prompt: orange, title: fast times in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Before it became The Suburbs, the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles was just a bunch of orange groves. You can still receive lectures from local old-timers about those days, whether they actually remember them or not. Sometimes just repeating stories their parents told them. Sometimes transposing scenes from CHINATOWN with their own memories, the way we all tangle received nostalgias with actual experiences. To them, it seemed as if it’d always been oranges and something permanent had been lost forever. This wasn’t the case, of course.

Those orchards only existed for the scant decades between when the Valley was annexed by Los Angeles for water-access needed for such farming and when the second World War ended, and everyone needed picket fences to wrangle kids. Before that, it was all wheat fields. Before even that, where native Americans grew their figs. Every age’s passing, those born next believe it has always been that way, mourning the changes they witnessed as the deaths of things once eternal. None of it was, of course, that’s just a trick our short lives play upon us.

Perspective’s a hell of a thing. We don’t get the sasquatches’ centuries, we get these tiny cups of decades in our hands and have to try and make do. The years I lived in the Valley were when the malls started dying. Internet and the big-box stores drying up their business models, the Tower Records chain as canary in their coal-mine. Even before I lived there, I knew those malls of the Valley from teenage movies, gleaming halls of pastel vomit all directions. I’d grown up myself in less glamourous versions of the same, outside Utica and Albany, and as I watched them die, I mourned arcades and record shops that once felt endless. My folks reminded me of Main Streets and Downtowns those malls put out of business when they were young and how they mourned them just as hard. Perspective’s a hell of a thing.

The entertainment industry doesn’t import water like an orchard, rather it outsources hope. Kids with dreams flow in to do the grunt-work until most burn out and a few luck into the isolation of success to do the same to the next generation. Nonetheless, pipelines flow and fruit blooms and so the money’s made. If you think the outcome’s worth it, it all works in its own circuitous way. Still, I wish we had lives long enough to figure out how to make it all happen more humanely.

Admitting to Frank my jealousy for the wisdom of his long life, he laughed. “My grandpa used to complain how he’d never have the perspective of the redwoods, how he felt like a hiccup in comparison.” We think ourselves so different from the future and the past, as if they’re apples and we’re oranges. Apples and oranges are only so different in the vacuum of each other. Put them up against Buick Skylark, say, and they’re pretty much the same goddamn thing.