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. 

The Role of Art

Just a cool and short clip that I wanted to share and save for myself. Hope you enjoy.

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Michael: Pyro the Rising Son (Flash Fiction in the Sage Ritzkan Series)

"I'll burn this building down to the ground," said Michael through his teeth, seething.

There are a lot of abbreviated Mikes (serious sports types or bespectacled A students with great posture). And then there are the less common, though often more popular, Mikeys (pudgy and jovial with welcoming cheeks or red headed class clowns with scabbed knees that you can respect). But even rarer still are the male Mickeys. Foreign to most they were, the way they could carry on in the footsteps of two legends, one a heavy drinker with a free swinging wooden club, the other a squeaky cheese addict germaphobe propping up an empire. Even the poor souls named after tin cans of fermented chemical dregs have a way about themselves that exudes self-reliance in the face of a belt or a switch. 

But Michaels? They don't exist in the halls of elementary. You'll find them in bar exams, on trustee boards, or among "the faculty". Michaels are where the Mikes, Mikeys and Mickeys go to die, to develop dignified guts, wealthy double chins, and respectfully ginny checks. 

So why this child Michael, you may be asking? Because the innocence within him is long gone, like a chaise lounge in a hurricane. Teachers sense the pit of rotten guts solidified into a chrysalis reptilian shell, black like silverfish, pumping every couple of seconds as a normal heart might do, spitting up cauldronic bubbly waste that oozes into his veins and up to his brain, driving it like a banshee conductor on a runaway track, and they disengage fearfully. 

"I'll reduce this motherfucker down to black," he reiterates with satisfactory malaise.