prompt: plot, title: the lede in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Plot, to my tastes, is a necessary evil as best. Structure required to hold the damn thing together, bones to hang the meat from, but I can’t say I ever enjoyed a story solely for the plot. I’ve never read a book for the pay-off that the murderer was Colonel Candlestick in the john with a jar of mustard or whatever. I know some folks enjoy things like that, but it’s not for me.

Character and theme come first. Maybe place, only if there’s time.

Enjoying a story for its chain of events, to my interests, is like someone saying they find a man attractive for a “handsome sternum” or a woman for “gorgeous metatarsals”. It’s probably true that such people exist, but I think we can also agree they’d be creepy sex-weirdos.

I wish I could explain the aftermath of those transformations with the grace and focus this world would prefer. The pacing and characterization of Dickens without that penny-a-word descriptive dithering. The terse journalism of Hemingway without all his chest-beating macho bullshit. But the sasquatch relayed his tale to an idiot with a film degree and an adolescence full of Vonnegut, so we’re stuck with this instead.

Mitzi, with a marketable new look assumed surgical, suddenly had a lot more work, even without the show-stoppers that once confused the experts. Her agent got her on one of those talent shows the networks love, not because they’re good but because they’re cheap, and wouldn’t you know, The (now-conventionally-beautiful) Amazing Mitzi made it to the final episode.

She spun her new cult following onto the Vegas Strip, a cabaret act called “The Queen of Hearts and Her Kings”, with Frank’s colleagues Jack and Andy doing Michael Jackson and Elvis, his roommate playing her beefcake “lovely assistant”. Good for them.

Frank asked why I’d never heard of Mitzi from that talent show, he thought it had been popular. Simple answer is, I’m a failed screenwriter, we all eschew reality like The Devil himself, as if television cashing out of scripted shows is why we failed, not because we weren’t good enough suck-ups, weren’t born into it. Better to blame the flavor-of-the-month than ourselves. Myself.

“You’re burying the lede, though,” I said, “you’re no longer the last sasquatch.” “Technically.” “So, are you gonna…” “Gonna what?” “Be fruitful? Multiply?” “Mike, a few months ago, she was trying to kill me for science.” “That isn’t a total red flag for some of us.”

“Are you attracted to her?” I continued badgering. “Of course, I am. And she to me, it’s wired into our bodies. Part of the spell, Mitzi thinks.” “So?” “So, she wasn’t even ‘she’ until then and wasn’t a yeti yet, either. “Again, not a red flag for some.” “We’re taking it slow, Mike, I’ve got time. We have time.” When you live for hundreds of years, you do have time, at that. It might sound amazing, having all that time, but I have to admit, it also sounds goddamn exhausting.

Last updated June 25, 2022