Sunday, June 8, 2014

Day 4: Box Fever


Today’s Prompt: The department store elevator shuts down on the way to the fourth floor, with you and ten other people in it. You remain calm but other people begin to panic. Write this scene and the dialogue between characters.
— Courtesy: WritersDigest.Com

Word Count: 1,312
            “Last time I was in an elevator and this kind of shit happened things took a bad turn and one of the guys croaked,” A woman standing close to the doors said.
            “And when precisely was that, madam?” A man gone in years said.
            “Two, three, four, five years ago,” Said the lady.
            “On what floor was the elevator when it got stuck?”
And the answer came flying right back. “About the third or fourth floor.”
All eyes in the elevator shot up to the display panel. The electric potential in the atmosphere went up a few notches.
            “Ya gotta be kidding me. I don’t believe that hype you cooked up. A ball of crap and old women’s fables, is what it is.” The old man eyed the lady. Well, I can’t say he stared hard or was only looking in her direction cause the place we were in was dark with the lights out.
            “I swear on my mama’s grave.” The lady’s voice had increased in pitch. “Why would I lie when I’m also stuck in this circuit just like everybody else?”
            “Because some people major in giving other people a heart attack,” The old guy said. “Besides being under a lot of stress can lead to running off at the mouth.”
            “I am not under stress, sir.”
            “You’re stuck in this mess with us, lady. Ain’t you?”
“Excuse me,” a masculine executive voice said. Probably, the guy I’d spotted donning a three piece suit earlier when all the lights were on. “Shouldn’t we concentrate our energies on finding a way out of this jam?”
An alarm went off someplace overhead.
            “What on God’s earth is that?” Some guy topping a face cap said. That moment of urgency made his voice come out in a squeal.
            “People, if there ever was a way out of this situation, it is not racketing and panic,” Some dude, standing in the center of the elevator, said. “Let’s get ourselves to…”
A scream came down the elevator shaft through the maintenance square hole down into our stuck elevator. It wasn’t really that loud a scream. Somebody just said, ‘Hey!’ And the echo carried all the way through the shaft and amplified it. Soon after, a metallic object came clanging through the vertical passageway. Everybody’s gaze turned upward like religious folks in anticipation of an apparition. It landed hard on the roof, found the hole and went sailing through on the rebound. It came down fast. It came in a mad spin and looked big. The guy standing at the center of the elevator, the one who argued against ‘racketing and panic’ took it hard in the face. It didn’t knock him out cold but the damage was enough to make him change his position.
            “Oh God,” he screamed. “It’s the building. The entire building is coming apart in bits and pieces. We’re all going to die. Save yourselves, get out. Get out of here.”
His audience didn’t need another invitation. Crisis reached a peak within the space of a few seconds. This is how circumstances can bring the best out of us. It makes us do things we would otherwise have declined if offered enough dough to buy the town.

            A guy who I’d seen hanging a fetoscope around his neck was by one end of the elevator placing the medical instrument on the wall. I think maybe, he was listening for hollow sounds. I bet the inventors could never have imagined their contraption would come in handy in a jammed state of affairs.
Then there were a couple of folks angling, falling over themselves trying to scramble up the slippery walls like they possessed some inane reptilian ability. They were not making much progress in that department.
            “Out of my way you incompetent fools.” It was the lady who’d witnessed her own share of death in stuck elevators. She was part of a group trying to pry open the doors with their fingers. Even Iron Man could use a little help in that department. I wondered what that activity might do to their fingernails. But nobody thinks of fingernails in life-and-death situations.

            Someone had fetched the ‘bits and pieces’ of the building which fell through the hole into the elevator. It was a large spanner and the engineers probably dropped it trying to set things to rights.
Obviously, no one else had seen the tool or they would guess repair was in progress and as a result, an object which should have created calm and reassurance was the catalyst of pandemonium all thanks to one man’s blinded conclusion.
Because circumstances had reached a head, he couldn’t even figure out for himself that the object in his hand, which triggered the crisis in the first place, was a tool and not a building material as the gentleman-prophet-of-doom had foretold. Neither did he put it to good use cause instead the pry-open-the-doors party; he turned to the walls and hammered away. Maybe, he hoped the clanging would draw? But it’s probable he was trying to bust a crack through the metal wall and jump all the way to the ground floor. God help us all. He’d be lucky to survive the leap. And I believe others would have duplicated the jump.

Yet, there were folks, these I called the Chorus, who were yelling for help. Calling out to folks on the other side of the walls to come to their rescue. I’ve had enough and I moved to the guy with the spanner, approaching from an angle so I don’t get knocked out cold. I grabbed his hand and wrung the spanner from him.
            “What the…?” He protested.
            “Just give me a minute,” I said. “I got a better idea.” I bet he thought I was going to pick up where he left off. I spun around and bellowed loud enough to bust my vocal chords and make my ears ring. It worked. People gave me their attention.
 “This spanner,” I raised the spanner over my head so they all saw. “came flying through that hole,” I said, pointing the spanner at the tiny outlet on the elevator roof. “It’s the same object that hit this guy in the face but he was probably blinded by the blow and couldn’t see his assailant which lead him to false conclusions. This spanner is an indication that the engineers are in the elevator shaft trying to fix whatever was broken. So there’s no reason to stress. Let’s keep it together for a few more minutes and it would be like none of this never happened.”
A guy dropped to the floor and cried, “Thank God, they’re doing it.”
            “Doing what,” The guy with the face cap said. He was of the team trying to dig their nails into the wall and climb out lizard style.
Before anybody could answer, the lights came back on and the elevator gave a little jerk and began its ascent.

You wonder why I didn’t panic. I happened to hear one of the maintenance guys on my way into the elevator say it was going to get stuck on the fourth floor because the gears had fault. They were climbing into the shaft to get it fixed before the passengers threw a fit. Besides, I work here, in this department store. I’ve been stuck myself in that little box quite a few times. But never mind the pragmatic storyteller the lady was, nobody ever died in that box, as far as I know it.
Wait. I might be wrong. There might have been at least, one instance of fatality, make that two. But they were both old timers who used up their time on earth.
Or maybe, three deaths occurred in that thing. Shit, that things becoming quite the killing machine, you know?
Ah, hell. Get your purchase and get out of here!

Eneh Akpan
June 4th, 2014



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