prompt: rate, title: oh! sweet nuthin in "the next big thing" flash fiction

According to The Amazing Mitzi, while many of Hollywood’s ironies are indeed side-effects of The Thirty-Mile-Zone’s obfuscating enchantment, it’s far from all. Some are geographical, some climatological, others merely the logical-conclusions to America’s paradoxic underpinnings. We needn’t a sorceress to explain most phenomena, only our most extraordinary cases.

The Curse is surely a part of why so many go there in hope of being remembered, yet everything not pinned-down is almost immediately forgotten, unless its history plays to something else still famous. Video rental houses become yoga studios become micro-breweries at the drop of a stock price, rebranded anew in the space between a sunrise and sunset. It’s why we traveled there to be discovered yet ended up covered-over again in illusion and smog. Definitely why we go to LA in search of glitzy glamor but end up blanketed in mystic glamour. She claimed the glamor/glamour pun was put into English by sorcery, rather than etymology, but Frank suspected she was joking.

The thing about the stars, however, isn’t magic, just the city layout and good old light pollution. That way we wander there looking for stars, human-stars, but only get the rarest occasion to see stars in the sky at night. You could stumble into Jack Black in a book-shop with accidental ease, but good luck seeing The Big Dipper or Orion. Orion Pictures itself long bankrupted, of course. Magic can’t be blamed there, though, just American waste, filling the sky with exhaust and the night with endless illumination, so no one can ever imagine an end to work or any time for rest.

Frank had a shortwave rig up in The Hills by the Hollywood sign, where he had a half-chance of unobscured signals. He would go there, time-to-time, listening in hope his missing race might be calling to him, somehow. No one batted an eye at a sasquatch hiking up-hill, of course, everyone just assumed he was part of an advertisement shoot or what-not. At worst, some union rep might check in to make sure he got their collectively-bargained minimum rate for such employment.

He said up there, once in a while, when the marine layer was thin and there weren’t searchlights from premieres at Grauman’s, he could indeed occasionally see stars, real stars, the actual stars. The same distant beacons that shone down through the redwood forest he’d grown up in. When he was a boy, he didn’t think much of them, he was about as indoors as a yeti could be, his nose always in books about our weird human world where maybe he wouldn’t be as much an outcast as he was among his arboreal brethren. Full-grown and alone, however, up there with his ears to the radio static and his eyes focused on a briefly-clear view out over the infinity of the Pacific’s horizon, he finally understood what those stars all really meant and wished he had something to share this realization with, other than the hum of sweet nothing from his headphones.