keyword "transient" title "rallying for extra innings" in "the next big thing" flash fiction

He should’ve been in Southern California playing first-base for the Dodgers, had life gone the way it seemed into his teens, “Big Ben” Eisen then, nicknamed so for breaking the scoreboard clock with his first swing on the varsity team. He ended up there anyway, as a research scientist in Pasadena instead, as Doctor Benjamin Eisen, seeking cures for neurological diseases like the one that stole his dream. He was the highest-touted prospect in New England, led North Adams to State twice, had just signed a letter of intent to Stanford ten days before he realized the tremor in his hand wasn’t just transient batting-cage fatigue.

They honored the scholarship anyway, even though it was clear he’d never play again, it was a big news story, a feel-good piece about a feel-bad kid that made a bunch of stuffed shirts look great but as for Ben, he could barely choke back his rage at all the unwanted pity. The diagnosis would’ve been his death sentence fifty years before, which he may have preferred on some level, but now there were medicines with a thousand side-effects that slowed the progress to where he may not need a wheelchair until his forties, might live into his sixties with a bit of luck. Still, it was a ticking clock and still, no pill could ever make him strong enough to be “Big Ben” again.

A competitor nonetheless and with a free ride to a very good school in hand, he threw himself into a science major, hoping he might learn how to beat his faulty genes at their own game and finished his masters before his class got their four-year degrees. Eventually, he was an up-and-comer at a prestigious lab in the hills east of Los Angeles, was making great strides in his field but not nearly fast enough to keep up with his own nervous system’s slow betrayal.

After a tedious luncheon in Hollywood with one of his lab’s stultifying Silicon Valley tech-bro investors, however, he saw the damnedest thing of his entire life. He saw a busker in a costume on the Walk of Fame get plowed into by a double-decker tourist bus and then get up. Just get up. No one should be able to survive that kind of trauma, let alone stand steady seconds later but Ben could swear to a God that so long ago abandoned him, the more superficial wounds had healed right there in front of him, almost instantly. And when those cuts were fresh, why didn’t it seem like the guy was wearing a suit at all? Moreover, why did no one else there even seem to care? Everyone around him was acting as if it was all a stunt filmed for a movie, just because it was happening in Hollywood. But if something, someone could heal so fast, whatever that creature turned out to be, could that moment hold the answers to all the desperate prayers he no longer even allowed himself to pray?