i.

He can feel himself getting old, is the thing. Hears it when he lowers himself to his bed, feels it when he leans his weight on his feet.

Tick, tick, tick — says the clock

Crick, crick, crick — sound his bones

On best days, Morgan can still convince himself he is young. He is only twenty-six, not even half-way to sixty yet. He has plenty of time—to skate, to live, to play hockey.

On bad days, the bones and fractures ache in the cold refrigerated air and ice. It's harder to convince himself he's young like Mitch or Autston and Willie because all he could think every time he gets checked is how long the bruises are going to fade.

Tick, tick, tick

He lies on the sterile cold metal medical table, letting the podiatrist probed at his feet. His knee unconsciously jolts when the doctor's fingers ghost over the fracture spots.

Crick, crick, crick

ii.

Morgan is twenty-six, and that makes things worse.

He stops going to parties now, stops drinking shitfaced and starts thinking before he acts. Invitations trickle down to almost nothing. He spends most time in the ER, wheezing past the pain seizing his lower body and staring up at the white ceiling counting different shades of paint, imagining the game narration playing somewhere off his right. When he is discharged, he buys a six-pack from a convenient store three blocks down his condo and puts it next to his side, prying one opens with his teeth and falls on his back, the ceiling fan rotates leisurely above his head as he nurses the tender muscles, looking down at his casted foot as if waiting for a miracle to happen.

He falls asleep thinking of his trade. When he wakes up, the word refuses to go away. It stays, lurking at the corner of his mind. Sometimes it skims to the surface, imprints on the back of his eyelids every time he closes his eyes, manifesting into tangible clot in his throat, his lungs.

He is not a fool, he knows there is an expiration date somewhere at the edge of his skate. The boys on the team start ribbing him as an old man, and the grain of salt rips wide the shitty part of him that wants to deny the truth till his death.

There's a difference between twenty-five and twenty-six, and he thinks he still hasn't accepted the changes yet, pretending he hasn't figured it out. But he figured it out a long time ago.

He's not old enough to consider his mortality, but maybe it's not a midlife crisis in name but in spirit. He has been playing hockey for more than eight years, and maybe by this point something in him just starts to drown amidst the scheme of losses and out-of-reach wins. The frustration that stacks up in

He's young. He keeps fighting, because that's what he does and how they do it, but he's tired and wrung out, and hope is a fleeting concept.

iii.

He doesn't know whether blaming it on bad luck would have tamed the pain of loss, but he does it anyway. The Stanley Cup is out of their reach again, and Morgan briefly wonders why anybody on the team still repeats the same words of sorrow and regret. It rips the wound further, making it unbearable to look at. The Press still broadcasts the same shit, and sometimes Morgan just wants to rip the paper into shreds and yell at them: Jesus, we get it. We are letting the city down. But he never does that. Instead, he sits in his car and listens to the sports radio blabbering about these latest losses and tries not to cry. He punches the steering wheel, then drives home and scrolls through the internet, staring at more articles mocking their inability to live up to the legends. It seems like a vicious cycle he can't pull himself out, a terrible feedback loop of him agonizing and laughing at his own pain.

Morgan dreams that night: Babcock and Keefe, speaking, arms crossed, backs turn to him. Their silhouettes are sharp and defined against the monochromatic setting. The noises of the crowd cheering and bodies slamming down in the rink are mere ambient white static at the edge of his consciousness.

They're relying more on luck than talent, they say, not in their voices. It sounds more like a cacophony of the presses shoving their microphone at him. Babcock and Keefe continue: That's why they can't win.

A part of Morgan thinks: Of course not. We bust our asses to get where we are. We trained, trained, trained to be at a place we're now. It's not just dumb luck that we get here. It's not just dumb luck we won the Stanley Cup years back. We can do this again, we can do it this year.

But the other part of him thinks: We're trying. We're trying.

He wakes when the night is still silent. Feeble white streetlights filter through his blinders. Morgan turns on his side and waits for the gentle throb of his leg soothed down. The cast is heavy, like an anchor.

His mother calls in the morning. He can't bring himself to pick it up. He holds his head at the dining table, soft blue dawn smudged across his skin, listening to the voicemail playing from the living room. The breakfast is cold when he digs in.

iv.

Morgan lets his phone ring. Once, twice. He stares at the caller's ID. The screen lit up and blackens. Lit up and blackens. His thumb hovers over the Decline button.

But he picks up on the third time.

It's John.

"You heard of the season postponing?" John asks.

"Yeah. It sucks, eh?" Morgan says.

Morgan has heard about the postponing. He had been listening to the same point over and over again for hours on end since the news broke, although it really doesn't make a difference to him. He's going to be out for eight weeks, at which point the season is wrapping up anyway. So he would have been on the bench, watching as his teammates trudged through another pulling-teeth game, trying to claim the Stanley Cup.

"It is what it is, I guess," John sighs.

"Bet you're doing tap-dance right now, Captain. Just blame everything on the Corona Virus," Morgan says, swallowing back the remainder of the sentence,You don't have to rattle off about the team's inability to improve and hope to be better next year.

John is quiet on the other line. Morgan picks out the erratic shuffling at the airport in the background, he can hear voices slurring at each other and he'd have guessed it was Cliff and Spezz laughing obnoxiously over something. "What's wrong?" John says.

Morgan should have said, Sorry. That was uncalled for. Instead, he sits down at his couch, elbows on his knees. Sunlight streams through his living room window panels. Morgan picks at his cast, and he isn't sure if his smile is out of dry humour or drawn-out bitterness, or both. "Nothing. It's just we've an amazing line-up this year and we could have—"

"I know, but we can't change it, you know. It is what it is. They don't know if they're going to cancel the whole season, anyway. So maybe it's just gonna be a two-week period. We're flying back to Toronto, and we'll see from there."

"What about practice?"

"Cancelling for now. They don't want us to catch it. That's alright, we all need some time to regroup anyway. Do you want me to drop by?"

Morgan breaths for a minute. Something is growing in his chest. He swallows it down. "Okay."

"Okay."

"I'm sorry," Morgan says, before his pride gets the better of him again. "Sorry for earlier."

"It's alright," John says kindly. "Take care of yourself, buddy."

When Morgan lowers his phone, John has already hung up.

v.

The thing is: all he needs to do is look to the right, at Tyson Barrie, and suddenly he can see himself thinking, That is what I'm gonna end up as.

You can only make it so far before your legs are too slow and your eyes can't track the offense men anymore and your stick starts missing the puck. Then you're up for firesale. No one wanted you. You get bounced around until you end up in a team that strings together more losses than wins and you resign to your fate because there's nothing more you can do. You settle down and wait until your body gives up. In your spot is a younger hotshot who smiles widely at the camera, and you watch the draft pick from the TV, and get interviewed about it tomorrow, and mill out the exact same words other men would have already said about the replacement.

Sometimes, Morgan envisions the moment he receives his trade deal. He'd be at home (because if he's at the rink he knows the look of sympathy and pity he's going to get), coming home right after a loss (most likely, because that's what they had been doing all seasons these days: losing, losing, losing. The management would say different, John would say different, it's obligation, but they all know it's a lie). He knows the exact thing his agent would say to him: It's time, Morgan.

He doesn't quite know how he should respond. He thinks he might throw the phone at the wall. Or ball his eyes out right then and there.

Both sound like awful reactions, but it's better to have a plan than no plan at all.

vi.

Morgan phones his parents, once he feels like he gets everything under control.

"Does it hurt?" His mom asks.

"No," Morgan says, his voice is a tad softer than he expects. "It's not a big deal."

"Really?" She says, teasingly.

"Yeah. It's getting better. It's not as bad as what they make it sound."

"That's good." For a moment, she hesitates, before saying, "Are you going to come home?"

"No, I don't think so. They don't want us to travel."

"I thought they would have said so," She sighs.

Morgan swallows, his throat clicks drily. "Yeah. Well."

"So what's your plan now?"

Morgan lowers his eyes to the floor. He has been through this enough times that the answer comes out like a second reflex. "Rehab and make the best of the situation, I guess."

vii.

Some days the words circle his head like a cursed chant: It's time. It's time. It's time.

He hits the ice, tethering with his weight as the trainer follows his little, careful movement. He skates around a little, the words echo with each tap of his stick, each time the puck bounces off the goal post, each time the phantom crowd roars: It's time, Morgan. Give it up.

viii.

He wonders how much he'd pack when he leaves the city.

Some players only need a suitcase or two, a few boxes that fit in the trunk—their life up to that point somehow easily packed into small boxes labelled with Clothes and Appliances, nothing more. Some players need weeks of shipments flying over the continent until the house they have here and the house they have there are two exact replicas.

He mock-packs once. It's muscle memory, by now. His whole career is packing and unpacking and repacking. He drags out his valise, folds his clothes and tucks in some protein bars and a burner cell phone. He looks at the bedroom he's confined in, examining the bare walls, glancing at the paper and ballpoint pens that strew across the desk at the corner by his bedside.

The suitcase feels weirdly light when he lowers it to the ground, and he sits down on the bed, looking out at the window. The weather is just bright and gray enough to raise hope of a better day and warmer spring weather around the corner, but the temperature really barely goes above zero and the sun is a hazy bright blotch above the horizon. There's not many people out, these days, with the lockdown underway. The bus stops deserted, parks dotted with forlorn one or two walkers. He watches a handful of people and vehicles hurriedly crossing the streets below, examining a faint slant of sunlight reaching through the space and smooths across the patch of his calf where his shorts ride up.

Morgan wonders if he can quickly take up the new team's culture, and embrace the new city's life, or he'd be like Tyson who coasts along his teammate's pity and smiles without reaching his eyes and keeps catching himself gazing at the empty horizon with a lovesick expression as if Tyson has carved out a part of his heart and left it somewhere on the top of the mountains in Colorado.

Morgan practices the words inside his head: I'm excited for the opportunity and look forward to playing with the new guys. He would smile, and he hopes—unlike Tys whose teary red-rimmed eyes and hoarse voice gave him away—everything he says would sound genuine.

ix.

All the facilities close due to the virus outbreak, and the government has really started to push social distancing so his trainer can't come by as often as he can to speed up the rehab process. Morgan is on his own for as long as this takes. They're looking at the possibility that the trainer can't even come at all and can only correct Morgan's form through video chat.

It isn't a big deal.

Morgan doesn't ask whether the scheduled surgery to remove his cast still stands. He goes through his work-outs, then watches today's news. Outside, the wind is howling, banging on the window panes.

Tick, tick, tick — ticks the clock

Morgan taps his index finger on his thigh, tracking the hand movement around the clock.

Tick, tick, tick

The evening bleeds into night.

*

cross-posted on ao3

A character-study on Morgan Rielly

WORD COUNT: 1,780