prompt: wander, title: the fix in "the next big thing" flash fiction

There was blood, because of course there was, the scientist was attempting a transfusion from Frank straight into his own veins. There was the shock-non-shock that sasquatch blood looks exactly the same as human blood. It made sense but there was still some reflex in the back of their minds thinking it might be green or glow or something. No. Indistinguishable from the scientist’s or any of their own.

We’re all on the run from loneliness, I guess, from the loneliest of all things, death. We run from the feeling that there’s nothing than the self until our legs give out. We need to connect and have connection never end. It isn’t any different for the famous folk Mitzi name-dropped as friends. For all they have in terms of acclaim and adulation, a couple bad reviews and they retreat back into mansions, devastated, hitting the bottle or worse. That hole of lonely mortality burns away in every heart that’s ever beaten.

So it did in the scientist on the table, tremors in the arm that didn’t house the needle, on the verge of an epileptic seizure, praying to a god he no longer believed in to somehow make him whole.

So it did in the last sasquatch on Earth, beside him, on his way to bleeding out and leaving them fully extinct, on an ad-hoc operating table in an abandoned Chuck E. Cheese up in the Valley.

So too for Frank’s friends, who’d wandered into that space searching for him, not expecting the scientist to have taken it so far, so gruesome. His roommate, with his size and strength, rushing the trembling scientist hoping to unhook and subdue him, talk him into undoing the whole mess. His colleagues, Joseph and Tony, “Michael” and “Elvis”, rushing to his side in similar hope of freeing him, staunching wounds his nature might somehow heal if the trauma could be halted.

That’s how it was for the Amazing Mitzi, for Margaret Nussbaum, frozen in place as the others were able to move, to try. Time slowed down for her, may as well have stopped entirely. She’d spent her entire life trying to use her magical skills in little ways that would never truly rock the boat, never really give up any significant promise or pieces of her soul in return. Just enough to entertain, enough to compensate for her imperfections, just enough to walk among the beautiful people, if never quite of them. Not really.

There was something more important, now, one of the few people she’d ever connected with and he was dying. In that frozen moment, she muttered some words in Hebrew, she moved her hands into almost impossible patterns of grace. She surrendered to that power she had only ever dime-danced with hence. She begged, then in English loud and high, “please, somehow just fix this”. There was a flash of light, Frank told me, then things began to fix themselves indeed.

But, perhaps, not exactly as she would have intended.

Last updated March 10, 2022