New Fiction: The Tiny Man in the Baseball
Title: The Tiny Man in the Baseball Author: K.C. Wilson
Category: Fiction
Once there was a tiny little man. He was so tiny he could fit inside a baseball. In fact, one morning, he woke up and he didn’t know where he was at first, but he was inside a baseball.
He also didn’t know how he got in there. Either it was some kind of magic baseball or else some mischievous fairy must have put him in there. Anyway, it was a little stuffy inside the baseball and the tiny man was having quite a time of it trying to breathe through all the string and stitching.
The baseball was lost in the tall grass near the home run bushes. The outfielder couldn’t find the ball, so the boys used a different ball and kept playing.
The tiny man was out in left field when it happened, taking a nap in the tall grass when the baseball came bouncing into his little world. It bonked him on the head while he was sleeping and he then may well have uttered an epithet that was quite possibly offensive to certain hypersensitive forces in the spirit world that may have had something to do with him ending up inside the baseball. The tiny man could only guess how in the wide world he got in there. But his guess was that a malignant, spell casting fairy had put him in there to teach him a lesson over something he must have said when the baseball bonked him on the head.
That was the last thing he remembered, getting bonked in the head.
And he had a tiny little headache to prove it. But he wasn’t concerned about that. He spent the whole night wide awake thinking about his little problem without coming up with a single good idea. Inside, he barely had room to move around. And there was nothing at all to eat except string. There was plenty of string. But it wasn’t looking very appetizing. He hoped to find a better way than having to eat his way out. The truth was, he was getting a little worried.
What if no one ever found the ball? Or worse, what if those boys did find it? What if they started batting him around? What would that do to his headache? Make it worse, no question. He worried half the night and racked his tiny brain the other half to no avail. When morning came, he had no bright ideas about how to get out. And he was so hungry for having missed not only his dinner and breakfast but also his midnight snack that all that string was beginning to look like noodles. By mid-morning, it looked almost like spaghetti.
By mid-morning, also, the boys who had lost the baseball the day before were back, scouring the outfield for their lost ball. The tiny man could hear their voices searching and calling to each other. He was afraid it might go badly for him if they were to find the ball and use it, but then, he thought, how much worse could it be than sitting idly in a field eating string? Finally, he began to call out to them, “Here! Over here!”
Of course, they couldn’t hear him. But suddenly, his little world was turned upside down and sent spinning through the air as one boy found the ball and after smacking it twice into his glove, threw it high and far to another boy who deftly caught it and, after examining it for possible defects, smacked it into his own glove several times with a pleasure the tiny man could sense but found himself hard put to share.
“Batter up!”
The tiny man knew what those words meant. He’d often sat in the high grass watching with fascination the boys’ baseball games. He knew the pitcher was on the mound, rolling the ball around in his palm, fingering the threads. He braced himself for the crack of the bat against his head and was glad for a moment that he had not eaten any of the string which would be his only protection and padding in the game of hard knocks that was soon to begin. He felt the swing of the pitcher’s windup, and the sudden whistling speed as he went sailing toward the strike zone, smacking into the catcher’s mitt as the batter swung and missed.
“Steerike!” He heard the players’ catcalls and advice from the sidelines. “Knock the cover off the ball, Willie!”
“Yes, do,” the tiny man enjoined, as the catcher tossed him back to the pitcher, intent on repeating the terrible procedure.
Was that his only hope, he wondered, to have a batter knock the cover off the ball? Then what? He’d still have to unravel all that string, and how could he do that, trapped on the inside? Like it or not, he was going to have to start eating that string, but not yet, not while he was being pitched around and swung at, and beaten with a baseball bat. How could he eat when his nerves were so on edge? With every pitch he felt like he was falling off a twenty story building. Maybe the catcher would catch him or maybe he’d hit the sidewalk. Either way, his nerves were shot.
After a while, he just relaxed, and he barely even felt it when the batter connected with a line drive to the shortstop. It was no worse than being whacked with a shillelagh. It knocked his little hat off, knocked the wind out of his tiny lungs. That was all.
Suddenly, he smacked into the shortstop’s glove, then he was being whipped around the bases, smack, smack, smack, smack. He didn’t have time to dwell on the effects of any one impact. Overall, he began to feel like a lump of jelly, and it didn’t bother him all that much to be whacked and whacked again all the livelong day. He only wished some young Babe Ruth would gather up and knock the cover off the ball. Which, eventually, one did, but not before the tiny man was black and blue in a hundred places.
To begin with, the ball was far from new. And there was a place where the threads had already begun to shred apart. Every time the ball was hit the threads unraveled a little more. Inside the ball, the tiny man thought it was beginning to seem a little drafty. He could hear the boys’ voices better and he knew the ball was no longer the perfect spheroid. The pitches didn’t whistle like bullets anymore. There was a slight flapping sound when the ball went sailing through the air. And the game became less serious because all the boys wanted now was to see the cover knocked off the ball. They let the threads unravel more and more and even helped them along until they were playing with an unwieldy flapping pretense of a baseball. Still, the game went on.
The tiny man located one end of the string and began to gnaw on it. He didn’t gnaw for long, nor did he chew, because there was just too much of it. He started swallowing. Inch by inch he swallowed string until he was full and still he’d barely made a dent in the wall of string that surrounded him. But his little room was getting bigger.
And the knocks, when they came, were not as hard as they were because the ball was more like a bedraggled bird with a broken wing than a baseball, but still the game went on, and the tiny man kept swallowing string. He had to unbutton his little shirt because his little belly was stretched like a bubble. And he had to unbuckle his little trousers for the same reason. He kept swallowing string. He swallowed and swallowed and finally, after swallowing a hundred yards or so of string that did not taste at all like spaghetti, he saw the first tiny crack of daylight through the split seams of what used to be the baseball.
He could hear the boys laugh louder now. “Batter up!” He heard them call. And the pitcher was no longer hurling curveballs and fastballs. He gripped the ball by its flapping cover and slung it with the clear intention of ripping loose the remaining threads. Only a piece of the ball’s original stitching remained intact when the pitch crossed the plate, the rest of the leather flapped in the breeze like a flag.
At the crack of the bat, the boys sent up a cheer and a howl of triumph. Big Willie knocked the cover off the ball and it landed on the grass of the infield while the ball sailed high over second base, trailing a line of unraveling string far out into center field. The ball was unraveling in mid-air, getting smaller and smaller as the center fielder maneuvered to get under the dwindling speck in the sky. At the high point of the ball’s trajectory, the tiny man stopped swallowing and began to feel the string being pulled the other way, out of his little stomach. The ball had unraveled to nothing more than what was left inside his swollen little body. On his way down, with his mouth wide open, the string kept coming out. He was falling backwards from such a great height in the sky with the string unraveling out of his stomach. He didn’t have much time to think, it happened so fast, but when he landed in the center fielder’s glove, he spit out the last tail end of the string and turned to tip his hat to the boy who had caught him. Meanwhile, he was quick to buckle up his little trousers and button his little shirt, all the while grinning and twinkling a merry eye at the dumbfounded boy, who had never seen a tiny little man before and was, no doubt, expecting to catch a pop fly.
“Well, be seeing you,” said the tiny man, as he hopped to the ground from the boy’s glove. “It’s time I had a bite to eat.”
And, quick as the boy could blink twice, he disappeared into the tall grass.
K. C. Wilson lives in North Florida with his wife and two children. His first novel is The Route (Barnyard Books 2001). Short fiction of his has appeared in Delivered, Thema, Faraway Journal, Cavalier, Mississippi Crow, and is forthcoming in Kerouac’s Dog. He is the songwriter for The Rubes.
