Football Script | Touch

Eli pulled him up. For a moment, they stood on the forty-yard line, father and son, held upright by nothing more than touch.

Leo rolled right. The knee screamed. He heard it as a sound inside his own skull, a grinding like gravel under a tire. The pocket collapsed. Derek closed in. Touch Football Script

Leo lay on the turf, his knee a shattered question mark. The sky was a pale autumn blue. He could hear his own heartbeat in his ears, slow and loud, like a fist on a door. Eli pulled him up

He closed the notebook. For the first time in thirty years, he didn’t write a new script for next Sunday. The knee screamed

“You okay, old man?”

But the ball was already in the air.

Leo planted his right foot. The pain was a white wall. He threw not with his arm but with his ribs, his back, the ghost of every Sunday he’d ever played. The ball left his hand wobbling—ugly, desperate, human.