keyword: help, title: the tarzana shuffle in "the next big thing" flash fiction

I went out to L.A. to help or at least that’s what I’d hoped to do. My brother and I lost our father in January, his father-in-law passed in July. I’d house-sat and tended business while Ma was out in California with him for months and then at the end of summer, it was my turn. My brother has barely-controlled epilepsy and back issues on top of that, a wife working out of town, a mother-in-law needing his aid on a near-daily basis, I could at least be a companion or anyway, that’s what they tell me. Anyway, that’s what I tell myself. I watch the dogs for him when he’s out helping the mother-in-law. We talk a lot and he’s maybe a little bit less lonely, I guess.

But I can’t shake the idea I’m mostly just being shuffled like a maiden aunt in some old British novel that many’d call a classic just because it’s old and popular but were it written now would be dismissed as maudlin trash. Something by Jane Austin. My whole life I always heard “Mike, you’re smart but we’ve no idea what to do with you.” Never had a damn idea myself. Barreling toward forty, I still don’t. I always just tried to treat others as well as I could manage and kept on writing, let momentum carry me from there. Failed miserably out here which makes it difficult to be back but if failing miserably somewhere excluded my presence, I’d be left standing in stock still atop the North Pole, at this point. So maybe I’m just being shuffled around now from place to place, totally unmoored but told that I am helping just to make me feel better.

Me and the gaps in my resume. Me and my cleverness and my oceans of anxiety and my half-thimble’s worth of wisdom. Myself and my art-bum’s tendency to chase external validation or a pretty face down a dead-end and then, even after they disappear, keep smashing my skull against that brick wall hoping it’ll bring them back.

My brother had a dream where he was spoke with Dad, both knowing he was dead, and he was about to tell my brother something very important, but he woke up before Dad could finish. The next night I had a dream where I was speaking with our father as well. Dad apologized to me that he hadn’t been showing up in my dreams as much as other members of the family, my mom, my aunt, my brother, whatever, it wasn’t that he loved me less, it’s just that he and I have very little unfinished business left between us. Then I woke up in Los Angeles again, on a fold-out couch.

I’d like to say that I am lost without my father but to be honest, I’m lost either way. This isn’t on Pop’s absence. I miss the hell out of him but I’m sure he would agree, this is my own mess now.