prompt: meal, title: natural selections in "the next big thing" flash fiction

“Aged cheese, I can mostly handle,” Frank said, picking at a veggie omelet with a fork his hand made look comically under-sized, “anything with a lot of unconverted lactose, however?” Frank opened up his fanny-pack and dumped out an array of supplements meant to allow one access to the horror of an American diet. Beano, Lactaid, all sort of wards against the allergic hodgepodge of a melting-pot’s food culture. “Two-thirds of humans can’t handle the uncut white stuff, either. Lucky me,” he smiled, “their pharmaceutical infrastructure accidentally aiding a sasquatch with similarly adaptational meal-planning.”

Sasquatches, or at least the ones from what we’d call “northern California” anyway, ate a mostly pescatarian spread, according to Frank. They kept bees for honey, raised chicken for eggs, dined on fish as an occasional treat. They’d eat fowl, only in the rarest times of famine. “Adaptation is not about the strong surviving,” he admitted, “strength is the biggest lie in every culture. Things change and, if you manage to figure out how to change with ‘em, you’ll get to live a little while longer. Isn’t about some predetermined endgame toward dominance, just dumb luck and rolling with the punches.” He popped a lactose-buffering pill, for good measure. “No one’s strong. Just lucky or desperate.” “Or both,” I added. He washed it down with coffee then agreed. “Or both.”

“Survival of the fittest, it isn’t static. It’s contextual. It just means that you’re the fittest for the situation you’re currently in. If you’re adapted for the desert, that’s great until you’re dropped into the north Florida swamp. Somewhere along the way, some mutations randomly made life there that can handle Satan’s own humidity and it’s probably going to eat you if you don’t die from heat-stroke first.” He looked down at his now-emptied plate. “Lots of veggies, fruits and fish in Mendicino so things like me survive there well.” He paused. “Or we used to, anyway.”

“What do you do,” I finally had the gall to ask him, “when what you thought you were so well adapted to changes?” I looked at my own carbohydrate-free meal, imagined the stings from my nightly insulin injections. “What the hell do you do when the thing you were building yourself up for disappears? Turns out to have been a mirage, a lie, a joke, a con-job pyramid scheme?”

“You change,” he shrugged, “you change or you die. That’s the law of life, I’ve been told it’s a law of magic too. You change or die. The closest thing to strength there is that’s real is just the ability to change.” Said a mythic creature reduced to posing for selfies with tourists to the man trying to figure out who he was after, outliving the death of his dream. His childish narcissistic impossible dream. In the end, all we can do is find some way to survive until the next big thing comes along. All we can do is just wince, grunt and take our goddamned medicine once again.