Ray Scanlon: Game Time (Nonfiction)

In the long shadows my grandchildren desecrate a soccer field with improvised barefoot baseball: taking turns, one fungoes a wiffle ball while the other two chase and dive on it. Since they invent and tweak the rules on the fly, there are re-dos galore.

They adopt animal pseudonyms for color commentary and dramatic scoring announcements. Agreeable and considerate of each other, they run and laugh. They laugh a lot.

Ray Scanlon Massachusetts boy. Has grandchildren. Extraordinarily lucky. No MFA. No novel. No extrovert. Other than at Stymie, his work has been published in Camroc Press Review, Prick of the Spindle, Short, Fast, and Deadly, and elsewhere. On the web: http://read.oldmanscanlon.com/.