keyword: sage, title: a long strange trip in "the next big thing" flash fiction

Translated to English, the creature I called Frank asked the group “Focus just on the scents for a moment, what are the background smells?” “Patchouli,” one student said. “Burning sage,” said another, “and something else I can’t make out.” “Low-grade cannabis,” Frank smiled, “as you’d expect.” While he didn’t love teaching, leading expeditions to study human phenomena at least engaged his education in skin-apes and, even if it meant herding adolescent sasquatches around humanity’s fringes, it was a living. When you over-specialize in arcane fields, academia’s often all you have left, you take what you can get.

This left Frank, along with a magician to conceal them, corral ten young yeti into observing the tailgate of a Grateful Dead concert that sunny summer afternoon in what we’d call the Eighties. The kids were half his age, some barely fifty, all the males taller than him, most of the females too, but Frank stood tall in this, his one expertise.

“Those sandwiches,” he’d tell his charges, “contain fermented cow lactation, they call it Toasted Cheese.” “Remember, most have better grooming habits than this subculture,” he’d remind them, “so don’t judge too harshly.” While they were of course utterly weirded-out by humanity, it was fascinated repulsion, they respected his knowledge of such confounding brutes, if nothing else.

“The one urinating behind the tall-trees belongs to an artificial kinship called Hell’s Angels,” he pointed out, “a low-level warrior band that asserts dominance over others through reckless use of unsafe motor-craft and threats of violence.” “You mean, like, what did you call them?” a student chirped, “The polyce? Polase?” “They’re like police, yes,” Frank nodded, at least some listened, “though police are of higher social standings but follow through on violence more often.” “You should call this class Humans Are Weird, professor.”

Frank started to laugh but it was a blur after that. They didn’t know the human was so high he briefly saw though the obfuscating glamour, didn’t know he carried one of those “pocket murder buttons” he’d said only the most paranoid humans carried. The man suddenly started screaming in terror and brandishing weapons. The mage couldn’t get his shielding up quick enough. Frank jumped in front of the children on pure instinct.

The smell of his own fur burning. The heat of the hole in his body. The rush of young surging to tackle the death-crazed animal with the barbaric device. The mystic’s rushed healing spells. The flash of split-second terrible power no one should ever have, let alone something so short-sighted by its too short life as a man.

The next thing Frank remembered was waking up in an abandoned medical chamber, years later, utterly alone, not a bigfoot on Earth to be found except for himself. Over time, he realized that if he ever wanted to know the company of others, let alone the answers to ten thousand questions, he’d have to put his knowledge of his beloved human-animals to the test.

He’d have to go back to L.A.