prompt: fast, title: ambulance blues in "the next big thing" flash fiction

FRANK THE SASQUATCH: But you have to admit, though, if you overlook the Curse of the Thirty Mile Zone, if you didn’t come here to get famous, Southern California’s gut-wrenching beautiful. Possibly the most gorgeous of all human habitats.

MIKE THE HUMAN: If you can overlook that, yeah, maybe, sure.

FRANK THE SASQUATCH: Azure skies. Low humidity. Seventy-five and sunshine forever.

MIKE THE HUMAN: If you’re into that sort of thing, yeah, maybe, sure.

FRANK THE SASQUATCH: Aren’t you from Lake Effect Country, Mike? Do you really prefer the land of the ice and snow, with the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow and so forth?

MIKE THE HUMAN: Winter’s one of the very worst things in all existence, sure. Only an utter psychotic could argue otherwise. But at least it’s natural. At least winter’s real. But when you’re a failure so you’re picking up piss from hospitals for minimum wage, so people can test positive for weed and lose their jobs? And you pass that hospital that isn’t a real hospital but used to be?

FRANK THE SASQUATCH: The one where they shot “Scrubs” until they finally tore it down?

MIKE THE HUMAN: Yeah. The one they closed to make more money as filming locations than they ever could saving lives. Maybe it makes want to accelerate fast as a piss-mobile can go and crash into that set, dousing regret. Maybe for an instant, stuck in traffic on Riverside where there hasn’t been a river in years, it feels like dying of exposure’s a better way to go than dying for it.

FRANK THE SASQUATCH: That’s just the TMZ talking. If you’re not chasing misfortunes and shame, just drinking margaritas at the edge of pristine sea until the moment you drop? It may be the best place to live slow and expire softly in the entire world.

MIKE THE HUMAN: But that’s why the conquistadors stole it, right? That’s why the Hopi mage tromped all the way from Arizona, exhausting his eternal soul, to punish them their robbery, you say. You’re the one who told me that story. If this wasn’t all so gorgeous once, none of the things that made it a carelessly-wished-for hell for idiots like me would’ve ever happened to begin with.

FRANK THE SASQUATCH: …fair point.

MIKE THE HUMAN: Jaw-dropping beauty and an abiding sense of peace are all well and good until someone declares war to mug them from whoever got there first.

FRANK THE SASQUATCH: Or charges four grand a month to live there.

MIKE THE HUMAN: They’re the same war of attrition, though, just over longer scales of time and a bit more plausibly-deniable. Same struggle for who gets to torch paradise by hoarding it.

FRANK THE SAQUATCH: You should work for the tourism board.

MIKE THE HUMAN: I know it’s just a tale of sour grapes, but sour grapes are all I have left from the experience. Might as well crush them up and see if all this whining sells.