prompt: encircle, title: S. giganteum in "the next big thing" flash fiction

“When I was young.” Frank never said when he was “little”, always when he was young. You’d think it was because he was a sasquatch, nearly-seven-feet tall but that wasn’t why at all. As if he was saying “I was never little” as he was larger than most people. But the truth was the opposite, an artifact of his self-pity over the fact nearly-seven-feet tall is short for his kind. Perspective’s a bitch like that. We live inside our comfortable assumptions for long enough, we begin to believe they are all that there is to know or to be. But just over the next hill, there will always be another way to understand the inscrutable goddamned blessing of life.

“When I was young,” he said, “my folks would bring me out to the prayer groves, from time to time. I think they thought I might end up a priest myself.” He laughed. “I mean, academia, they had it half-right? The cloistered structures, the trade-off of maddening amounts of labor for the upside of being on guided tracks. Being held comforts just as well as it suffocates, after all.”

“I didn’t have the priesthood in me. I had patience for rites but not the self-seriousness or magic aptitude. I had cousins who could work at the weaves, not me.” Frank looked down at his giant hands that to him seemed so small. “But I remember those feelings, the heat of the bonfires, the terror of being encircled by looming ageless redwoods. My people thought it the most beautiful thing in the world to be among those groves, austere, serene, awe-inspiring. Me? The tall trees terrified me. Filled me with a terrible mortality. I’ll get four or five hundred years, if I’m lucky? Those things will stand for millennia unless you chop them up into hot tubs.” He caught himself, looked toward me. “No offense. Not you, your…” I smiled. “We’re pretty terrible.”

So, when Frank was young, not little, young, his nightmares filled with redwood monoliths of terrifying peacefulness, but his dreams were filled with a larger world where he wouldn’t have to feel so small. To be learned and wise, beyond old rituals and antiquated understandings, theory eclipsing practice, rational thought transcending weak little bodies with limited warranties. Frank dreamed of cities, Frank dreamed of new varieties and of endless possibilities. Frank mostly dreamed of us.

Then one day, he woke up to see all his people had disappeared without a trace while he was in healing slumber and he had to join us, finally forced into it for reasons he may never understand. Sometimes you gracefully move on in life. Sometimes life throws you out of the house instead.

“Now my nightmares are all here where I wanted to be and in my few pleasant dreams I’m back with the smoke and the lightning bugs, the shadows of redwoods embracing me like a lover instead. It’s the damnedest thing, god-damnedest thing of them all.” Perspective, I suppose.

Last updated October 20, 2020