prompt: space, title: space and time in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Fascination almost always starts out as fear, a fear that is eventually overcome while that focus lingers on. It’s a feature that seems to come standard with any level of sentience, human, animal, sasquatch, whatever. As I’ve said, Frank had stood out even when young for his stunted growth, damned to perhaps not even reach seven of our feet in height. He found himself sheltered by his family for this reason, it’s probably why the poor schmuck was doomed to academia. The others bounded through groves of redwood, lost and found again over hills and dales. Frank, however, often stayed back at home, got lost in books and tales by homebound elders instead of exploring nature or the company of his fellows, let alone the larger world.

Maybe had he not been treated so tenderly for his minor disadvantage, he could’ve “toughened up”, been bolder, more confident. Maybe Frank would have ended up making music instead of lecturing about human music and human faith. He told me how beautiful the songs were, in the language of his people, but he never sang for me himself. He hated the sound of his own voice.

While Frank’s young peers, just kids in their twenties, went out to push at limitations, he instead listened to old women and old men talk about how awful humans are. How they were lucky that through magic and safe practice, they were kept mostly off our radar.

Because humans have maddening short lives, very few of them acquire more than a thimble’s worth of wisdom, let alone compassion, they said. Because their organizing structures operated on a system of power that kept commoners ignorant to power’s abuse, the generational transfer was kept to the barest minimum, they said. Because human life is so short, we make up for it by breeding like stoned weasels and so are found in every livable space on Earth, ruining it as we burn through life, they said. Fun to watch but too dangerously stupid to get involved with, they said. I can’t say they were wrong.

“But they were wrong,” Frank told me, “your mayfly desperations, your erratic jumps in logic, your passion for goddamn everything because you get so little time for anything, it is beautiful. It’s not stagnant like my people are. Were.” He corrected himself again. “Like my people were.”

“Elementary school,” Frank said, “I think I was twenty-eight, my parents finally signed off on my class field trip to a human mall we’d magically cordoned off. I fought it but when I finally got there, it was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen. Colors, sounds, lights, so much everything. So bright, so new. Doorways that didn’t make me feel small. From then on, I needed to know everything there was to know about you all. It felt like I finally fit.”

“That’s how I felt when I first saw LA too,” I then asked him, “but now?” He repeated the same phrase back at me. “But now?”

Last updated October 23, 2021