prompt: steep, title: once upon a time in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Once, there was a man whose world fell apart around him. Not knowing what to do with himself, he did as so many do, he went west, the direction of change. Good changes, bad changes, change either way, he followed the setting sun as far as it could take him. He knew a little magic and he hoped he could use it out there to make things right. This isn’t about me, of course, I am without magic, I went west half because of my childish narcissism and half because I didn’t know what else to do. Saudi oil-men had recently blown-up Manhattan, after all, I couldn’t just drive four hours down the Thruway to chase idiot dreams. (I failed New York eventually too, after I left L.A. An ex and I blew through a small inheritance of hers in a year and change.) But I couldn’t know any of that yet. I only knew I was a young man and in the movies, a young man goes west.

Once, a man went west as the world he knew was ending, to where the continent finally relents and becomes sea. Uniquely skilled, he tried everything he knew, used everything that he was, in an attempt to figure out why it was happening, how to get back the life he had known. This story isn’t about the sasquatch I call Frank, he didn’t go west at all. The yeti lived in what Americans call northern California and southern Oregon. When he woke up alone and his people were gone and the only recourse for loneliness was returning to where he’d once studied the human religion we call “rock-and-roll”, Frank Yetti’s life went entirely south.

The man was the Hopi mage who went west to try and stop the white man from taking the whole hemisphere away from the First Nations. He spent his lifetime trying to repel them with charms and spells, tanning skin leather, bleaching hair white, watching his sweat, blood and tears steep into the sand, fighting his losing battle. When he died, he sacrificed what was left of his soul to make it a roach motel for folks with greedy vain dreams, to trap them with used illusions, drain them dry. With his last breath, the curse of the Thirty-Mile Zone.

My father had a heart attack after a day sunning himself under his daughter-in-law’s orange tree, my brother’s wife’s orange tree, in the San Fernando Valley. My selfish actions indirectly caused the domino rally that put him there. When my father was young, my mother’s mom offered him money to take his band to California instead, maybe to test the depths of his love, maybe trying to protect him from the powerful force she knew her daughter was. He refused and became our dad instead. He died out there because of me. Part of myself remains there as well.

Everyone’s story after all is the same, more or less, what differentiates us at all, trivia at best.