prompt word: memory, title: objects in mirror in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Frank’s earliest memory was as a toddler of a mere fourteen, his species’ equivalent of three. His parents went off into the other room to talk to the local healers about his stunted growth, “he may not even reach three lengths in adulthood,” they whispered, three lengths being a bit under seven feet in an American’s understanding, “but he should end up healthy every other way.” Even as a child, not called the human moniker Frank, rather his actual sasquatch name he said I hadn’t the tongue to pronounce, he understood what it all meant. He was going to be short, very short, short enough to be looked down upon for the rest of his life but never enough to be pitied. Not a freak, not disabled, given neither an odd fame nor dispensation for his troubles, just several hundred years of inconvenience and underestimation for the sin of being an exception but not exceptional. He’d barely just lost his second set of teeth, some of his thirds still not set inside his jaws but he knew he’d be different for the rest of his life and, worse, different in a way that couldn’t even be exploited. It was that point when he realized he would have to become an academic.

“I’m not asking for sympathy, Mike, I’m just trying to explain throwing myself into the study of your people, your religions, your music,” Frank raised an almost-impossibly long arm to signal the waitress for more coffee, “nicknamed Saint Francis for caring so much about human animals, uh, no offense.”

“Animal might be too much a compliment for us,” I smiled, “none taken.”

“I didn’t fit in, so I looked outside my world for something interesting in a different way, you people, you people and your fascinating customs, I found something worthwhile in learning about you all instead.” The waitress refilled his cup. “I was different, you know, but not so different to be useful in my difference and I felt doubly-cheated. Now here I am decades later though and for all the awkwardness, part of me just wants that world I’d never fit into back anyway, just because it’s what I knew as when I was young. I probably sound crazy.”

I looked out into the darkness of the city, through the diner’s window. The barista at the Gower Gulch Starbucks was probably the greatest actor that the high school stage in Quahossettminster Massachusetts had ever seen. The check-out clerk at the Rite-Aid next door maybe the prettiest girl to ever get out of Possum’s Scrotum West Virginia. Our waitress probably knew the most English in her tiny Guatemalan village, just enough to escape and sling coffees for us dumbass Americans. My depth of field shifted when I blinked from eyestrain, whereupon all I could see was my own reflection in the Denny’s window.

“That must have been goddamn awful, Frank,” I told the truth and then I lied, “I can’t begin to imagine how much that must’ve hurt.”

Last updated April 14, 2019