prompt: ring, title: the gifted in misc. flash fiction

My generation didn’t ask for those participation trophies, you know. That’s the thing the stories get wrong, we didn’t want an awards ceremony for next-to-last-place in the youth soccer league. We just wanted Pizza Hut afterward, burnt pepperoni wrinkled in cups each holding an ounce of grease, maybe quarters to play Golden Axe. That’s all. The trophies weren’t for us, they were for our folks to put in cases so everyone knew how much they loved us. We just enjoyed the orange slices at halftime and the chance to fight dragons. My poor generation, merely along for the ride.

They call it “Gifted-and-Talented Syndrome” now. I sure as hell had it. If you could read a few grades above minimum, they’d put you in special classes with extra art supplies and tell you how special you were, how you were going to change the world. There was never a question. Decades later, none of us know how to fail, what to do after failing. How to bounce back and when to let go. Accidentally trained to believe we must possess instant mastery or shouldn’t even try. If the brass ring didn’t come to hand like Luke Skywalker summoning his sword via ill-defined magic, we were disappointments and should just give up. This wasn’t intentional but it’s how it panned out. Our only sin, believing it when they said we were special. They tried sending a teacher into space, shining example of our coming promise, and they immolated her instead, but for the want of a single o-ring Reagan contracted to the lowest bidder. We should’ve known then. I feel like I should’ve known then even though I was just five, because of the lingering “Gifted-and-Talented Syndrome”. Even six-figure metastasizing student loans didn’t fix it for us, just gave us more to fail at, more promise squandered, more weight pressing stone waiting blood that was never there.

The light at the end of the COVID tunnel is coming, vaccines are being approved. Rich idiots and poor conspiracy theorists will slow it but the end of the plague is coming and the world will wake up again and I hate to admit that it scares me. The world waking up terrifies me. Awful as all this has been, it has left everything on pause, everyone caught up in panic, anxiety, crippled with lack of surety. The whole world feeling the way I always have since I realized I wasn’t as special as everyone told me I was. All the madness, I’ll admit, I felt a little bit less alone in it.

Pretty soon, myself and my whole gifted-and-talented generation, in debt to our necks for the sake of others’ dreams, we’ll be back on that island again and it terrifies me. For a little while there, everyone felt like this. Can’t even drown the shame in pizza now, what with the diabetes. Horrible as a pandemic is, that moment of feeling normal in our fears, it was an odd sort of gift.