theme: proclivity, title: the flehmen response or lack thereof in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Despite what you’ve been told by Seventies drive-in exploitation schlock cinema, the sasquatch bares no particular sexual proclivity toward humans, let alone toward human women in specific. Consider using a time machine and meeting the most attractive homo erectus or Australopithecus in history. Unless you’re way-twisted or truly lonely, it isn’t going to do it for you or for the pick of the homo habilis litter either. You’re just too different. In general, so too for sasquatches when considering homo sapiens salaciously. Even Neanderthal genes don’t help.

We smell wrong. Our Jacobson’s organs withered away to goddamn nothing, we only pick up on pheromones at the subconscious level, nothing certain. We poor baldies are left to be attracted to the appearances our cultures tell us to desire, attracted to currencies, attracted to folks who fulfill the false narratives we have about ourselves. This is the shame of being human.

Frank’s people can appreciate physical beauty in each other, sure, but in the end it’s mostly just about how their scents match up, that’s the real drive. Even as the last of his kind on Earth, he’s just not wired to stalk camping grounds in Oregon to find a human mate only to be snuffed by a lynch mob of trophy-hunters and thrill-killing bikers. The movies lied to us about this, as usual.

If you want to know if Frank Yetti and his friend the Amazing Mitzi tried to get something to work between them, of course they did. He was utterly alone, she didn’t have a chance with the kind of blue-eyed boy that plays guitar she desired without ripping the bleeding sinew of time and space out in the process, of course they did.

Physical compatibility wasn’t the issue, not to get into too much detail, even though the yeti are much larger than us, their fiddly bits are within the high-end of the human norm, in terms of size and functionality, it doesn’t scale up. All adult male bigfoot endowed uniformly, a bit over nine inches by our measure, every one of them. Why? I don’t know. There’s probably an explanation involving magic, everything else of Frank’s is explained by magic, why not yeti willies too?

Despite their emotional connection and their trying, their instincts and desires were too far apart to make it work. Too large a gulf and between them some missing link. Their very evolutionary lines like two ships passing in the night of history so they settled for kindred friendship, despite temptation in times of loneliness.

What would become yeti and what would become this damned human race left Madagascar at different times, sorcery and natural selection respectively shaping them into two very different kinds of things with very different needs. We are alike, however, in our capacity for loneliness.

Loneliness, not just our human shame, but the shame of anything that thinks and therefore is. The desperation of loneliness is a pox on all our houses, however big or small our houses are.