prompt: book, title: what you wished for in "the next big thing" flash fiction

“Ultimately, people only want stories if they can convince themselves they’re real,” the yeti said, as he set his coffee back on the saucer, “at least plausibly real. My people, yours, all people, they don’t want metaphors, they don’t want parables, y’know. They don’t want ideas transcending the literal, they want lies that sound real. They all want some bullshit hidden truth about how they’re secretly the chosen or a genius or beautiful and fated. Above all else, fated. They,” he sighed and pulled a losing scratch ticket from out his wallet, “we all just wanna be told we won the lottery. For me, to find my people and go home, but it’s all the same symbiotic codependent con-job.”

“You’re a wizard, Harry,” I half-heartedly mimicked an actor in a mediocre children’s film, “or in your case, you’re a hairy wizard.” “Gods yes,” he continued, gesturing wild in all directions with his improbably long arms, “I mean, here we are in a city built upon that royal scam. Give her your everything and Dreamland will deign to briefly let you believe all of your own lies.”

On the far wall of the restaurant, there was a mural of the hills and that goddamned Hollywood sign, of course there was. The letters bright-white like the bleached teeth of the preacher in his limousine demanding all your rent money. Bright-white as the tunnel they say we’ll see when death finally comes calling. The bright-white in an errant moth’s eyes before that last bra-zap.

“If their fantasies of avarice aren’t possible, at least someone to lie to they how they’re indeed over that next hill. They think reality television’s better than something that admits to fiction because then they can pretend people really are that shallow, to pretend that with enough money, they could lack the pain of feeling too. That the wrestlers really hate each other, the politicians really believe what they’re saying. How when that grandpa won the Funniest Videos prize for getting hit in the crotch with a football, it wasn’t the fourteenth take by desperate wretches just wanting to be a little famous. That we can really tell our futures in the positions of stars, in the scattering of cards, that their faiths weren’t made up from whole cloth by ancient chiefs looking for a more permanent means of control than simply hiring a bunch of sociopaths with clubs.”

“Frank,” I said, “I’m listening but that was a bit of a rant, you know, more my sort of thing, if we’re being honest here. Where are you, well, going with all of this?”

“I guess that I’m just warning you. You’re free to write about me if you like, no one will believe it anyway, I just don’t know how many would care to listen. A magical story that only serves to tear down the magic lies they prefer to believe, I don’t know if that makes to a marketable book.”

Last updated August 04, 2021