Fiction Winter 2023 poetry all issues
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Cover
Susan Wilkinson
George Vendura
Water Uphill
Stephen Parrish
Bury Me Standing
Dustin Stamper
Chinese Finger Cuffs
Conor Hogan
Forsaken
D.F. Salvador
The Long Vacation
Elliot Aglioni
Mortimer Causa
Terry Mulhern
Watch out for snakes
O.T. Martin
Reconciliation
Nick Gallup
The Slings and Arrows of Outrageous Fortune
Ian R. Villmore
Love Is an Anchor
Katrina Soucy
Breathe
Dan Timoskevich
The Point
Dan Timoskevich
The Point
Trey’s head is hot, and his feet hurt. His toes are wet and mushed together in his shoe, stinging where the blister has ripped loose. He’s afraid of changing out of his socks, soaked with three hours of sweat, because if he removes them, he might rip away the puffy shell of blistered skin that’s delicately hanging on. Trey bounces the tennis ball exactly three times, a pre-service ritual he must perform to satisfy his coach. He catches it and holds it against his racket for a moment before he serves. He’s one point away from winning the Boys 16 and Under division at the Southern Open. He wants it to be over.
He considers going for a big serve and ending the match with an ace. Nagging voices inside his head persuade him to reconsider. Coach: Why go for the lowest percentage serve on the biggest point of your life? Mom: This is what we’ve been talking about. You can’t lose your focus on big points. Dad: What was going on inside your head? Mom: At least you’ll learn from your mistake. Dad: He never seems to learn. Coach: Eliminate thinking errors. Mom: Why do you complicate things, Trey? Coach: Keep your thoughts simple.
Standing just outside the fence with his arms folded across his chest, his coach hides his facial expressions in the shadow cast by his large straw hat. Trey’s parents are seated on a Carnival Cruise beach towel draped over a row of the aluminum bleachers. Trey didn’t go on that cruise. He was training for this tournament, for this moment, a moment that has left him confounded.
His right quadriceps twitches, signaling an oncoming cramp, and this convinces him to hit a safe spin serve to his opponent’s backhand. Just get the point started.
His opponent blocks the return back to Trey’s side of the court. Trey jerks his racket back and scrambles into position. His swing is no longer fluid but is now a disjointed abbreviation of the looping stroke he and his coach have been working on for the past four months in their weekly lessons. At least he strikes the ball cleanly, sending it safely across the net to the middle of the court.
Every point has been like this for the last thirty minutes. Neither player aggressive. Both terrified of making a mistake because an error would mean precious energy had been wasted, and after three hours of slugging balls back and forth, neither of them has energy to spare. Trey is aware of the obvious paradox. Because he and his opponent are playing cautiously, the points have become much longer and more grueling, but both refuse to take a chance with an aggressive shot. It’s become a demonstration of willpower rather than skill. Trey wishes his opponent would just take a rip at the ball and put an end to this torture. But he doesn’t, and they continue lofting heavy topspin forehands, each shot clearing the net by a comfortable margin.
Trey has never made it this far in a big tournament. His parents and coaches have long insisted that his game is there, telling him that he should be making it to the finals and winning tournaments. He’s not sure if this assertion is meant to be an encouragement of his abilities or an indictment on his failures. His mom has told him it’s just a mental thing. You have to want it. He doesn’t want it. He just doesn’t want to lose. He doesn’t want to come close, tease his parents with success only to fall short yet again. All the money they’ve spent. Lessons, clinics, hotels, rackets, strings, shoes.
All that he deep down really wants is for this third-set tiebreaker to be over so he can retreat to the bench and hide his burning face in the little rectangle of shade from the lamp head hanging high over the court. He’s fighting harder than he’s ever fought for something he doesn’t want. He doesn’t want to lose.
In the humidity, the ball has become shaggy and heavy, its black print nearly worn off. It spins at him through the air, a giant, yellow furball. He considers the color and texture of this ball so carefully it becomes a blur. His next shot shanks off the frame of his racket, sending a painful jolt through his tired arm. He hears his mom gasp in disgust, or at least he senses it.
The ball zig-zags in the air like a knuckleball. It’s headed out, beyond his opponent’s baseline. The score will be even again. All this effort will have been wasted, and instead of walking away the champion, he’ll have to win two more points in a row to win. He’s not sure if he wants to go through this again.
But somehow—maybe a gust of wind—the ball changes trajectory and falls straight down, clipping the baseline. Still, he expects his opponent’s index finger to shoot up in the air indicating a call of “out.” A shot that ugly should have gone out. As his opponent stumbles backward to make a last second recovery, his left hand rises into the air ambiguously. Instead of extending his finger, he launches a high, defensive forehand back in return.
Trey can tell his opponent wanted to call the ball “out”, but the shot had been too slow. All six people on the outside of the court had a clear view of the line. They would know the ball had been in, and they would have known his opponent had cheated if he had tried to call it out.
In a way, Trey regrets that his opponent had not called the ball out. It would have released all the tension, relieved the pressure. Sure, he would have dropped his racket on the ground, clasped the top of his skull in disbelief, and charged the net yelling, “No way! That was so in.” Because there are no line judges on the court, there wouldn’t be anything he could do to reverse the call, and Trey would look back to the sidelines at his parents who would share in his anger, his dad probably muttering something about what a big cheater the other boy was in a voice just loud enough for the boy’s parents to hear.
It would have been a relief, this outcome. A win-win. If he had ended up losing, he’d have an excuse, an asterisk next to his opponent’s victory. Trey would have the moral high ground. His opponent only won because he had cheated, he’d tell people. And Trey would believe it and sleep easier at night knowing this. But the bastard called it in. The point continues.
Trey is even more careful now, his shots landing shorter in the court while his opponent has gone on the attack. He senses his opponent is frustrated, anxious. Trey would be too if he were him. The point should have been over after that horrible mishit. Perhaps pressure has been relieved on the other side of the court. Now, if his opponent should lose the match, he could claim that Trey had won because he’d been lucky. That’s one thing Trey has learned. Rarely are there both winners and losers in tennis. There are those who won and those who claim they should have won. Defeat is difficult to accept, and those who do accept it toil at the bottom of the rankings until they’re so discouraged by their lack of achievement, they eventually give up.
Out of the corner of his eye, Trey sees his opponent’s parents shaking their heads, gesturing with their hands, and whispering over and over, “That was out.” They actually want to believe that Trey’s ball had been out. They had wanted their son to cheat, and they would have accepted it.
Trey is now sprinting from corner to corner, chasing down balls, trying to hit at least one defensive shot good enough so that the attack stops. He finally hits his first decent shot in the last thirty minutes, a sharp crosscourt forehand that sends his opponent scurrying towards the sideline. The shot has taken just about everything out of Trey. If his opponent hits it back, he’s done.
His opponent does get it back, a slow, loopy shot down the line to Trey’s backhand, just enough within reach that Trey has to waddle over to it. This is it. He attempts an ill-advised, poorly executed drop shot that lands barely over the net but bounces too high, giving his opponent ample time to retrieve it. His opponent races to the net and drives a backhand into the opposite corner. Trey doesn’t make a move towards it. The ball lands squarely on the sideline. In.
Trey extends his left index finger and says, “out.”
It’s over.
He’s won.
Dan Timoskevich
’s short fiction has appeared in Sixfold, The Thing Itself, The San Antonio Current, and The Aquila Review. He has also co-written two award-winning musicals produced in San Antonio, Texas.