I thought you might like this - best comments and good place to circle peeps) is on thread from Gianmario S...

I thought you might like this - best comments and good place to circle peeps) is on thread from Gianmario S...

Originally shared by Nykki B

Digging into the recesses of my Scrivener, I found a little writing dare that Gianmario Scotti threw at me back in October. So here it is, better late than never :)
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Falling Star

“So it goes a little something like this,” said Charlie the janitor. “You’ve got your basic debris bombarding your brain, and then you’ve got the prime stuff that falls from somewhere else.” He leaned back on the broom, nudging a pile of invisible dust forward marginally as he did, the angle of handle and bristle and lanky elbow precisely calculated to support his weight. “We don’t know where it all comes from — you can call it anything you want: muse, inspiration, idea heaven. Whatever suits you. But it all comes down like rain.”

We sat around him like children, crosslegged and kneeling, listening. He shifted his broom again, leaning forward. “The trick isn’t catching only the really good ones. That’s like trying to catch a specific raindrop in a storm. The trick is catching all of them.” A grin flashed across his dark features and disappeared. “You have to be listening all the time. Looking all the time. Good ones will sort themselves out. Now get. I’ve got work to do.”

The broom swept forward and we scattered; we would have sent up trails of dust if there had been dust to make them with. Charlie’s moods were like that, and space save you if you caught the wrong one. There was no telling what would take him when; there was no particular reason why we should believe any particular piece of sage bullshit he spouted off at any given time. Sometimes he liked playing the old wise man, and sometimes he liked playing the lift attendant on a station with no lifts. And sometimes, he was brilliant.

You never knew with Charlie. We’d never known with Charlie. Back in the old days, when he had an office and a desk and classes to teach, sometimes he’d show up and sometimes he wouldn’t. Sometimes he’d spend the entire hour of lecture swearing at the students in Abingi or Erd; sometimes he’d solve theorems and deconstruct quanta; sometimes he’d sing. And sometimes he’d disappear for days: a feat worth noting in a four-ringed disk a mile across and fifty feet thick. It wasn’t like he could just step out for a breath of fresh vacuum.

But that was before. Before, when he’d been brilliantly eccentric. We’d made excuses and covered classes and listened to the opera of the stars that he’d composed for mellophone and snare, because we all really believed in him. We believed in his brilliance and his magic, in his research and his quanta, but most of all we believed he could save us. Three hundred of us, believing in Charlie, because we didn’t know what else to believe in: all of us breathing and working and sleeping and eating and carrying out our lives secure in the knowledge that Charlie was eccentric, but he was brilliant. Knowing that Charlie would save us.

Nobody knew what happened to change that. One day we woke up and his desk was gone, and his office was empty, and number six airlock was churning out a room-sized load of debris into the star-studded void, and Charlie was pushing a broom. He wouldn’t tell anyone why — all he would say was “Some jobs need doing more than others” — and if you pushed him, he’d wield the broom like a fiber-tipped lance, so we all stopped asking. For a while he wore his khakis and his sport coat, but when the knees wore out he got hold of a roll of denim and made some coveralls. He kept his head down and the floors clean. He polished the chrome: the people who make stations and don’t go on them like a lot of chrome and gleaming surfaces; the people who live on them prefer something you can get a grip on when the grav generators go out. He kept it neat.

And sometimes he would talk. Never about the things he used to — quanta and theorems and equations full of squiggly lines and dots — but about stars, and ideas, and distance, and lights. Things you couldn’t put your fingers on. Things you couldn’t see and couldn’t touch. And he always started off the same way: “It goes a little something like this.” Then he’d launch into the middle of it. Maybe he’d talk for an hour, maybe for thirty seconds, but we all stopped and listened and soaked it all in. Catching it all. Sorting out the bullshit later.

And the problem was: we still believed. Sixty years gone of the hundred on the clock, and we still believed Charlie would save us.

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Prompt: "So it goes a little something like this:" said Charlie the janitor. Charlie was an academic but couldn't cope with the pressure and the panic attacks he would get at work, so he changed profession for something much less demanding.