Epitaph Road by David Patneaude Page A

forth harder and harder, Sunday took practice swings, timing my throws. She looked like she knew how to swing a bat; Tia could definitely throw a ball.
    Tia crouched down behind the circle of dirt that represented home plate. Sunday stepped in, the bigger bat perched on her shoulder.
    â€œYou should be wearing a mask,” I told Tia. “You’ll catch one in the teeth.” Beauteous teeth, I thought to myself.
    â€œI’m okay,” she said.
    â€œYou’re sure?” Sunday said.
    â€œNo worries,” Tia said.
    I shrugged. I wasn’t going to throw easy just because Tia was back there. I toed the dusty ground, looking for a decent place to set up. Finally, I faced the batter, wound up, and let one go. It was a little outside. Sunday watched, uninterested, as it flew by. I threw another, almost in the dirt. She wasn’t tempted. I was trying too hard.
    I backed off on my third one, and it was going to be a strike. I watched it heading for the heart of the plate.
    It didn’t get there. Sunday squinted and jumped all over it. The ball screamed over the shortstop spot and well into left field. She didn’t smile. She stood there, poised for my next one.
    I picked up another ball and fired it hard. She swung, harder, but missed this time. The ball plopped into Tia’s mitt.
    I kept throwing, Sunday kept swinging. Sometimes she connected, sometimes she didn’t. Finally, I blew three in a row past her and she gave Tia the bat and headed for the outfield to retrieve balls. She wasn’t ready to sacrifice her teeth.
    Not choosy, Tia took cuts at just about everything I threw her — high, low, outside, in — so I did better against her, the misses slamming against the weathered wood of the backstop. But she connected from time to time. She hit the last one deep, over Sunday’s head, and raced around the bases, laughing. She beat the throw home, but I tagged her anyway. As she squealed and squirmed away, I caught sight of the smooth coppery skin of her stomach. The tiny external tip of her PAC-mandated birth-control implant protruded from her belly button like a piece of silvery jewelry.
    They let me hit, taking turns pitching. I was rusty at first but then started nailing some. Sunday threw hard; Tia was more accurate.
    We quit, finally. All in all, we were pretty even. They’d proven they could hit me, could throw a ball past me; I didn’t know what I’d proven. Maybe that my league should allow me to pitch, that I was nothing special, not even in baseball.
    We were leaving the park when a long procession of women and girls paraded through the entrance on foot, moving toward the burial mound, humming something familiar and mournful that hovered above their heads like a dripping gray cloud. They all wore long crimson gowns; they all held tall, unlit white candles and candlesticks in front of them like altar girls. Their leader, an older woman, barefoot, carried a big wooden cross with a candle mounted in the top, stepping out by herself, her long gray hair flowing behind her.
    We stopped our bikes to let them cross the street. The women ignored Tia and Sunday but smiled at me. The younger girls waved.
    â€œFratheists?” Tia said once we were back on our bikes and moving.
    â€œYeah,” I said.
    â€œI’ve heard about them,” she said, “but I’ve never seen any before today.”
    â€œNot exactly mainstream,” I said. “But what is, anyway?”
    â€œPAC,” Sunday said. “Apportionment.”
    Tia got this strange look on her face, but instead of commenting on Sunday’s remark, she launched into something kind of unrelated, as if she was trying to cover up her thoughts. “Right after Elisha, mainstream churches did well,” she said. “Some people believed a kind of half-baked Rapture had occurred. Nothing else happened, though, and there was almost no clergy to hold things together. Before long,