In the sunlight
Title taken from the 31 Days theme for April 2, 2007.
What Takaya Abe remembered best about Haruna was the image of him pitching, even beyond the bruises, beyond the arguments and beyond the many not-so-little betrayals. Off the mound, Haruna was the bundle of gangly limbs, impossible tallness and hot air that created a teenaged baseball player with an attitude problem. When Haruna was on the mound, however, something changed in him. All the skill and negativity dispersed throughout his body moved outward, pushing into the extremities of his limbs, coiling within the legs that rooted him to dirt, and the arm that aimed to shoot for the sky.
The pitch always happened too fast for anyone else to fully study it, but because they had been a battery, Abe was able to take the pieces of the whole from many different pitches and play them backward in slow motion memory. He alone saw the interplay of talent, skill and musculature rippling up the legs, through the spine, into the shoulder and down the other boy's arm, transferred into a baseball by the touch of his palm and fingertips. He alone caught that small quirk of the lips, the flash of heat in those eyes, the tension and the sweat of the moment cast across the horizon.
He did not like to think about it much, but Abe figured that the pitch might have been the reason why he had tried to stay on with Haruna for that long. It was not because of the pitch itself, or of what it could do for the team. It was because through the pitch, Haruna was drenched in light, made clean by color and brilliance.