The following story is my submission to the first round of the 2023 NYC Midnight Short Story Challenge. I didn't publish the edition of the Alpha Girl saga Friday because I had to spend my writing time on this instead. I'll post the Alpha Girl story Friday. The assigned genre, subject and character for this challenge was romance, meteoric and dog-walker. Enjoy.
There’s nothing quite like the end of summer in a college town. The streets are crawling with nervous parents, embarrassed new students and embarrassing returning students. The heat and humidity are rampant as summer holds on for dear life. With so much walking on and around campus, everyone wishes fall would put up a better fight and get here just a little sooner. But fall’s just chilling on a park bench somewhere patiently waiting.
Perhaps no one in the area is looking forward to cooler weather than Miles Parker, a graphic design student entering his final semester, who walks dogs for a living. At least, part of a living. He also works at a comic book store just outside campus.
Miles has been walking dogs through these busy streets to the beautiful parks and open spaces away from campus for almost three years. He loves this time of year. He can see the hope, stress, dread, determination and excitement in all the students’ eyes. This year, he sees something different though. The past few days, there’s been a small group of people chanting with picket signs. The words on the signs are the same as the ones coming out of their mouths.
“The end is nigh.”
They’re anticipating the forecasted meteor shower to be annihilating. They either don’t have internet access or they have too much internet access and are so plugged into their algorithms that they believe ProgramPrimpate69’s online videos over NASA’s.
“Yo, Miles,” one of Miles’s classmates calls out as he’s walking Yoshi, the chillest Boston Terrier in the city. Miles doesn’t hear his peer because his earbuds are turned up loud enough to make you wonder how much he really values his eardrums, but he sees him waving his arms like a lunatic.
“Peter! Where you been all summer, man?” Miles greets the lunatic after taking out his right earbud and pausing the song he’s listened to enough times to do blind-folded karaoke.
“I was interning upstate,” Peter says as if Miles should’ve known that, or better yet, as if Miles should’ve been doing the same thing. “You been walking dogs all summer?”
“Yeah…” Miles scratches the anxiety that’s materialized on the back of his neck. “I’ve been working on some stuff though.”
“That’s right! I saw some of the designs you posted online. Super dope,” That’s nice of Peter to say, but if you could see him in his polo shirt buttoned all the way to the top and his jean shorts, you’d realize the word “dope” coming out of his mouth is blasphemy.
Miles is eager to get out of this interaction. “I’m heading to meet Vic at Mario’s when I drop off Yoshi to watch the meteor shower from the roof,” Miles hesitates to invite Peter out of fear he’ll say “dope” too many times around Vic, but his friendliness overpowers him. “Feel free to join us.”
“That’d be dope, but I might be too busy filling out paperwork for my job,” Peter’s confidence bursts from his mouth and punches Miles right in the nose. “Paperwork for my transition from intern to a full-time role once the semester ends.”
Yoshi tugs on his leash as Miles stands in the explosion from the stress bomb Peter has inadvertently dropped on him. He’s happy for his peer, but there’s too much pressure building inside him for his excitement to squeeze through.
“That’s…dope,” he manages to say before putting his earbud back in to block out any more disturbance from the outside world as he finishes his walk. Peter stops him.
“Crazy, huh?” Peter gestures toward the activists. “The end is nigh.”
“I sure hope not.”
When Miles pulls out his phone to resume playing his music, he sees a text from Vic. “Change of plans tonight. Met a couple girls at Mario’s.”
Miles’s palm catches his face before his head drops to the ground. Miles wouldn’t have any problem adding a couple of nice girls to the meteor-shower watch party on the roof, but that’s not who Vic’s wanting to change their plans for. Let’s just say Vic is too insecure to entertain women more intelligent than him, and that forces him to miss out on a lot of great women.
Because Vic is his best friend, Miles has battled through plenty of nights where Vic has forced him to hang out with a group of girls who can barely say three words before looking down at their phones. The type of girls who’d think Miles is weird for asking a question like “What do you think heaven’s like?” The type of girls Miles is too afraid to ask such a deep question. He’s not in the mood tonight. Not after talking to Peter. His pleas to his friend are no use though. Vic’s been too good of a friend to Miles for him to not reluctantly agree to be his wingman.
After walking a couple more blocks, Miles arrives at Mario’s Coffee Shop where Miles expects to be eagerly greeted by a group of people anticipating his arrival.
“Yoshi!” Mario, the owner of the establishment, eagerly greets his dog.
Miles is about to exchange pleasantries with Mario and give them the recap of Yoshi’s walk when something catches his eye. A girl. Curly blonde hair. Fair skin. Blue eyes. No, green eyes. No, blue. Actually, green. Definitely green.
“Yo, you got a staring problem or what?”
Miles snaps out of the trance and follows the voice he’s afraid belongs to the blue/green-eyed girl’s boyfriend. The voice turns out to belong to a six-foot-three, 200-pound guy wearing a shirt tight enough to tell you the 200 pounds is pure muscle. What a relief.
“My bad, Vic,” Miles says as he daps up his friend and turns to the two girls he’s sitting across from. “If this guy’s bothering you ladies, I know the owner so I can get him kicked out.”
The girls laugh. Miles can’t help but wonder whether they’re laughing at his joke or at him.
“Who am I kicking out?” Mario says as he slaps his hands on Miles’s shoulders and squeezes. “Vic? Oh, I could never kick Vic out. Unless he’s mean to Yoshi, but who could be mean to Yoshi?”
“He is so cute!” the girl Vic’s definitely interested in tells Mario in reference to the dog he’s letting lick his face. Aside from the fact that Vic can’t keep his eyes off her, Miles can tell this is the one because she’s his exact type. Mocha skin with big brown eyes and big lips. “What kind of dog is he?”
“He’s a French bulldog,” the girl with the green/blue eyes incorrectly informs her friend.
“Actually, Yoshi is a Boston terrier,” Miles corrects her.
“No, Miles, she’s right,” Mario corrects Miles’s incorrect correction. “Yoshi is a Frenchie.”
“Damn, Mr. Know-it-all doesn’t know it all,” Vic roasts his friend even though he definitely thought Yoshi was a Boston terrier this whole time as well.
“You can tell because Frenchies have more straight and rounded ears and smaller, stockeir bodies,” the girl explains how she knows more than Miles about the dog he’s been walking for three years.
Miles peers at her as he sits down. She’s tucked her hair behind her ear and faced the ground now so Miles can’t confirm what color her eyes are.
“Ladies, this is Miles,” Vic introduces his friend who he realizes has managed to put his foot in his mouth before shaking these girls’ hands. “He doesn’t study dogs. He studies graphic design and walks dogs.”
“I love graphic T-shirts,” Vic’s ditsy crush gleefully shares with Miles. “I’m Tanya, by the way. The female Dr. Doolittle over here is Sunny.”
Miles wants to tell her he loves graphic novels in response. He’s sure she wouldn’t know what those are. Vic can sense a sarcastic comment coming from Miles, so he slowly steps on his toes under the table.
They order coffee from Mario. Miles expects the girls to be basic and order pumpkin spice lattes, unless they’re not in season, in which case, they’ll order white chocolate mochas.
“I’ll take a pumpkin spice latte,” Tanya says. Uncanny.
Mario regrets to inform her it’s not in season.
“How about a white chocolate mocha?”
“That, we can do. And for you?”
“I’ll take a black coffee.”
Miles’s eyes jolt up to confirm where those words came from. If he had already been drinking his coffee, he would’ve spit it out in shock when he realized Tanya’s friend, who’s secretly a dog-whisperer, just ordered black coffee. He proceeds to struggle to not stare at her until Mario comes back with their order. She catches him a few times, tries to smile to lessen the weirdness, then looks down when Miles avoids eye contact and increases the weirdness.
When the coffee arrives, she takes a sip. Miles sees her eyes gazing above the rim of the tilted mug. He realizes they aren’t blue or green. They’re the color of the universe giving birth to a star.
“So, Miles,” Vic gets his friend’s attention to stop him from staring like a psycho. “How’s the hero series coming along?”
“Oh,” Miles slowly returns from a dimension where the only thing happening is him staring at Sunny. “It’s… going well.”
Miles sees a variation of the same look on the girl’s faces. A look that makes the child in Miles excited to show everyone the picture he drew that his parents put on the fridge and makes the adult in him think his parents only put it on the fridge because they’re his parents, not because it was good.
“I’ve been designing superheroes and posting them online every couple weeks,” Miles nervously clarifies with the girls before resistance possesses his soul. “I’m probably done with that though. I need to spend my time looking for an internship.”
“I want to see your superheroes,” Tanya loudly announces.
Before Miles can uncomfortably refuse to show what he’s spent nights creating, Vic takes matters into his own hands and shows the girls the copies of Miles’s superhero designs he has on his phone.
“Wow,” Tanya exclaims in a way that Miles can’t accept as genuine. “Isn’t he so talented, Sunny?”
“You must like comic books,” Sunny says indifferently without looking up from the phone.
Miles is about to shamefully confirm his nerdiness when Sunny suddenly decides to continue.
“Or graphic novels since you’re a graphic designer.”
A joke. One that makes Miles chuckle. Not crack up or really even laugh, but chuckle at the humor and the cleverness behind it.
“Yes,” Miles says with his lips in the form of a hammock hanging between palm trees on a beach. “I’m a graphic designer who loves graphic novels.”
“And wears graphic t-shirts?”
Miles laughs harder at that one.
“Well now that we’ve got our coffee, what do y’all say we head out?” Tanya throws out into the universe an idea Miles hates.
“I thought we were going to watch the meteor shower on the roof,” Sunny takes the words out of his mouth.
Tanya looks at Sunny. Vic looks at Tanya. Miles looks at Vic. Vic turns to Miles. Miles turns to Sunny. Vic sees a look he’s never seen from Miles.
“Tanya, why don’t we let these two talk about designing novels and t-shirts on the roof while I show you around town,” Vic’s words float through the air like a basketball being alley-ooped.
Tanya blushes and looks at her friend for her blessing. They hug and depart from each other.
Miles is back in the dimension where all that’s happening is him staring at Sunny. But this time, she’s staring at him too. Not the same way as Miles though. He’s staring like a child stares at candy. She’s staring like a single mom on a diet stares at it.
They head to the roof. Intimate silence awkwardly sits between them.
“So Frenchies have straighter and rounder ears, huh?” Miles musters up the courage to break the ice.
Sunny’s head bobs back as she snickers. “I had a Boston terrier when I was a kid. I wanted a Frenchie though. My foster parents tried to convince me it was a Frenchie, so I had to figure out the difference to tell if they were lying.”
Miles’s eyebrows raise. “What’s being a foster kid like?”
Sunny sips her black coffee. “I was lucky. They wanted me to be happy enough that they got me the closest thing they could find to a Boston terrier and didn’t want me to think it wasn’t what I wanted. Not everyone gets that lucky.”
The silence returns.
“Is the nursing program here as good as Tanya says it is?” Sunny kicks silence out this time.
“Oh, the nursing program?” Miles is impressed. “It’s supposed to be one of the best in the country…
“So you’re an orphan-turned-nurse?”
Sunny laughs harder than Miles was ready for. Again, he doesn’t know whether it’s the joke or his awkward personality making her laugh.
“I’m sorry,” Sunny manages to get out when her laughter subsides. “That was a really blunt way to sum up my life. Accurate though.”
“It sounds like a superhero origin story to me,” Miles’s nerdiness shouts “Oh, yeah!” as it crashes through his personality like the Kool-Aid man.
“A superhero like MetaWoman?” Sunny smirks as she references one of the designs she saw on Vic’s phone earlier.
Miles shakes his head in disbelief. Then pauses and tilts his head.
“You know what?” Miles suggests. “Yeah. Like MetaWoman. She’s got unbreakable skin and super strength. No matter how hard the world tries to hurt her, she keeps going. She’s too strong to let any villain stop her from helping others.”
Suddenly, a meteor shoots across the sky. Then another. Soon, Miles is watching a barrage of flaming space rocks fly across the sky reflecting in Sunny’s wet eyes.
“What if those protestors are right?” Sunny asks without turning her gaze from the show.
Miles is staring hard enough to make it hard to hear the question, but he hears it. All he can hear is Sunny.
“I mean, if this is the end, I guess we’ll get to see what heaven’s like,” she continues.
“What do you think it’s like?” the words are pulled from Miles’s brain like a piece of metal to a very strong magnet.
Sunny thinks for eternity before answering. As she thinks, Miles watches the meteors in her eyes get bigger as they move closer.
“I think heaven is where you live your best moments forever. And happiness, fulfillment and love never end.”
Miles doesn’t see the meteors get any bigger in her eyes because he gently grabs her chin and guides it toward his direction. He slides his hand across her cheek and gingerly but firmly grips the back of her neck as he kisses her. Forever.