Gray was sweating. He was wearing an unbuttoned shirt over a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, yet the summer just seemed hotter on this day.

The street hadn’t changed much since he was a boy. There was a bodega on the corner that had undergone new management twice, yet stayed kept the same look. The trees were perfectly filed and fenced off by iron bars that both protected them and stopped the roots from the upending and cracking the sidewalk. Fire escapes marked every alleyway.

Gray remembered the summer days that were just like this. When the warm breeze stuck your shirt when you ran. Where he would race the drifting leaves. The air smelled just like it did now. But for some reason, he wasn’t smiling like before. The breeze did help to cool him off.

He walked down the sidewalk and saw a cat lazing near the entrance of a ramen shop. A newer addition to the street. The feline considered him for a moment and stretched. It yawned. At first, Gray thought that it would move. The cat did not. It just closed its eyes and went back to sleep under the warm gaze of the sun.

Gray continued down the street until he got to the corner where the road split. If Gray remembered correctly, left would take someone eventually to route 9 where they continue to go further upstate. The right would take someone to that mall that closed by the time that Gray was nine years old.

He remembered watching the desolate building as they would pass on his way to school. It was a decrepit place. Teenagers would flock to it and explore the halls in search of fake horrors and rumors. In the end, they found nothing. An empty center of commerce that was no longer needed in the age of platforms. A chasm of the past. They did eventually demolish it, but it was by the time that Gray was out of the house.

But he wasn’t here to go down that street.

The house on the left corner only had two floors. It was meant to be a two-family home. Every single window in the front was covered by old white curtains that were picked when Gray was born. Gray opened the small fence that reached to about his waist and walked up the steps. The front metal fence had its black paint chipping away.

He started to sweat again. There was a doorbell screwed on to the doorframe that doubled as a camera. It was an older model that Gray wasn’t exactly sure still worked, yet he pressed the button. He heard a chime echo behind the door.

He waited. There was some rattling behind the door until it opened to reveal a wizard of a man. Dressed in a graphic t-shirt and gray shorts, the old man blinked at Gray.

“You didn’t call that you’d be visiting,” Gray’s father left the door open as he went back inside the apartment.

Gray followed and took off his sneakers at the door and placed them atop a towel that they kept near the entrance for shoes. He closed the door behind and squinted his eyes. No lights were on, and the curtains served well to keep the day out.

Gray passed the only family photo on the wall.

He took an immediate left to enter the living room. He had to step over cables from a GECKO I headset that had its wires sticking out like limp appendages. The couch was torn and faded from years of use. Stacks of books, vinyl records, and cassette tapes joined the old headset on the coffee table. Nevertheless, their place was clean. It was properly dusted for the one of the corners where Gray saw a couple of dust bunnies.

There was a television in the home that was held up by a wooden cabinet. No matter how popular the platforms were, viewing movies and shows stayed within a screen in the real world. There were attempts to create immersive movies that involved users wearing headsets, but the products were never good. People didn’t want to be inconvenienced to walk around following actors. They just wanted to sit down and watch something already perfectly framed and edited for them. So, television stayed alive through the boom of virtual headsets. Virtual movies theaters were made but that held the niche of watching movies with your online friends.

From the living room, Gray could see his father in the kitchen opening the stainless-steel fridge.

Steven Miller was a man whose beard was the same color as his son’s name. He poured himself a glass of orange juice in a coffee mug and chugged half of it. He jogged back to the living room and almost tripped from one the loose cables that came from the GECKO I headset. A drop of juice fell on the hardwood floor.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Steven sat down on a recliner. He faced his son while he held his mug with both hands. Gray leaned forward and disconnected the loose cables.

“I can’t believe you still have this old thing,” He wrapped the wires tight and then placed them on the table, ridding the home of a tripping hazard. “Do you use it?”

“Sometimes, but it’s an old machine. Doesn’t work too well. You probably don’t want it, right? Since you play video games, you probably have a high-end machine for those.”

“I only have GECKO II. Need to upgrade that soon.”

“Oh, yeah? Isn’t that one pretty old?”

“Five years.”

“Hmm.”

Both sat in silence. Steven leaned forward and turned on the television. He didn’t bother scrolling through a list of television shows and put on a procedural drama that followed a hard-boiled detective. The gimmick with this one was that the detective was a Michelin chef for a decade before becoming an ace gumshoe. It was aptly named dine and crime.

“You see when a puffer isn’t prepared properly, it is filled with deadly toxins.”

“Are you suggesting the suspect made prepared the puffer fish wrong on purpose?!”

“That’s exactly what I am suggesting. See here…”

Gray blinked at the show in front of him and turned to his father who also wasn’t looking at the screen. Steven scratched his neck and cleared his throat.

“We haven’t talked in a while. You never called.”

“You didn’t call either,” Gray responded. “Sorry…”

“Yeah…” Steven sighed. “I should have reached out too. You’re out of the house now, so I didn’t want to intrude. How was the past year?”

“Job’s been fine. Didn’t really do anything crazy, so I actually got to save some money.”

“You sounded so sad on the phone during Christmas. I should have said something, but I just found it difficult to talk.”

“I’ve seen how things can get in the kitchen. You try to keep your cool, but something things get too hot to handle.”

“I’m trying to do better this year, Dad. I know that it was pretty bad to not talk for a while and that’s why I came,” Gray said. He finally was able to say it.

“Do you want to get dinner?” Steven shut off the television. “If you have time. Maybe you got plans later, but since you’re here we can talk some more. That ramen place down the street is good. They have this cat Taro and the bowls are good.”

“I saw him,” Gray nodded. “Yeah, let’s get some food.”

“Alright, then Let’s get going. Wait though. I can’t go out in shorts.”

Gray waited for his father to change out the shorts. He came out in stone-washed jeans, but didn’t bother to change the shirt.

The two took the five-minute walk to get to the ramen shop. Taro allowed himself to be petted by Steven. After the proper the tribute was made to Taro, Gray and his father sat down on a small table that had three stools. Father and son sat across from each other and let the stool in the middle be the empty one. They ordered quickly and got the same miso ramen bowl. They spent the rest of the dinner catching up on their daily lives.

“You remember John?”

“The guy that used to work with you?” Gray asked.

“Yeah…You know he moved to Florida.”

“Really?”

“Yup. Funny story, like after a month moving there, he found and alligator in his backyard.”

“Sounds like Florida,” Gray responded.

“Yeah. What type of games you playing nowadays?”

“A game called Elrin Online is the main one,”

“That’s that MMO, right? Maybe I should give it a try,” Steven ran his hand through his beard.

“Liar. You hate MMOs,” Gray said.

“I don’t hate MMOs.”

“You always played them for an hour and just went back to playing those old-school dungeon crawlers.”

“Hey blobbers, are a great gerne.”

“Blobbers?” Gray laughed. “What kind name for a genre is that.”

“It’s beyond your kid,” Steven leaned his arm against the chair to feign a cool stance. Then he chuckled.

After the food came, the two spent the rest of their dinner discussing the thing that had happened interim between Christmas and today. They devoured the bowls. Gray tried to pay for the food, but his father refused. Stating that natural order would be disturbed if a father didn’t pay for his son’s meal. Gray left the restaurant with a bloated warmth that came from the heavy broth. The sky was dark, and the air was cool by the time they walked back home.

Steven entered the house and took a step towards the second floor to get to his bedroom. He patted his stomach.

“It was nice. You want to sleep over?”

“No, I’ll just head home. I got some things I want to do tomorrow.”

“Alright, have a goodnight.”

“Night, Dad.” Gray watched his father tread up the stairs. He sighed when he reached the top. Getting the steps seemed to be harder for the man every year. “I love you, dad.”

“I love you too, Gray.”

Gray waited until he heard the bedroom door close. He turned and stood in the entrance of the house. Gray was a silhouette against the sky. He turned once to look at the family photo.

The three of them were on the Long Island boardwalk. In the middle of winter. A spur of the moment decision that his mother made to visit the beach during a cold day. It was always her decision when it came to moments like that. Like when she proposed that everyone in the family dye their head a bright red when Gray turned sixteen.

The three of them were huddled together in their coats and beanies. It was a close-up photo because who the hell would they ask to take the photo on a beach. His mother was the one holding the camera. Gray forgot her smile.

He remembered how the sea looked. How the day itself looked. Like a haze was placed over the sea and sky. How the horizon looked tranquil and still.

Gray closed the door behind him and walked out into the hot night.