theme "trust" title "in search of" in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Hard enough being the last of your kind, that’d be burden enough for Frank, to be certain he was the last sasquatch on Earth, but only being mostly sure, that’s what hit him hardest. To wake up alone each morning, still not certain of the what or why, that’s what really twisted the knife. The hope he’d someday find a few stragglers like himself, the hope his people still lived and would return when whatever troubles happened finally blew over, that’s what ate him up inside.

Hope is strong drink, it numb pains for a while, but it doesn’t make it go away. You blank out for an evening, but you need a little more each time and whenever that buzz wears off, you feel that ache all the deeper. You go to sleep with a bellyful but tomorrow when it’s gone, that loneliness throbs all the more. Each time your trust in hope is broken by the fact nothing has changed, you need a little more the next time and the next time until you’ve built up such a tolerance that no amount can help.

When he wasn’t on the Walk of Stars or wandering in empty buses, he researched yeti sightings. In libraries, through television shows, on late night AM radio, in google alerts for “bigfoot”. He understood the irony of being some crackpot searching for the yeti when Frank was one himself, but bereft of corroborating evidence for his own existence, what could he do except keep sifting through humanity’s trash trying to find an Exhibit B?

I mean, I get it. There used to be three of Mike Cecconi, my father, my grandfather and myself, now there’s only me. The last of a name is one thing but an entire species? When my brother and I were young, Dad used to fire up his old shortwave radio on weekend nights and we’d listen for pirate stations or clandestine spy broadcasts beaming out orders in secret codes. Alpha Whiskey Tango, Cinco Dos Ocho, stoners in Iowa spinning Marley records to be heard by six ham-radio operators and the one FCC van closing in. Old Eastern European folk songs on an interval to let their double-agents know to stay down. Cuban insurrectionists passing notes. It was magic how he could conjure up for us these secret worlds hiding in the plain sight of a medium no one used anymore, no one it seemed except for Dad.

Well, and also Frank. Frank had a shortwave radio in his apartment too, an old one with all the warm and glowing tubes. Some nights he’d turn it on and listen, hoping to hear an old sasquatch children’s song no human could ever know, a sign that someone else was out there looking too, to know that he was not alone. He would never hear it, though, and he would go to bed hoping he might hear it yet tomorrow night. Hope is like that. Hope is a rat bastard like that.