While Making Out the Lineup for Tomorrow’s 12U Softball Championship Game | Jim Parisi
1. TABITHA, whose mother sent, at the start of the season, a spreadsheet documenting her myriad allergies (line fifty-seven: lukewarm tap water?). Despite the ever-present risk of anaphylactic shock, Tabitha is an on-base machine who sets up the power hitters who don’t need to be encased in a plastic bubble when the team enjoys its post-game snack.
2. AGNES, your best all-around player. She lives at the end of your block with her two moms. You spent numerous nights this past winter in their living room, drinking too many Modelos and failing in your efforts not to burden Holly and Audrey with your tales of woe.
3. MARTHA, who hasn’t made an out since early April, always bats third. Her father set in motion the chain of events that has reduced you to sitting in bed unable to sleep, in an empty house, as the clock approaches three in the morning.
4. MADELINE, erstwhile resident in this three-bedroom Cape Cod, which never seemed cavernous until her mother pulled up stakes in January. You wanted to work out a rotating co-parenting arrangement that would keep Maddie in the house full-time. Becca told you that wouldn’t fly because she and Maddie were moving in with Steve and his three kids. You protested that she had started seeing Steve a mere three months earlier, after your separation became official. You lost that argument and got custody every other weekend, plus practices and games. This year has been difficult, but the big test will come when the offseason starts around six tomorrow night.
5. ROSE, who speaks only when spoken to and sits alone at the far end of the bench. Her mother insists Rose can’t wait to get in the car to head to the field. You recognize echoes of your own mother in Mona’s rictus and the ropy muscle bulging in her neck as she stands along the outfield fence; the yearning for her quiet, sensitive kid to fit in; the living and dying with every at-bat and every chance in the field. You try to visit Rose’s end of the bench every couple of innings; on a good day you can induce a hesitant smile at a corny dad joke. But Rose springs to life on the basepaths, stealing with abandon and always taking the extra base.
6. CASSANDRA, sister of Martha and younger daughter of the instrument of your professional demise, Bill Trager, whose first initiative upon becoming mayor two years ago was to adopt the supermarket model of self-checkout for municipal services, starting with your domain, the public library. Trager’s budget not only replaced clerks with self-service kiosks, it also eliminated funding for your head librarian position. You wonder if your decision to start a twelve-year-old at shortstop ahead of Cassie, who at ten was new to the team, convinced him to seek revenge. Trager sits in the first row of the stands to yell encouragement to his daughters. You hate yourself for lamenting that he is not a more toxic presence in their lives.
7. GISELE or GETRUDE, twins you haven’t seen since they sprayed line drives all over the field at the first practice. You assumed they had quit the team, but on Friday morning, their father texted to say the girls would be arriving at four on the dot, coming directly from ballet class. You fear going into the championship with two outfielders who haven’t picked up a softball in three months. But their surprise appearance is your only hope of averting an embarrassing forfeit.
8. GERTRUDE or GISELE, not that it matters.
9. MABEL, your daughter’s new roommate, whose pinpoint control and natural movement will determine your team’s fate. The girls have had a rapport since the first day of 10U practice, when Maddie raised her hand to strap on the catcher’s gear and Mabel strode from behind the gaggle of teammates to say, “I’ve got pitcher, Coach.” Your throat catches every time you hear parents call the duo “the sister battery.” You tried to make Steve the villain after Rebecca broke the news last fall that their casual dating had turned serious. But things between you and Becca had been on the skids for years. You prefer to remember the Steve who used to smuggle illicit beers under his jacket for impromptu Friday happy hours in your library office. And you can’t blame your former friend for being in love with the woman you fell for, hard, when she trusted your spindly arms to catch her in a team-building exercise at freshman orientation. If you could rekindle those happy hours, you’d ask Steve if he ever finds himself marveling at Becca’s ability to command every room she enters, always knowing the right thing to say to gather a crowd around her; if he’s found the spot on her lower back, an inch to the left of her spine, that sends a shiver through her entire body if you touch it with just the right amount of pressure; if she scrunches up her nose when she laughs at his jokes, the way she used to for yours, before all the laughter stopped.
[OUT: BEATRICE, MURIEL, and ESTHER, triplets on a pilgrimage to Disney. You beg parents not to schedule vacations until after the playoffs end, but every year, one family bolts town as soon as school is out. The girls don’t control their own schedules, which is the only reason you feel guilty for hoping a smallpox outbreak shuts down EPCOT.]
You close your laptop. The printer comes to life down the hall. You press your back against the headboard and finger the ridged border of a red checker, a one-month sobriety chip you awarded yourself yesterday afternoon. You know that no matter what happens in the game, you won’t wake up the following morning beside a lineup of beer cans on the nightstand.
Read by the author:
Jim’s story was selected as the 2025 Honeybee Flash Fiction Prize winner by Tom Paine. Tom had this to say about the work…
Kurt Vonnegut didn’t do book reviews, as he said nothing was easier than sticking a warm knife through the butter of a book. He knew how hard it is to write, and frankly, how noble to try to capture the topside beauty of life while capturing “deeper things” in the nets of words we call sentences. As a fiction professor in an MFA, I try to water the garden, to promote growth. Which it to say: hooray for these finalists. Each shows deep pixelated attention to life, and attention is love. Let me say up front readers have biases, and mine own is toward a writer sharing the strange and grievous experience of living the fleshy life. I want full 3-D communion with the people in fiction others call characters. When writing is artful and attentive to the minute building blocks of a life others call random details, I feel less lonely, and even soul-vitalized. Which is a long-winded way of saying the story that locked me into a shared experience of life was “While Making Out the Lineup for Tomorrow’s 12U Softball Championship Game.”
What an absurd and impossible conceit for a story! A coach pondering the players in a young girl’s softball game the following day. But woven into a coach’s list of pondering, each player comes to life in a grocery list of offhand but life-giving details. But within those thumbnails, the coach unveils a snapped love, alcoholism, and their own splattered but hopeful heart. Art’s secret is that the closer you zoom in on the details of anything, even a random coach’s player list (!), the more it glows with the bickering mitochondrion of a life. So yes, this writer has made something gorgeous out of a coach’s hidden melancholia; shown us the gods in the quotidian. Even a coach’s notes otherwise heading for the trash on the floor of the car.
about the author:
What comes to mind when I think about the good life is vacations with my family: sitting on the nearly deserted beach late in the afternoon, the sun setting behind us, the sound of the waves crashing, the sense of peacefulness. I think I’ll need to make a concerted effort to conjure that image to counteract the sense of dread that pervades my thoughts whenever I think about the state of the world.
Jim Parisi lives in Occupied Washington, D.C., with his long-suffering wife, Beth, and Dolce, a spicy mix of boxer, pit bull, and Australian cattle dog. (Their two kids, Aidan and Nora, have flown the coop.) Much of his free time is spent coaching Little League softball. His writing has appeared in FlashFlood Journal, The Bluebird Word, Five Minutes, Wandering Lights, Club Plum, and ihavethatonvinyl.com.
Read our Q&A with Jim here.