for any of those things, she’d signed him up for freaking baseball. He would have much rather stayed in his room playing Blood Demon, cutting his way through zombies, shooting his way through packs of hell hounds. He was almost at the final level where he would confront the Blood Demon herself in an epic battle for the ages. He didn’t blame his mom for not understanding, didn’t even blame her for signing him up for a sport he didn’t really care about. He didn’t blame her. He blamed the doctors.

“It’s important for Daryl to stay active,” they would say. “His disease is progressive, so the best way to slow down that progression is to keep him moving.”

They always talked about him as if he wasn’t sitting in the room. He was fourteen, almost fifteen, and smarter than most, so when they talked about him like that it made him mad. Pissed even. Sometimes he imagined that the zombies in Blood Demon were just hordes of doctors coming to poke him with needles, to stick him inside machines, to test his reflexes. At those times he took an almost manic glee in chopping off their heads, whooping with delight at each kill. This often made his mother concerned. She would knock on his bedroom door and ask him if he was all right. He supposed she just wasn’t used to hearing him having fun. Sure, he didn’t smile the whole time he played, but for him gaming was fun. More than fun. It elevated him from his reality. In games, he could do things that he knew were impossible in real life. He could run and jump with ease, never feeling the twinges of pain in his muscles that accompanied these activities in the real world.

That was why he was in left field. Way out. The chances of a ball coming in his direction were slim. He also knew this wasn’t one of those stories that ended with him catching the ball and throwing it to home plate for the win. He couldn’t throw that far, and if the ball did happen to head in his direction, it would have to fall directly into his glove. It was the bottom of the second, anyway. No one had even gotten a hit yet.

His eyes wandered across the outfield. It was nothing like that song his mom sometimes listened to. There were no dandelions out here. Everything had been trimmed back, mowed over. It made him sad. He didn’t understand why everything had to look perfect, why all the flaws in the world had to be brushed over. He supposed it bothered him because he too was flawed, broken, different.

He didn’t really fit in anywhere. When he was thirteen, he and his mom had moved to a new town and Daryl had started a new school. He had thought it would be his opportunity to start over, to reinvent himself. No such luck. There was no hiding certain things, like the way his left foot sometimes dragged behind him when he was tired, or the way the muscles in his arms were dented with atrophy.

He saw the small patch of flowers in front of him for the first time. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen them before. Trudging into left field with his head down, he should have noticed them. He didn’t know how they had escaped the lawnmower. Maybe the gardener had decided to leave one small touch of natural beauty. Hunching over slightly, he examined the flowers more closely. Marigolds. His mom had planted some in the garden at the house, and sometimes he would go outside just to look at them. Seemingly simple, yet so complex, he found the folds of their petals fascinating. They looked like little balls of sunshine.

From the infield came the crack of the bat striking the ball. Daryl looked up, thinking maybe that he was wrong, that maybe he was the kid in the story who made the impossible catch. When he looked up, he saw the little white ball bouncing toward first base. The kid on first scooped up the ball with ease, and waited on base, gently tagging out the runner as he jogged up. Parents in the stands clapped and hollered as if something significant had happened.

Daryl scanned the crowd, found his mother sitting in the first row, her phone held up to her face. He thought she might be recording the game. What the hell was the point? Nothing was happening. His gaze returned to the flowers. He thought about picking one, bringing it to his mother to make her smile, but decided against it. There were already too many scars on the landscape. A fat bumblebee drifted into his line of sight, buzzing around the flowers for a moment. There was something strange about its flight pattern. It would shoot forward and then dip slightly as if something was holding it down.

The bumblebee finally selected a flower and landed on a delicate petal. As it explored the surface, Daryl noticed that one of its tiny legs was missing, which was probably why it had such a strange way of flying. The missing leg left it unbalanced. Despite that, it still flew, because that’s what bumblebees did. They flew. If they didn’t fly, then they couldn’t eat, and if they couldn’t eat, they would die a slow death. Normally Daryl regarded insects with disinterest. He wasn’t afraid of them like his mother was, and he didn’t find them particularly interesting. He didn’t kill them immediately as so many other people would, but he also didn’t care if they lived or died. This bumblebee was different, though. He felt an affinity for the insect, seeing in it his own struggles.

Another crack of the bat meeting the ball drew his attention. He looked up again, strangely feeling the same expectation as before. Maybe this was his moment. No. The ball went foul and some of the parents in the stands groaned. He found his mother again. She held up her hand, waving to him. He waved back, feeling a small tinge of embarrassment. When he looked back down at the small patch of marigolds, the bee was gone, having flown off during the commotion. Daryl searched the air, hoping to catch sight of it one more time. Nary a trace. He wished it luck.