What Happens When You Don't Play Ball

By Janice Daugharty

Miss Faye is recovering from a broken hip. Sick of the physical therapy session, in which a bunch of old people are tossing a big yellow ball, she wheels her chair from the room, and keeps wheeling it till she is sitting outside the hospital. Not her fault that a cab driver named Stinker mistakes her for his fare. A whole day with Stinker teaches her what happens when you don't play ball.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Janice Daugharty
• Release date: Nov 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452350806

Janice Daugharty

Janice Daugharty is Artist-in-Residence at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, in Tifton, Georgia. She is the author of one story collection and five novels: Dark of the Moon, Necessary Lies, Pawpaw Patch, Earl in the Yellow Shirt, and Whistle.

Book preview

What Happens When You Don't Play Ball

by Janice Daugharty

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Janice Daugharty 2010

The wheel chairs shape out a bad circle. Like children playing Ring Around the Roses or Drop the Handkerchief. Except that the chairs are manned by old, old ladies. A yellow ball, plump as a new moon, bounces and woggles within the ring. A rouged-up lady cased in white knit pants catches it in both hands and bounces it hard toward the center—no aim—to show that she is really into it, this rehab therapy or exercise or whatever the hell it is. The ball spins up before a long-bodied, long-faced woman with insect eyes. She doesn’t even look at it.

A black woman in a green attendant’s uniform squeals, Catch it, Miss Faye! Catch it! She gets paid for saying that.

Miss Faye doesn’t even look at her.

The ball bounces into the bull’s eye of the circle again and another lady catches it on the rebound. She cackles and pitches it willy-nilly and it rolls between the wheels of two chairs and across the waxed tile floor of the huge glassed-in therapy room, all chrome and white with a few no-name children’s pictures to make the place look homey and justified. Murmur of voices from the flat black