Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash
Jamus worked at a puzzle factory. He didn’t operate the presses printing the cardboard with beautiful pictures, nor did he install the die cuts into the jigsaws to stamp out the puzzles. He swept.
Bottom of the totem pole. Answering to everyone, nobody answered to him.
Yet, without him, the place fell quickly into disrepair. Puzzles create a huge amount of paper dust. The piles would stack around machine legs; the dust made the floors slippery. It infiltrated the building ductwork. Without regular sweeping, and he started every hour at one side and the building and ended the hour on the other side, the piles would be a fire hazard. Without regular sweeping, the dust would break the machines even faster as it clogged mechanisms and rendered the necessary oils useless. Without regular sweepings, the constant breathing of dust by the workers would be even worse.
Every year he would try for a raise. Every year he would be denied it, nothing he did was extraordinary. He didn’t bring new pictures to the factory. He didn’t develop new cuts.
Maxey got a raise when he suggested adding a 750-piece to the lineup. Rachel got a raise when her frog-in-the-rain series hopped off the shelves around the world.
All he did was sweep the factory from one end to the other eight times every day. Cleaning around the legs of the machines, replacing the filters in the air vents daily, kept the floors clear of the puzzle pieces to prevent slips.
He took the fallen puzzle pieces home. Shifting them into piles by the jigsaw cuts. While Jamus was only a custodian in the eyes of his employer, he was also an avant-garde artist, assembling the puzzles pieces into something the company never intended. On Saturday he would go to the Blue-Ways walk and join the chalk maze drawers, the watercolor painters, and dozens of other creative people along the riverside and sell the creations.
The fallen, who never made it into a box. The broken, that jammed the machine. The lost. The useless. The unsung.
The workhorse sweeping up the factory and creating art.
(words 354; first published 6/26/2025)