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How to Kill a Janitor

I stared at the tarot reader, startled.

It was hard not to stare at her oversized nose, bugged-out eyes, and moon-and-star headwrap with dangling various gold kitsch trinkets and tassels. They twinkled in the light of the bare candles spread throughout the dark room. Icons of Jesus and Mary glinted in the flickering flames as if laughing at the hypocrisy of the idea.

“What did you say?” Jacob asked.

I glanced at him reproachfully. As if he hadn’t heard.

“That is the man who will kill you. What are you going to do about it?” she repeated in her haunting crone’s voice. To me it was falling flat on the side of the melodramatic.

I pulled Jacob from the tent into the assaulting florescent lights of the flea market. The warehouse interior exploded with the smell of a thousand things recently escaped from attics and summer garage sales, attacking our noses. A fog of baby powder hung in the air.

“I told you not to do it,” I said, sneezing right afterward, my hair flying in my face. After being suffocated in the dim tent, the lights were pressing their fingers into my skull. “What a joke.”

Jacob was glancing around cautiously. His thin, lanky body seemed to barely hold the clothing onto his back and his winter hat seemed to swallow his head. But as I looked up at him, I could see his eyes.

“How can you call that a joke?” He shivered and reached for my hand. For such skinny arms they had all the power in the world to draw me to his side. “Colleen, I got a bad feeling when I saw him, though...”

“No, she just put it in your head!” I meant to pull away from him, but when he said my name I almost forgave him for convincing me to see the creepy fortune-teller.

“It’s not your life you have to worry about,” he answered gruffly, dropping my fingers. He spun around and took large strides toward the vinyl booth. I hesitated only a moment.

“Jacob!” I wailed. I got some stares from men my father's age-- whose names most likely were not Jacob-- curious as to why the boy was so angry at his pretty girl. I didn't have time for their interested nods.

The man in the red hat must not have been there; Jacob kept going. I sprinted after him, dodging a group of old women as they cut in front of me to peer at dishes that had barely survived the Revolutionary War.

I finally caught his arm by a bookstand. “What are you going to do?”

His eyes brushed down every aisle like so many combs running over sand. A boy in a red jacket had momentarily caught his attention; his feet shuffled forward again.

“What--” I tried again to get his attention, but someone shoved me into the next aisle.

“Sorry.” The panting man with a balding spot on his blonde head barely glanced at me. “You haven’t seen a man in a red hat?”

Not waiting for my reply, he hustled around another corner. Hanging calendars and posters bent and fluttered in the breeze his rush created, but I already saw the black business card he clutched in one hand.

“Jacob,” I murmured, spinning on my heel toward the place I left him. I could see the top of his black cap bobbing between the shelves of piles of thrift junk a few aisles toward the front of the store.

I was distracted by a flash of red that appeared above me like a bird springing into the air. The man in the scarlet trucker’s hat was climbing a high ladder, carrying a florescent light bulb. I could see Jacob heading on an intercept course.

I watched from my position on the open floor, next to rows of used and new sofas and easy chairs covered in plastic. The man in the red hat had seemed so sinister in the tent-- who could possibly want to kill my Jacob?-- but now he looked like the average janitor, carefully climbing each rung, holding the new florescent rod carefully, carefully avoiding hitting flea market junk from the surrounding shelves, rising above the merchandise to the high warehouse ceiling, carefully, balancing himself near the top, carefully, easing the dead bulb out of the sockets, carefully, that awkward position with two rods, carefully, switching hands--

I was startled by a loud cry that rose above the normal hubbub noises, as was the janitor. A blonde head was rushing at the ladder from the opposite direction as Jacob. No sound escaped my open mouth. When it was all over, all I could do was stare at the empty space high in the air where the ladder previously stood and the bare spot where the light fixture once had been.

“Jacob,” I said, calmly, turning away toward the tarot tent.

The form of the man who had pushed me seemed to connect with the ladder.

I passed the old book booth, calmly, not seeing anything but

The janitor clutching at the light fixture rather than go over with the ladder. The light bulbs twirled toward the shelves like twin batons, smashing below with pops and crackles. I tried not to remember Jacob’s yell as the ladder followed.

The old ladies were no longer standing at the china booth. The kitchen knives were left unattended. Everyone was walking, rushing, like water to a drain, bewildered toward the place where

Sparks rained down from the ceiling as the light fixture disconnected, bent, buckled under the janitor’s weight. He didn’t make a sound, just the reverberation of people on the ground screaming as he fell

I threw aside the tent flaps, calmly, with my free hand. At first I could only make out Jesus sorrowfully gazing at me from His imprisonment in the ring of fire.

“Love, fortune, career success,” the tarot reader crooned, chuckling, hunched over her cards.

It all fell on

“Read your own,” I hissed, the metal glinting in the candlelight. “I’m the one who will kill you. What are you going to do about it?”

-amanda johns 2004