Revised excerpt from "Broken"

...the drama that is my life. Bordering on 60 hours per week at the day job. Coaching my sons's ball teams whenever time allows. Trudging through endless revisons between the hours of 2 and 4 am...no, really.

...the following is the latest passage from "Broken" that I've been slicing and dicing whenever not overcome with exhaustion. Enjoy:)

***Like Coach Hummel, Doug Stutzman, our sixty year old coach of the Farm Team, was a local icon from his younger days, having once held many athletic records in baseball and basketball. The majority of them were quashed by Hummel two decades later, but searching for any sign of animosity within Stutzman's weary soul would've been futile.

He roamed the ball diamond, his posture stooped, pausing at every position, granting each of us a moment while balanced on teetering knees. Cartilage whittled thin like mucous and stretched taut.

His chin, grizzled with spiked fuzz the color of ash, resembled a used eraser on the end of a pencil. Rounded off and worn down to a nub. Likewise, a pair of silver tufts peeked out from under his ball cap, hovering over each ear.

He spoke with a throat full of gravel. The kind of sound coughed out of the failing exhaust from a farmhand's delivery truck.

Dad later told me that in his youth, Coach Stutzman carried himself well over six feet in height. Now, following a lifetime spent sacrificing his joints for that winning layup or a stolen base in the bottom of the ninth, he'd become a calloused old man, trapped in a body breaking down. And by week's end, I adored him.


***"Broken," by Elliot Grace : 2011