prompt: horizon, title: looking for the next best thing in "the next big thing" flash fiction

The problem with telling long-form stories is, to tell them well, they have to end. It’s easy to fall in love with characters, places and things, easy to want to know what happens on and on forever. Even when the characters die, we need to know about their children and their grandchildren. We never want a party to stop. But there will always be open questions, what ifs, that’s how it works.

My generation was ruined by it or anyway our stories were. The sagas we were raised on had all their meaningfully-constructed endings undone decades later, maintaining careers of washed-up actors, selling toys with boxes never to be opened, dreams perpetually mint-on-card. Collectables bought and sold on the speculative market instead of memories.

Entertainment executives are a cowardly and superstitious lot, after all. Greenlight a new idea and it fails, they’re fired. If they approve “intellectual properties” with “built-in audiences” that bomb, there’s ample marketing research proving wasn’t their fault, job security. Batman, over and again. Batman Forever. Star Wars and rumors of Star Wars. Is this the Curse of the Thirty-Mile Zone gone global? Almost certainly.

But all tales must yield eventually, to let us all make up our own minds from there. Even when there’s loose ends. Even when you don’t get every answer. Some questions don’t have answers or anyway don’t have answers that apply to everyone. Some we have to make up for ourselves.

I don’t know. I can’t work magic, I’m just some half-clever dude who stumbled into a more or less unbelievable story. I can’t be sure what any of it meant, I am barely smart enough to know I’m not smart enough to know. I cannot say where the rest of the yeti went. I don’t know if or when they’ll ever return. But I can tell you this much:

Ever since my encounter with the sasquatch, I’ve been following the Amazing Mitzi’s career in Las Vegas from afar, from up here in the Adirondack foothills, via the internet. Mitzi recently added a new illusion to her show no one, not even inside-baseball nerds devoted to the craft behind stage-magic, can figure out how the hell she does it.

Maybe it means there’s redemption yet or at least forgiveness in this idiot universe and she has reconnected with divinity despite it all. Or maybe it means there isn’t, but with luck we can still cobble something fresh together with baling wire and spit to get us through the night. Maybe the difference between the two doesn’t matter at, maybe they’re the same in every way that counts.

Or maybe you reach the point where you accept gone is gone and the only way to soldier on is to find something else to dream on. Maybe the glare of Sunset blinds you, so you look away down Gower instead and search between the mini-malls and soda fountains for the horizon, in hope of something new. In hope of discovering the next big thing.