What appeared to be a man, hovered over a smoldering fire smoking a cigarette. His bony purple fingers tightly gripping a rectangular bottle.

The bell jingled over the door. Frankie looked up. His apron stained with dried blood. A cleaver in his right hand and the limp leg of a of a recently slaughtered lamb in his other.

It’d been 5 days since the assembly fuck-up. The house was like a morgue. Nobody’d talked to nobody. I worked as much overtime as they threw at me just to stay away.

He blinked again. His cheek no longer soothed by the wooden floor beneath it. A wisp of intrusive dust drifted towards him, settling on his lashes. A laborious blink, his only remedy, then another, the particle unmoving.

His mother worked two jobs. One was good, and one was bad. The good one, she said, was good because people left her alone.

At first the team was just a bunch of burnt-out baseball guys looking for a reason to get out of the house. Then it got serious. The trophies, the fights, the bets. Sixteen-inch no-mitt softball became an obsession. Nothing got in the way. That’s how it went when guys had too much of what they didn’t want in life.