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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