In Vacant Fields

Baseball was our favorite game in the neighborhood where I grew up. We always played in this open field across the street from my house. The grass was worn away in the corner that we used for home plate, and there was a dark wooded area which neatly marked the edge of the outfield. One day as we were playing, a goat demon came strolling out of the woods to talk to us. He had cloven hoofs for feet, and when he doffed his hat, we could see that he had two little ivory horns sticking up out of his curly brown hair.

The goat demon told us that he hated us playing baseball. He said that it caused a lot of noise and commotion in the realm where he lived. He explained that goat demons sleep during the day and haunt the world at night, perpetrating their mischief most effectively in the dark, and he said that all the constant racket from our baseball game was keeping him from getting the proper rest. We didn’t quite know what to make of any of this. We looked back and forth at one another, scratching our heads. We’d never considered the possibility that our innocent pastime might be causing distress within the goat demon community.

Finally, the captain of our team, the oldest kid in the neighborhood, came forward and promised that we would keep it down and try to play more quietly from now on. The goat demon vehemently shook his head. He insisted that there was no good and quiet way of playing baseball. He insisted that the game was torture for him by its very nature. He decided that he was going to demonstrate this by playing an inning or so with us. The team captain shrugged as someone tossed him the ball, and he headed over to the pitcher’s mound. The goat demon picked up a firm black wooden bat, and he took his place at the plate, grinning a wide evil grin that curled at the corners of his mouth and showed a row of his big sharp teeth.

He connected with the pitch and belted it into the air with a soft pop. He hit it so hard that it actually exploded in the air over centerfield. The center fielder just stood there forlorn with his shoulders slumped as the white powdered remains of the exploded ball rained down on him. The goat demon skipped in a gleeful, taunting way as he rounded the bases. He whacked the first baseman with his hoof as he tapped the bag. Then he stomped on the second baseman’s hand, smashing it between the bag and his hoof. He kicked the third baseman hard enough to leave a cloven imprint on his forehead, and as he came rounding for home, gnashing his teeth and narrowing his burning eyes, the catcher wisely got out of the way, and in fact, took off for his own home, shedding his mask and his hat and his glove on the ground as he ran away crying.

This goat demon was starting to seem like a real jerk. Next he wanted to show us his pitching skills. We tossed him the other spare ball that we had. He didn’t even bother heading to the pitcher’s mound, didn’t even bother with the pretense that we were still playing an actual organized game. He just wound up and threw a surprise fastball to the girl in right field. The pitch was so fast that the sight of him hurling his arm and the whack of the ball hitting the girl’s glove all seemed to happen in the very same instant, even though the girl was a good twenty or thirty yards across the field.

And that pitch had to sting. The girl hissed as she grit her teeth and gingerly slid her glove off. Her hand was throbbing red and a welt was already forming on her palm. She went up to the other players waiting by the bench along the first base line, and she tried to see if any of them would take her position. She held out her marked hand to show that she couldn’t play anymore, but the other kids shook their heads adamantly and backed away as though her hand was hot and could burn them if they got too close to it. None of them wanted to be on the receiving end of another pitch like that.

The goat demon went over and picked up the ball where the girl had dropped it in the grass. He twirled it around in his hand and he asked if it was the only ball that we had left. I reluctantly admitted that it was. Overjoyed by this answer, he started to gnash the ball with his sharp teeth until there was nothing left of it but shreds that he spit into the air like confetti. He went over to where all our bats lay in a pile, and one by one he snapped them in half across his knee, flinging one half into a ditch, another half into the trees, and sending another half sailing into the sky to land on the roof of a house clear across the neighborhood, lodged against the brick chimney.

We just stood there helplessly as the goat demon pranced around ruining our equipment and reveling in the destruction of our game. When he was done, he just grinned that big sharp grin again, a few pieces of stitching and twine still stuck between his teeth. He tipped his hat at us as he slipped it back onto his head, and he headed off down the road, whistling some infernal tune as he headed back to the tormented realms of the demons in all of their various goat, pig, and rodent manifestations. We all just looked around at our decimated field and sighed.