prompt: egg, title: a dream is a wish your heart makes when you're fast asleep in "the next big thing" flash fiction

It was a helluva thing, of course, for Frank to wake from his coma and find his entire species had disappeared off the face of the Earth. The loneliness and existential dread of discovering himself a dead-end, a whole way of life likely to perish whenever he himself died. However, he’d always felt apart from their culture anyways. So short at six-eleven, without nearly the musical aptitudes or natural attunements of his peers. That loneliness was awful, but his study of humanity allowed him to hide in plain-sight among us, under the cover of The Thirty Mile Zone’s enchantments, so Frank didn’t lack companionship. Over the longest-term, he said, the worst part was all the guilt.

“Survivor’s guilt?” I asked. “Not exactly,” he confessed, “maybe a little of that too.” He glanced nervously down at the placemat under his platter, a kiddie maze no children would ever navigate, to be thrown out whenever our table finally was bussed. Humans and sasquatches are different in countless ways, but shame isn’t among them. He eventually drew his gaze back up towards mine.

“When I was a kid, I didn’t fit in at all and my folks fretted about my sickly height. Not fitting in with the children my age drew me to studying your people, and that my keen interest in humanity made me fit in even less.” He tented his huge fingers to his mouth, hating this admission. “There were times when I was young, I’d wish they’d all just go away, stop judging me or worse pitying me. Just let me be as I was, whatever broken mistake I happened to be.”

“The guilt is that, in the end, I got my wish.”

In that moment, all I could think of doing was admitting my own shame, to show I didn’t merely sympathize, I empathized. “For all I try to convince myself my failures here in L.A. were for the better, that fame and fortune are cruel idiot dreams and attaining them would’a made me an even bigger asshole than I already am, I’m well-aware that might just be the sour grapes gripes of my rationalizations talking.” It was my turn to look down at myself in disgust.

“Maybe it didn’t teach me a valuable It’s a Wonderful Life lesson about what really matters… or make me a better person. Maybe I’m just a loser confabulating myself a hindsight consolation’s prize because that’s better than admitting, no, this town’s awesome, I just wasn’t good enough.”

A long silence passed between us, then, the distant hums of cheap neon the only accompaniment to our shared self-pities. Frank finally broke the vigil by poking at a half-eaten glob of omelet on my plate with his knife. “That’s the thing about figuring out which came first, the chicken or the egg, isn’t it?” he asked, “In the end, it doesn’t matter either way. There’s eggs. There’s chickens. Knowing the order won’t change the fact they’re here and must be cleaned up after, regardless.”