A MATTER OF CONSIDERABLE GRAVITY

By Jason West

Janitor Jim was about to clean the men's room in the university astrophysics laboratory when out rushed a clearly shaken Doctor Von Wentner.

"If I were you," warned the notoriously loose-boweled professor, "I wouldn't go in there right now. There's dark matter everywhere!"

Von Wentner hurried down the hall and locked himself in his office. Sighing heavily, Janitor Jim got out his mop to once again clean up what he assumed would be the aftermath of the professor's explosive diarrhea. But when he opened the door to the stall, he quickly deduced that it was filled with another dark matter ― the mysterious, invisible kind, detectable only by the gravitational force it exerts on galactic clusters.

This dark-matter business was a bigger mess than Janitor Jim could handle with just a mop and a bucket of bleach water, so he carefully closed the stall door and walked down the hallway to his supply closet, where he eventually found the extra-strength cleanser that could handle a cosmic anomaly like this.

(Author Jason West is living for today, or so he says.)