The Janitor: El Sleazo (Flash Fiction in the Sage Ritzkan Series)

The Janitor - Flash Fiction

Everyone plays a part. All of us wear our masks and sing our oversung hymns in reverence to our teeny tiny portals of awareness (which is to say, in reverence to the unknowably huge dark matter that's our ignorance).

Mr. Steen, unlike the blowhards who claim understanding or, should they press their cases hard enough, expertise ("Laughable!"), bows down in service to his ignorance. 

Not a smart man in the classical sense, he is genius in his vision of totality. 

"Most of these a-holes think they got stuff all figured out," he tries to remind himself daily. "Ha!" the leathery skinned (wrinkled exactly like a crumpled plastic grocery bag), carhart draped (stains that spanned the industrial spectrum), custodial engineer ("It actually says that pretentious horse pucky on my contract! Patooey!"). "I got nuthin figured out more'n they got sumptin'."

And, truthfully, the old mop pusher had a point. Man's only real creation, that aberration of nature known as his conscious mind, man would like to think of as a deafening jumbotron, a blinding source of limitless energy in the center of the arena, when in fact it is nothing more than a singular primitive spark, an after effect of two rocks tumbling into one another, a natural occurrence ("Nuttin spehcial.").

"If all dis here ain't nuttin to hum home about, then me just followin nature's call like them sparkin rocks that's us here thinkin bout stuff shouldn't hurt nothin neither."

And all Mr. Steen can think about is what lies hidden between the legs of these school girls here at Sage Ritzkan. El Sleazo indeed.