AN UNCANNILY DISAPPOINTING ACHIEVEMENT OF LIVING PURGATORY,

A Story by Owen J Kato

A cleaner lives and dies in a city somewhere in a flash fiction shock art tale that was written in less than a day and revised maybe once.

FOR A TIME,

HOW IT ALWAYS FAILS TO SAID TIME

Fucked up flash fiction that signifies nothing by Owen Kato (With no revisions or edits but one go back and change)

Rex had killed himself in a state of uncanny childlike joy by diving into a two foot deep swimming pool of water.

The whole pool wasn’t two feet deep but in his tiredness he had disregarded the point in the ‘2.0’ and thought to himself in a moment of absolute and sheer joy when he finally jumped head first that it was in fact a twenty foot deep pool. And the point, the small dot spaced between made all the difference. Had he been more aware of his surroundings, less tired and not so automatically mechanic in his motions, perhaps this end could have been avoided and perhaps that girl that was at the swimming pool that day would actually still believe chlorinated water could magically turn into Kool-Aid.

A moment leads to a moment leads to a moment which usually turns into someone’s life which turns into their death; and many moments had lead up to this. Rex had achieved not much in his brief existence before his untimely or timely death, depending on how one would look at it. He had graduated high school with subpar grades and attended a subpar community college in which he dropped out of because he was bored.

In his boredom, he played videogames that he also got bored of, too, and decided to get a job to pass the time.

He remembered the first day of his job well because it was nearly exactly the same as every other day that followed for the next twelve years. And it went like this: he showed up at work at 0000hrs or 12AM, same f*****g thing, and picked his keys up at the front desk. Then, he went into the janitor’s closet and got two large buckets of soapy water, mops, his squeaky-wheeled cleaning cart filled with cleaning chemicals and sponges and a Swiffer he never used because he believed it wasn’t f*****g industrial enough. Following the collecting of his cleaning supplies, he rolled his cart to the freight elevator"cleaners couldn’t use the regular passenger elevators, it was forbidden, apparently.

He took the elevator up to the 4^th floor and rolled his cart across into the male washroom on the floor.

The washroom was shared by nearly two hundred tenants that worked in a law office on that floor throughout the day so by the time Rex got there, it was disgusting. And on his first day he looked at it a moment and wanted to quit his job because of how disgusting it was. The urinals were stained yellow and the urinal cakes, pink in color, were nearly eroded by the constant daily flow of ammonia that broke them down, warping them into a twisted smaller thing. Staining what was once bright pink a puke color.

The day after his first day, the washroom was not as disgusting even though it was, it was just Rex’s disillusioned perception of it. He had become slightly desensitized to the disgusting. And every day the washroom became less and less disgusting and easier and easier to clean.

In his fourth year with the cleaning company, and one Friday evening, Rex decided it best, for reasons of some sort of challenge, to work with his eyes closed. He wheeled his cart down the hall holding his mop in front of him as a make-shift walking stick. Fobbed his key card in the elevator and took it up to the tenth floor. Then he opened his eyes and took it to the fourth floor.

He pushed his cart into the washroom and started cleaning it.

Remembering all the motions, he cleaned the whole washroom with his eyes shut while humming to a song he didn’t know the name of that played at his prom"the one he went to with a girl who didn’t speak to him and left him as soon as they arrived at the dinner despite her seating arrangement being next to his and he concluded in his own head she left him because he had too much gel in his hair.

Once the washroom was cleaned, Rex opened his eyes and looked around. Everything was spotless because he knew all the motions and had gone through them many of times before. He smiled and then it faded.

The next day he did the same: cleaned the entire washroom with his eyes closed and even refilled the condom dispenser with his eyes closed except this time, while he was in the stall"he would always lock the stalls when he was in them cleaning because it made him feel safe"two people barged through the washroom door.

“I love British people, you are so British,” said a female’s voice.

“Got a dark sense of humor,” said a male’s voice in a British accent.

“I’m not having sex with you in a public washroom, though; they are so dirty.”

A pause. Then the male voice said, “This one is pretty clean.”

Another pause. “You know, it really is.” Then: “Oh, they have a condom dispenser in here!” slurred the female’s voice.

“It’s a law firm,” said the male’s voice, in dark humor.

“Whatever, we don’t need a condom I have birth control,” said the female’s voice. “It’s clean enough here. Let's f**k.”

Rex lifted his feet up so that they could not be seen in the space between the stall wall and the floor.

Then he heard someone push on his stall’s door.

He stayed quiet.

The male and female did not stay quiet. They started to make out probably. And they went into the next stall, locking it. And the structure of the stall started to shake and there was moans and groans and a couple ‘f**k me smoothers’ and then the male said, “I don’t know what that means.” And the female said, “I don’t know I’m drunkkkk.”

And the male said: “I’m going to cum.”

“Cum in me, please, Daddy.”

And then a sound, a long drawn out groan that Rex could only relate to a gorilla crying when another gorilla was dying at the same time on a nature show had watched. And the two sounds had to be meshed together.

And Rex stayed in his stall, scared. But he was happy he didn’t have to refill the condom dispenser again because it was always hard to get the top off.

Once the deed was done, and they had left after making a f*****g mess, Rex opened the stall and went about his operational cleaning, again.

But the intoxicated woman’s uterus didn’t go about its normal operation and the two had a child nine months later, give or take a couple weeks. Oh adventurous lust.

When he was done for the night, and all the washrooms from the fourth floor to the tower lobby were cleaned, and all the floors vacuumed, he left the office tower he had cleaned and was about to walk across the city street when an ambulance whizzed on by with its sirens singing. Rex thought to himself: oh, someone’s day was worse than mine, and then walked on home to his cat.

He had bought the cat at an overpriced pet store but it didn’t like him. It was rarely home and only came home to eat and after two years it didn’t come home at all. Rex never looked for it but he knew it wasn’t dead. It was probably somewhere better.

Six years had passed and one employee who had started with the company took it upon herself to always call in sick every Saturday night so that she could go out and get so drunk that she got sick and this had Rex always be called into work despite his arranged schedule of Monday night to Friday night graveyard.

He made okay money working six days a week but he tiredly spent it all at the mall on Sunday on stuff he didn’t need like clothes he never had time to wear or furniture he rarely sat in because he had achieved some probably un-unique form of complete unhappiness that he was somehow completely unaware of.

And he had also achieved another very difficult thing to achieve for most people who are probably sane to some varied degree, he had achieved: a life that was lived in purgatory. Every day he did the same thing, cleaned the same places, ate at the same burger joint every night before he went into work that had a cute girl he was too afraid to talk to so he ordered from the display machine instead of her and the one-time she said hello to him he walked away without his meal. And over the years of doing this, she moved onto to a better ‘career’ and he still sat there before work, hoping she would come back, but now he sat there with a double chin and forty pounds heavier because he loved fast food more than he loved himself and now probably more than he loved that girl. Then again, he only thought he loved that girl because he didn’t really know what love was besides what was falsely defined and presented to him through his television set.

After eight years of working and cleaning the same rooms, and one morning when he was about to leave, a young woman in a crimson skirt and blazer who worked at a travel agency located in the mall next door approached him, trying to sell him a very cheap trip to the Bahamas that was all inclusive for one thousand all in. Rex didn’t know where the Bahamas was but he had heard they were tropical and nice and that he could swim in the clear and warm ocean there. And he really liked the idea of seeing through the water to his toes so he knew, so he just knew he’d be okay in that water.

He declined and went to the mall and purchased one thousand dollars’ worth of shoes and a suit he never got to wear.

His life had become so terribly easy that every day was such an intense and unhappy struggle.

In the years that followed, Rex became quite angry at the fact he had to keep working six days a week and that his vision was failing due to working graveyard. He also became tired. His skin became dry. His hands had rashes from the cleaning chemicals. On Sundays he would walk the city streets in a tired daze not feeling the sunlight on him, and numb to weather changes. In fall, a leaf would strike him in the head and he wouldn’t know its fall. In the summer, he would sweat and he wouldn’t know it was summer. In winter the snow would come down and he would know and walk a little more carefully but he barely felt the cold. He watched all the pretty women walk by smiling and he would look at them with a distance in his bloodshot eyes, and a sadness, wondering if he was gay or straight or a bit of both or attracted to nicely painted white fences or those electrical boxes in the neighborhood that say: Danger High Voltage. He had looked upon them with an intense curiosity and he would feel a sexual pulse in him but he stayed away.

One day when he was cleaning the toilet bowl that had s**t all over it, he exclaimed in an uncharacteristic scream, “MY LIFE IS S**T.” And then he felt guilty about it and continued to clean the toilet bowl and he even apologized to it for raising his voice.

That was when he started taking to toilets and urinals. But he wouldn’t talk to sinks. He snubbed them as he scrubbed them.

That s****y incident, though, made him think and he asked for a particle mask and wore it religiously while cleaning and even around town sometimes because he thought it was funny and made him look like a ninja. And since he could perform his job with his eyes closed, he did so, and also with the lights out so he never had to see his surroundings, his reality.

Then out of f*****g nowhere there came a day where he won an award he didn’t care to win, and it was an award he didn’t even know was given to cleaners. And he didn’t even know cleaners received awards and why they would. He thought.

His company also did a little spiel about why he won the award. It sounded like a joke, and it probably was but the spiel read:

Rex, Thank you. Tenants have said that in the morning when they look down, they look down at the sparkling work you’ve done. They look down at how shiny and pristine you clean their urinals.

Rex didn’t know if he should smile at that so he didn’t because it takes less muscles in your face to smile than to frown but if you don’t do neither then it’s the easier for sure.

And that night he debated the old worn out suicidal cliché of having a bath with a plugged in toaster but he didn’t have a toaster and the thrift store a block down didn’t have one either so he was stuck because he was too lazy to go to the mall.

Fast forward to his twelfth year of cleaning. The year where his parents tried to have an intervention regarding his life goals or lack thereof but Rex couldn’t even understand it at this point; he was too far gone.

One day, after his shift, another young woman who worked at the travel agency told him to take the plunge and take a vacation. And he booked that vacation and told his employer six months in advance. He was to take it in the midst of summer, starting on a long weekend. And it was then he was glad his cat had run away because getting someone to look after it would be problematic.

The week before his trip he was called into the office and told that the female worker that always called in sick on Saturdays had quit and that he would have to either do his duties or do hers as the replacement employee performed his for the whole week of his booked off vacation.

He sighed.

And he didn’t go on his trip.

But in his fading numbness, he became angry and wanted to swim, to feel again. So on the Saturday he should have been away but was to work, he called in sick.

“I am sick,” he said over the phone.

“What are you sick with?” asked his boss.

“I feel like death.”

“Describe more?”

“Can’t get up.”

“You can.”

“Humans are allowed to be sick. Someone was every Saturday.”

“Come in. You can do your job half asleep. This is a big change, not like you.”

Rex hated change. He hated nickels and quarters and dimes. He hated how dirty it was. And how it had traveled further than him even if some of it was only a year old. He hated how when he walked with it that homeless people who ask him for it and he would just say they were his house keys but he knew that the homeless people knew that he was lying, anyway:

“No,” said Rex.

“What do you mean, no?”

And he hung up the phone because any type of argument was too difficult for him.

Later that day, he would have gone to the ocean but he was too afraid of it and its dark water and its unknown depth so he went to the clear-watered public pool beside the ocean. The water there reminded him of the Bahamas except he had never been to the Bahamas so it reminded him of pictures he had seen of the Bahamas.

There, at the pool, he changed and applied sunscreen, poorly, and walked out to the enclosed public pool in a daze one only understands when one has worked a graveyard shift for twelve years straight.

In a childlike excitement that had somehow came over him or overcame him, whatever you order you prefer, he went to the pool’s edge and looked down, tiredly, and smiled. He really wanted this. He dipped his big toe in and felt the semi-cold pool water. Then he backed up and smiled and ran and dove in, head first.

He bumped his head quite brilliantly on the hard bottom of the pool, perfectly cracking his skull open for his brains to kind of spill out a little. The impact alone killed him.

Then the water of the pool turned from a faint pure-clear teal to an iridescent foggy red that spread and spread until the whole pool was red as fruit punch. And a scrawny seven year old blond girl with big blue eyes named Brits"no, not Britney or Britany or Britani, no, just Brits, in her naïve youthful hope, became excited and yelled, “Oh man! The pool has magically turned into Kool-Aid!” And she jumped in with an open mouth and a hopeful heart.

The realistic and adult minded trouble was: the pool had in fact not magically turned into Kool-Aid and she got a mouthful of chlorine and scummy pool water which she spat out with a look of horrid abrupt disappointment about her face: this is growing up.

Seeing the red pool, her Father"after he had quickly retrieved her from the pool as she still wanted to swim despite the blood"in his bad taste, said in a British accent to his wife, her mother while she (Brits) was in close proximity: “And that’s why you never lose your virginity in a pool...”

It was quite dark humor.

His wife later divorced him over that statement, and probably because the only reason they got married was because they had carelessly procreated a child in a public washroom late one evening; and also, his indifferent comment to the fact that a man neither had never formally met had passed away via diving into the shallow zone of the pool.

Later on in her life, Brits would drunkenly and carelessly lose her virginity in a hot tub while on a ski trip and she wouldn’t regret it because she wasn’t like that, because she was tough because she had seen some fucked up s**t and still wanted to play. Because the tough ones play on. And she would go on to play in many public washrooms, both dirty and clean, because she knew they would cleaned after by someone and that the mess wasn’t on her.

But back to Rex, who was now currently dead, floating at the surface in a chlorinated sea of red.

To everyone at the public pool, and a now-less-hopeful seven year old Brits included, he appeared very dead. Yet, still, the ambulance came and the paramedics fished him out of the pool like debris with a bunch of pool nets. Then they put him in a stretcher and took him away, giving the public a false and disillusioned hope. But Brits didn’t buy it. And she was upset that she could no longer go down the slide and splash into the pool at the 2.0 foot deep shallow end now that the water was a “cooler color but not real Kool-Aid”.

And despite her being the age of seven, Brits cried in the car all the way home that she had to stop swimming, and through her white cheddar macaroni dinner which she squirted an immense amount of ketchup all over before she ate. And it was then when staring at the ketchup all over her food she had become resolute that she not only wasn’t afraid of the sight of excessive amounts of blood but was actually somehow comforted by it. And while she traversed through her own life that was full of sexual adventures and hungover studies, she went on to become a brilliant neurosurgeon. Good for her.

And after that day at the pool things for her would never be the same.

And Rex was buried and nothing in the world would ever be different for it. Except maybe, someone, perhaps, would notice one morning when looking down while taking a piss, somewhere on the fourth floor of an office tower, a urinal wasn’t as sparkly clean as it once was.

And somewhere in the towering distant Himalayas, a blackbird falls off a tree branch and lands in a wood chipper and jams the thing and writers end stories like this: they push the focus on something else totally irrelevant to the actual story out of their own sad sense of self-defeating prophecy and the whole story means nothing and reveals only to the reader the writer’s own insecurity in appropriately finishing a narrative piece or that the piece should have maybe been edited and cut short like Rex’s life or that the last paragraph be taken out entirely.

The F*****g End