Rainy days in a desert city were uncommon, and usually Wes would try his best to enjoy them by staying inside his apartment and relaxing with a movie or browsing the internet casually, no destination in mind. Right now, he couldn’t have that luxury. He was stuck at work on a boring Friday afternoon. After taking his eyes off of yet another text-filled Excel database, he swiveled his chair to the left to look at Royal Valley, the warm rain fogging up the glass. He was on the eighteenth floor, right by the spot where they hung the giant crown every New Year’s Eve. He showed up here every weekday to lose just a little more of his sanity and hopes for the future. Time never, ever stopped.

His gray and outdated business phone beeped, and Jared Reiner’s grating voice knocked him out of a brief daydream. “Hey, buddy, need that database printed right away! Is it done yet? I’ll be leaving in a few minutes to hand deliver it.”

“Yeah,” Wes sighed. “It took me all week, but it’s done.”

“Great. Good stuff like usual, bud. You available to come in this weekend and get it updated? Corporate might approve the changes by tomorrow if we’re lucky.”

“That… would be lucky. You know I’m free to come in anytime.”

“You keep up that work ethic, Wes. If this promotion goes through for me, then I guess you’re next in line for my job. It won’t be just database and IT work anymore.”

Jared finally shut up, and Wes went to print his work. He was about to reward himself by going to the kitchen and taking something from the candy bowl when he heard a distant, dreaded error sound. The copier was having a problem. Again. Maybe it just needed paper, but more likely, it was out to inflict pain. Denied the simple pleasure of a smooth finish to a long and excruciating project, he got up to investigate.

After facing down many enemies, mostly in high school, Wes felt like he only had two left: time itself, and the company copier. It had gradually fallen solely on him to fix it, and somehow, he was often the one to break it. It looked like a paper jam; simple, but annoying and a waste of time. He got on his knees, opened the hatch, and dug about.

“Son of a bitch…” he muttered as he felt around inside the machine, looking for a single piece of paper that had been mangled and managed to cripple the vital device.

As he performed surgery, Jared himself came walking down the hall, his fancy clip-on tie on display and proving that he was trying his hardest to suck up to his bosses. With him was the company secretary and two of its four vice presidents.

“Great talk, gentlemen,” Jared said and waved them off with handshakes. “I’ll see you at dinner tonight, maybe help you with the details of that new merger.”

Once the important men were on their way to their next meeting—Wes figured they were off to compare business cards—he stood up near Jared, his hands now dirty with stray toner. Jared turned to him, and his confident smile faded a little.

“Awesome thing about working IT in a tech company,” he told his ‘friend,’ “is that you can climb yourself out of it and before you know it, you’re with the big boys.”

“Yeah, but I’m doing like 80% of the hard work in the meantime. Do you even do much else anymore other than schmooze with corporate when they visit?”

Jared chuckled at this and gave Wes’ shoulder a pat. “Be cynical about ambition if you want, but c’mon, Wes, this isn’t like being a kid and sticking a piece of paper in a box and winning a million toys. You want something, you gotta work for it.”

“I work like hell, dude. Only, no one knows or cares because I don’t have the time to go around bragging. And you used to tolerate being underappreciated, too.”

“Hey, don’t worry, buddy,” Jared said with a wink. “I move up in the world, and you can take my place. I’ll put in a good word. Keep up the hard work.” He turned to leave, but not before one last insult. “Oh, and tell me how it goes this weekend.”

After washing his hands in the kitchen sink, and not bothering with candy as only boring Three Musketeers minis were available, Wes returned to his memorabilia-filled cubicle. No one would notice if he lazed about, but his work ethic wouldn’t permit it. As he got back to it, he looked at a framed photo, of the gang after graduating fifth grade.

He often considered reprinting a Photoshopped, Jared-free version of it.

• •

It stopped raining by the time he got off work, leaving behind an overcast sky now turning orange as the sun went down past the distant airport. NPR was running a segment about nearby forest fires, but his mind was pre-occupied with the next nostalgic urge. It would depress him, sure—just like the end result of all the other urges, but they always began with the faint hope of rediscovering a lost connection to his happier past.

This time, on his way to dinner, he turned onto Kettle Road and took it down past all the strip malls and department stores to where it forked and led drivers either to the city’s eastern interstate on-ramp, or south towards King Arcade. The fork was also by the vacant retail space that was once home to Royal Valley’s Toys ‘R’ Us.

He took his dirty and scratched silver Nissan Cube into its empty parking lot, with fresh puddles and cracks in the gray asphalt that were home to weeds. He parked uncaringly across three spaces, got out, and sat on the hood, facing east towards the mountains where the distant summer forest fire sent up a miles-high plume of smoke.

“What a stupid rain storm…” he grumbled. “Should’ve gone over there.”

Wes looked to his left at the empty storefront, where the colorful lettering used to be, now no more than off-color scars. The building had sat there, empty, for over two years. Soon, modern kids would have no idea that it was once a place full of colorful plastic creations. Designed by corporations and sold at high prices maybe, but capable of igniting innocent imaginations and childhood stories like no screen ever could.

  And twenty-five years ago, he really did drop a piece of paper in a box inside of that building and won a “million” toys. It was a historic moment in his life, now little more than a memory and a video clip sitting in a few hard drives.

What happened? Wes thought. When did everything become so…

His iPhone rang and derailed the Melancholy Express. He took it out, saw the smiling face on the ID, and answered to talk to one of the few people in town that still seemed to give a damn about his very existence.

“Wes, are you still coming tonight?” she asked. “Dinner will be ready soon.”

“Yeah… Just had to make a quick stop.”

“Could you maybe grab some milk on the way over?”

“Sure. So, Luce… Do you think Jace will actually be ‘joining’ us tonight?”

“That would be a nice change, huh?”

• •

Wes pulled up into the driveway of his sister’s smallish, single-floor house that she kept clean and vibrant, with garden ornaments in the front yard and a few colored glass mobiles hanging from the front porch’s trellis. In the past few years, after her husband split and left her with the lad, Lucy had really come to express herself and get into the organic, green-living thing, along with being a strong, independent super-parent. Her pre-owned Nissan Leaf was plugged in and charging by the side of the house and still wearing a proud “My Kid’s on the Honor Roll at DTE” bumper sticker.

But Jace didn’t act like an honor roll kid at home, as his edgy-angsty teenage days seemed to be coming sooner than expected. As soon as Wes had opened the front door with the key he had been privileged with, he heard the boy yelling at his teammates from his room, his shouts bouncing about the hallway. He had a tiny hesitation before every possible swear, so he could access his onboard thesaurus and find a safer word to use. Lucy hated hearing him degrade himself, and he tried his damn—er, darnedest to avoid groundings. But keeping his mouth “clean” did nothing to abate his constant anger.

“Shut the heck up, man,” Jace said into his Xbox’s headset as he furiously shot at an enemy team in some bloodless T-rated shooter. “You suck. That’s why we keep losing even when our team is lit, so get good or get off my squad. I don’t give a crap, just kill something already! Yeah, go ahead and unfriend me, scrub. Not like I’ll ever win another game with you on my friend list anyway. Okay, bye. Moron.”

“Jace, dinner is almost ready!” Lucy shouted, startling both him and Wes, whom she had snuck up behind. “Finish your round or whatever and come to the table.”

“Whatever,” he yelled back, without turning around. “My team sucks anyway.”

“What is that?” Wes asked. “Like, Fortnite or something?”

“That was the big thing for him last year. You know how kids move on. He plays that one a lot, but he doesn’t seem to even be having any fun with it.”

“Remember how all we needed was a Nintendo 64 and a few Mario Party and Kart games to be happy? What is with kids and video games now? Are they what they take all their anger out on? Luce, I don’t want to give you parenting advice, but…”

“I’ve set parental controls and taken away the system, but he just sulks until he gets it back and doesn’t seem to learn anything anyway. I’m… looking into something.”

Jace turned around once a defeat screen popped up, looked at Wes, and scowled.

Dinner wasn’t any better. Wes came over once or twice a week, and every now and then the three would have dinner out together, so he didn’t entirely treat the evenings as “just another night”—he wanted them to maybe be a tiny bit special. If nothing else, a chance to bond with Jace. But he wasn’t in attendance; his focus at the table was instead on his Nintendo Switch, as he texted on his phone at the same time.

By the time Wes was halfway done with his meal, he was fed up and snapped at him, “Really, Jace? Is whatever you’re doing more important than eating?”

“It’s just one fight and I’m almost done,” he replied, pressing the system’s buttons intensely. “It’s a Smash Brothers tourney and it was scheduled and I didn’t know we were going to have dinner early. Relax. I’ll eat in a minute.”

“Yeah, you’ll shove it all down in a few seconds and go back to your room…” Wes looked at Lucy, eating her pasta non-combatively. “You know, even if it was usually just me and my mom, I liked having dinner, at the table. It’s a nice break from everything and a chance to socialize. At least you try, but if every kid acts like this now…”

“And all you do is complain,” she replied teasingly. “Hey, if Jace doesn’t want to be social, the least you could do is make up for it. Don’t you have anything to actually talk about? C’mon, bro, what’s new? What’s a recent movie you liked? What’s a funny joke you heard at work? Or has literally nothing happened to you in the past five years?”

Wes looked down at his plate. “… You know I really have nothing worth talking about. I come over to see you two. Don’t worry about things on my end.”

Lucy’s attempted smile faded some. “You okay, Wes? Like, in a serious way?”

“Luce, what makes you happy? You weren’t very carefree as a kid, but by the time Jace arrived, you had really changed. I can’t tell if he’s the reason for that, or if you found something else… I’m just saying, we kind of went in reverse directions.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just that… Is life supposed to end at thirty-five? Or at least feel that way?”

“Aw, Wes, you’re being melodramatic. That, or your mid-life crisis is starting a little early. You just have to let yourself have fun again, that’s all. You probably think you’ve seen and experienced everything. When I was Jace’s age, I was afraid of anything new. But, like his ‘video games are my punching bag’ bit, it’s probably just a phase. I see my best days as right now, or ahead of me. You see them as being behind you.”

“Aren’t they? Nothing interesting has happened to me since Jace came along. I like new shows and games now and then, there’s still good stuff out there, but I never recapture any past joy. I don’t even know what to do with the money I make.”

“Buy a car! That’s something adults do to feel invigorated. Make the leap to electric. And then get a girlfriend. You still trying some dating sites?”

“I’m waiting for my current one to fall apart—the car, I mean. And, come on, what do I have to offer? I’m a burnout. Had my time, made the most of it, then graduated college and suddenly lost all meaningful direction.”

“Blah, blah, blah…” Jace interrupted after putting his Switch down and finally eating. “Man, Uncle Wesley, you sure like to complain when you come over.”

“And if you weren’t such a brat, there would be a lot less of it.”

“Be spontaneous!” Lucy suggested before Jace could retort. “That’s what you used to do, remember? You got bored, and you did something completely different.”

“Hm…” He looked at Jace. “Okay. I’ll take him camping. That’ll be fun, right?”

“What?” Jace exclaimed. “There’s no way I’m doing that!”

“Do you actually know anything about camping?” Lucy asked.

“I was kidding. But it is summer. Jace should be outside. Kids still do that, right?”

“When they’re hunting Pokémon on their phones, maybe.”

“Ooh, look at me, I’m old, I like to make fun of kids,” Jace mocked them.

“You’re cruising, buddy,” his mom scolded him. “How about you do the dishes tonight, or there will be no video games for a week again.”

He groaned and got up to take his half-full plate into the kitchen. “Whatever.”

“I have the growing urge to call him a little shit to his face,” Wes grumbled.

“That won’t help anything,” Lucy replied sternly. “He’s not a bad kid. He’s just working through some problems at the moment. It’s not like you never had any.”

“Sure, but not too many when I was his age.” Wes finished his dinner with a sigh. “I want to do something with him. I hate seeing the kid like this. How do I help?”

Lucy grabbed his plate and answered, “Take him somewhere. It doesn’t have to be camping. But he could use a positive male influence, since he barely sees his dad.”

Wes thought about the idea. But where would they go? Maybe a place important to his own past? King Arcade was too obvious. Surely there was a spot more profound.