People Like You by Margaret Malone

Author:Margaret Malone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atelier26 Books
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Back at the elevators. Bert’s finger on the down arrow.

My heavy winter coat on. Somehow I am now carrying the school lunch.

The down arrow button lit up. We wait.

The ding before the doors open.

“I’m going to say it out loud,” I say.

“Don’t do that,” Bert says.

The doors open. Me first, then Bert. The doors close. Our bodies tucked safe inside the pocket of the elevator.

Down we go.

Instead I say, “I hate winter.”

Bert grabs my free hand. School lunch in the other.

The elevator swings the tiniest bit from side to side, the quiet knocking in the mechanics of it all, the cables and wheels and pulleys, everything holding us in mid-air.

The ding before the doors open on the ground floor.

The doors open.

There’s a couple waiting to get on. The man carries an empty infant carseat. In the lady’s arms is a tiny baby, eyes closed, pug nose, mouth open. A baby so tiny it is mostly blanket.

We do not move from the elevator’s pocket. We do not make room for them.

The lady with her blanket baby steps forward to squish on with us.

“Sorry,” Bert says. “No.” He waves them off the elevator. “You’ll need to take the next one. Wrong floor.” Bert starts fake coughing. “And I have a terrible cold.” Cough, cough.

He never lets go of my hand.

The couple back away with their tiny baby to wait on the other side of the open doors again.

Bert’s finger presses the up button.

Again.

Again.

My hand in Bert’s hand. My other, the school lunch.

The baby starts to squirm in its blanket.

Any second now the doors will close. We can start again. Back to the motion of the rocking elevator, everything working together, the cables and wheels and pulleys, and Bert and me safe in mid-air.

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