prompt: diary, title: heaven help the one who leaves in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Frank started keeping a diary of his experiences, once he realized it was going to be a long time before he found his people again, if he was ever going to find his people again. At first, he wrote it strictly in the script of the sasquatch but, as time passed, he started copying the more important less personal passages into English as well, in case he died before that distant reunion, hoping he would then at least be remembered by someone. Even us. I asked him to write something in that language and he scribbled down, right-to-left, a string of simplified ideograms. I know very little of comparative linguistics but I dabble in world religions, “A bit like Mesopotamian cuneiform.” He smiled. “Who did you think taught them that?” I couldn’t tell if the friendly yeti was kidding.

Over time, he started writing more and more of it in English, less and less in the language of the sasquatch, in the dialect for yeti from what humans would consider northern California through
southern British Columbia. By what American homo sapiens would call the 2010s, he wrote it exclusively in English, he said, and while Frank didn’t say “as by then I’d all but given up” but from the way he told the tale, I knew that’s what he meant. He’d learned the body language and the little sighs and pauses in-between that give our way of speaking at least half of its meaning.

“About all I write in my native tongue these days,” he said, “is an occasional quick marker here or there, as a sign in case one of my kind turns up passing through, to let them know that there’s one of us here, looking for others.” He looked down into his coffee. “I mean, it’s silly, probably nothing will come of it but it’s my little bit of hope. You might see it as a graffito tag under the right bridge, on a rock up in the hills, on the back of the Hollywood sign, if you know to look.”

“What do you write?” “Oh, well, it’s exactly what I wrote down for you there as your sample.” I looked at it again, the little line of squiggles he’d put into the back of a Denny’s paper placemat with an instrument made to look as if a golf pencil in his hand. “What are you writing to them?” I asked gently as I could, “What do these words mean?”

“Literally,” Frank briefly took on the professorial tones he’d once used back when he was just a particular short member of sasquatch society, “it says I Am In The Land Made Cursed By Man.” “Colloquially?” I asked. “Colloquially,” he laughed and dropped the stentorian delivery, as if he just realized he’d fallen back into that pattern for the first time in a few decades, “in the language of my people, in the language of the forest of the tall trees, it just means Join Me In L.A.”