Strike zone

It shaped up like a pressure-free relief opportunity for Rock, but it had turned into the makings of a nightmare. When he took the mound to start the ninth inning, his team led 11-4. Now it was 11-9 with two outs and runners on second and third. Rock was the last available pitcher and his arm was through. The ball seemed odd in his hand, and the strike zone had become impossibly small.
Shortly after the game, Rock said it felt as if he were attempting to pitch an old cell phone, one from the mid to late 1980s, back when they were the size and shape of dumbbells. He had walked consecutive batters on four pitches, each with tosses well over their heads.
"I just couldn't keep them from sailing on me, but I didn't know what I was doing," Rock said. "I'd never tried to pitch a cell phone before."
Apparently, the last batter popped out to end the game, but Rock remembered nothing of that. All he could recall was his panic.

Computer trouble

Rock had accidentally clicked on a Safari icon on the row of browser options at the bottom of his laptop screen, and there were now three boxes labeled Safari on his screen, each nearly two square inches in size. He almost always relied on Chrome as his browser, and he needed it to search for information he had agreed to deliver to several acquaintances, but now the function of his screen was limited by the three large boxes he couldn't seem to do anything with.
Matt, a neighbor from a block away who still worked full-time at the paper, came by to help. Rock showed him how he had tried to move the boxes back into the icon that had at some point shifted to the top of the screen. He could move them to it, but the icon rejected them each time.
"They're too big," Matt said.
"I thought that, too, but I haven't been able to shrink them down," Rock said.
"Have you tried this?" Matt said as he reached to touch the screen with his right index finger. Rock watched as he shrunk the boxes with his fingertip.
"Wow," he said. "I didn't know you could do that with this computer."
Although Rock was pleased to learn of that function, it failed to help. Matt still couldn't get the icon to accept the Safari boxes.

Lou Peyton

Lou Peyton, a woman Rock had known since college, was parked beside him at a state high school track meet near Little Rock. Lou had been noteworthy throughout his experience with her as perhaps the most significant of founding members of the state's running community, but he had also known her as a wine connoisseur. It did not seem at all unusual when she handed him a bottle she said she had recently found in her house.
"Have you ever heard of this?" Lou said.
The bottle was the size, shape, and color of an old quart of Michelob. Rock could see it was open and half empty and clearly dated 1986.
"No, I've never seen this before," he said. "Have you tasted it?"
After Lou said she had not, she found at Rock's request a used disposable cup of some sort and handed it to him. Rock poured a bit the red wine and tried it to find a smooth, rich flavor.
"This is fine," he said. "Really, it's surprisingly good."

Dust devils

Dozens of dust devils began to spin across a large city park crowded with women and children. Rock chose the park as a shortcut from where his car had broken down a few minutes earlier, and shortly after he began his trek toward help, he found a broken pen in a front pocket of his khaki slacks. Ink flowed from it, and it had spread on his hands, arms, and face, and now dust blown up from the barren grounds around him stuck in the ink.
Rock paused to smear the now-black grit on his hands as the women and children looked toward him through the wind-tossed dust.

Weeb

Rock's friend Erin asked him who he thought was the best radio sports play-by-play announcer. He did not mean to mislead her when he said the best ever was Weeb Eubank.
"He did the New York Jets games back in the 60s and 70s when Joe Namath was playing," Rock said. "No one ever called a game as well as he did."
Later that day, Rock remembered that Weeb Eubank wasn't the announcer but rather the Jets' head coach through most of Namath's career. He couldn't imagine why he had confused that matter. In fact, he was fairly certain he had never so much as heard a Jets radio broadcast.

Cobwebs

Rock had fought a battle with spiders and their white strands of refuse since he moved into his house in Levy, but suddenly these drooping, bug-littered cobwebs seemed geared to take over. His entire bathtub and shower were littered with them, even though he had showered late in the afternoon the day before, no more than eighteen hours earlier.

Trial results

One of Rock's neighbors, a pretty woman of middle-eastern descent, was on trial for murder. Apparently, someone found her boyfriend or husband dead in her house in Levy.

No one on Orange Street could understand why she had been arrested. From at least Rock's perspective, there was no way this woman could have killed anyone.

He watched the judge declare her guilty, which elicited gasps throughout the courtroom. Moments later, the same judge said she was innocent, but shortly thereafter reinstated his guilty verdict. No one had ever seen anything like this before.

A correlation

Few matters had ever been as meaningful to life on earth as the one before Rock at the foot of his back bedroom's twin bed. Its complexity was almost beyond his ability to understand, but he knew he must. Everything—absolutely everything—depended on him.
Nothing about any part of this puzzle was clear, but he suspected a correlation between the hundreds of multiple-digit numbers emitted from a quilt on the bed and a song on his alarm-clock radio that had played nonstop for hours might provide a clue.
Rock's cat Jo looked on quizzically, a common posture for her in his experience.