"the next big thing" flash fiction
by littlefallsmets
Entries 87
Page 2 of 4
prompt: steep, title: once upon a time
Once, there was a man whose world fell apart around him. Not knowing what to do with himself, he did as so many do, he went west, the direction of change. Good changes, bad changes, change either...
prompt: "promise", title: "the fine print"
Magic is not a trick, she told him, it is a promise. It isn’t about fooling someone else or fudging reality, it’s a pact that is made. “Both stage magic and actual magic,” she continued, “though ...
prompt: bill, title: the bill comes due
“I’ve been wondering something,” I said as I swirled at my coffee’s dregs, “something kind of tangential to your story.” “Sure,” Frank said, “like I said, I’ve got all night.” “You’ve lived a ver...
prompt: wake, title: and you were there, and you, and you
I mean, I’m hardly the first person to notice something fundamentally uncanny at the intersection of Sunset and Gower, the Gower Gulch strip mall or Denny’s there. To the spot where the actual ra...
prompt: hawk, title: the pros and cons of disenchantment
“So, if Mitzi was attracted to you but you’re not attracted to humans, why didn’t she ever, uh,” I tried to be delicate but some things can’t be put delicately, “fix that with her magics.” “What ...
prompt: again, title: if the price is right
“You can’t argue a thing into being,” she said, “that’s not how magic works.” You can conjure a little through work and practice, you can gamble or bargain or negotiate with the higher or even th...
prompt: farewell, title: sensory deprivation
One of the other upsides of Los Angeles, for all the bad things you can say about it, is the utter timelessness of living there. You can’t account for seasons in the way you can in other parts of...
prompt: gift, title: little miracles
Not everything is awful about Los Angeles, I’m not saying that. I don’t want to say that. It’s just that every joy there has a dark side, the kind of deep shadows that can only be cast in the bla...
prompt: sign, title: relative measures
There are few phrases with a stronger one-two of power and malleability in our English than “the end of the world”. It means so damned much to so many but also a different thing to nearly every p...
prompt: hungry, title: jazz hands
“I hate those The Secret books,” she told Frank more than once, “the idea that magic’s simple as projecting intentions then getting whatever you want, such a childish and hungry and greedy way of...
prompt: nothing, title: a word for ginger brown
“You play any instruments?” Frank asked, deflecting back to me. “My brother,” I said, “brilliant guitarist, though he’s rusty. My dad is, was,” Frank and I both stumble on the line between what i...
prompt: return, title: quantum entanglement
“So, why did you study us in two separate disciplines?” I asked Frank, trying to change the subject from my own flaws, foibles, folly. “How do you mean?” “I mean, you taught human music and human...
prompt: matter, title: time spent in los angeles
“And then what happened?” I asked the sasquatch, as he stopped to listen to the distant sounds of people insulting each other in different dialects of Spanish, in the diner’s back-of-house. “That...
prompt: lie, title: compare and contrast
Frank Yetti prefers to say that he is “seven feet tall” in American English, in local measurement vernacular, even though that’s not exactly true. If you put him in the cliché of a general practi...
prompt: beyond, title: establishing boundaries
You’d figure a sasquatch wouldn’t have much to be afraid of in our world, even a small yeti like Frank. Six-foot-eleven would seem to ensure that, if nothing else, he would be the last busker in ...
prompt "spirit" title "the weather outside is frightful"
We kept coming back around to that lyric “it never rains in Southern California, it pours” which is true enough, both literally and metaphorically. In the places where there isn’t often rain, eve...
prompt: space, title: space and time
Fascination almost always starts out as fear, a fear that is eventually overcome while that focus lingers on. It’s a feature that seems to come standard with any level of sentience, human, animal...
prompt: book, title: what you wished for
“Ultimately, people only want stories if they can convince themselves they’re real,” the yeti said, as he set his coffee back on the saucer, “at least plausibly real. My people, yours, all people...
prompt: search, title: schrodinger's anesthesia
I’ve seen The Eels, the vehicle for their front-man Mark Everett, live twice. Once in L.A. with my brother, once in Brooklyn with my then-girlfriend. At the El Rey, their opening act was a Britis...
prompt: band, title: the roadie less travelled
“What was he like, Frank?” “Who?” “Zevon,” I asked the sasquatch, half honest curiosity, half changing the subject, “you must have some crazy stories, working the road for Warren Zevon.” Frank s...
prompt: encircle, title: S. giganteum
“When I was young.” Frank never said when he was “little”, always when he was young. You’d think it was because he was a sasquatch, nearly-seven-feet tall but that wasn’t why at all. As if he was...
prompt: diary, title: heaven help the one who leaves
Frank started keeping a diary of his experiences, once he realized it was going to be a long time before he found his people again, if he was ever going to find his people again. At first, he wro...
prompt: serene, title: on the pedestal these words appear
You’ll drive down from the San Fernando Valley, from the strivers and the strife, the immigrant markets with names you can’t pronounce and the white kids from the East Coast going broke for their...
prompt: figure, title: "callbacks & turnarounds"
There’s a line on Figure Eight by Elliott Smith, his spirit mentioned previous, that goes “Got a foot in the door, God knows what for”. When first I listened, I thought it just clever songwriting...
prompt: orange, title: fast times
Before it became The Suburbs, the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles was just a bunch of orange groves. You can still receive lectures from local old-timers about those days, whether they a...
Book Description
Wherein the typist quarantines the flash fiction about the Sasquatch and Los Angeles in case it can be stitched into something bigger.