prompt: rain (1) / title: blinded by the light in "the next big thing" flash fiction

“It’s a hell of a thing, Mike, a caterpillar.” I didn’t know what he was on about at first, Frank had a way of being gnomic, hinting around ideas in hopes you’d come to conclusions yourself first. I still can’t say if it was a sasquatch trait in general or because he was an academic or had studied our religions for so long he came to enjoy the dance of the parable, of trying to teach you how to learn while teaching the lesson at hand. I’ve no sense of how to do that myself, if you’ve learned anything about me here, it’s how I’ve no talent toward brevity. I overexplain to no end, I need be understood so precisely, by the time I finish my torrents of over-delineation, nothing is recalled.

“It spins and spins, throws all its energy into becoming something new, never really knowing what it’ll be on the other side of that cocoon. So busy wanting change for its own sake, never considering what it might become. Some become butterflies, y’know, some become moths.”

The neon over the window to the kitchen in the diner flickered as if it was trying to decide to burn out but didn’t quite have the guts, relented and returned to its glow. “You know the old myth, how moths are drawn to flames as if their lives depend on it, as if they’re in love?”

This I knew. “They’re not drawn, they’re just tragically confused. It throws off their senses, they start navigating at random, but people project meanings onto their meanderings.”

“It’s like that,” he picked at his cloying fruit salad, “I used the roach motel analogy earlier for how the Curse of the Thirty Mile Zone works, conquering idiot dreamers check in, they don’t check out, but maybe it’s more like a bug-zapper instead.” He’d gotten around to his point.

“That piercing blue-white light, that beacon there in the darkness, it’s not so much you’re drawn in, it’s more that fame and fortune leave you dazzled and unmoored, without your usual tools of navigation. All the guards you’d usually have up disengage since what you’re looking at doesn’t make any sense, cannot compute. So, you just spin around in circles until-”

“Bzap.” I said. “Yeah,” he sighed, “bzap.” “Belushi in the Chateau Marmont,” I continued for him, “bzap, Joplin in the Landmark, bzap. Bobby Kennedy into the Ambassador, bzap.”

Was that the point he was trying to make? That it was less like being poisoned to death in a trap, more like being rendered insensate by the promise of eternal adoration, you stand there looking into distant stars slack-jacked for so long you eventually just drown, choking to death whenever it finally rains? The song’s wrong, y’know, it rains in Southern California, not as often as other places, but it rains just like anywhere else. You’re so confused by visions of what you wish you could be, could have been, that it feels like it’s pouring instead. Bzap.