It was a Monday. Just like any other Monday, Dave grabbed his paper bag lunch and headed to his garage, ready for another week at school – not as a student who sits in his classes half asleep and bored out of his mind, but as a janitor. The one responsible for the thousands of adolescents, in his mind still children, who haven’t learned one thing about being respectful for their environment. He was an ardent employee, one of the most tenured janitors that Farmville High has ever had.
He had no idea that this Monday was going to change his life forever.
The first half of the day went smoothly – he cleaned the tables after breakfast, went out for a smoke, cleaned the tables after lunch, took out the trash and had another smoke, then ate his own lunch. After he finished eating, he started to head towards the basement – a place off limits to all students and teachers, and rarely visited by anybody of authority. It was an unclean and unappealing place to be. He had to get some paint to cover up the superfluously spray-painted outer walls.
As he entered the stairway to begin his decent, the dank smell of which he was oh so familiar hit him. It was like a mix of mold, mud and tomato soup. The light switch was located at the bottom of the staircase, so he left the door open so he could safely make his way down the narrow path. He flipped the switch, and headed to the right towards a large metal door. The door had a sign on the front in big red letters that said “APPROVED PERSONELL ONLY,” for there were cleaning chemicals that could be dangerous if used in rowdy ways.
He unhooked his key ring from his belt loop and browsed for the correct match. He found it, the key with a blue cover on the top, and put it into the keyhole on the doorknob. He turned it to the right and shoved his shoulder into the door and bounced right back off; it hadn’t opened. He tried the key again, to no avail. Inspecting the perimeter of the door, he found nothing that was keeping the door shut and became quite perplexed as to why it was not letting him pass.
He backed up, eyes still focused on the door. His hand went to his chin, slowly rubbing the goatee which he was quite well known for. Suddenly, the lights all went dark.
He glanced around, trying to find a point of reference so he could find his way back to the stairway. But it was completely dark. He couldn’t see his hands as they were right in front of his face, and he could no longer see the prominent sign on the door which (he thought) was right in front of him. Panic began to overtake him, and he turned and tried to use his memory to get out of the basement. He put his arms in front of him, following the wall to the stairway. He made it back up to the exit door, and sprang out as fast as he could. What he saw next left him in such a state of shock that he could not move at all.
He stood, gripping the railing, staring out into the light that now streamed into an environment of which he was completely unfamiliar. There was no sure form to the world he was staring into. It was luminous and impressive, but he could not comprehend with words what he was seeing. His pupils dilated and out of nowhere he was face to face with a being. It was not human, but it looked as recognizable to him as his own wife. He hadn’t a clue where he had seen the face, the shape, the persona before, but he knew that it was not the first encounter with this thing he’d had.
It opened it’s mouth to speak, and what came out sounded like the roars of lions and the flow of water, and it echoed throughout his entire head. Somehow, he felt like he knew what the being was saying to him.
He was not entirely present in his body; in fact he looked down and saw that the body he had known was not there at all, instead he was soaring through what he could only comprehend as “the heavens.” When he looked back up, the being put his “hand” between the eyes of the perplexed and incoherent janitor and he completely dropped from his own state of mind.
Images of his childhood and what looked to be him as an old man, in yet another unfamiliar environment. He heard a sound that was as loud as a thousand claps of thunder and it was all gone.
It was a Monday. Just like any other Monday, Dave grabbed his paper bag lunch and headed to his garage, ready for another week at school – not as a student who sits in his classes half asleep and bored out of his mind, but as a janitor...
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