The Elevator by Jack Spies
In a busy midwestern city, an old Otis elevator car glides over glistening races with the grace of a lynx, noiselessly serving its busy office building. Up and down, occasionally stopping for oblivious passengers entering and exiting.
Behind the passengers, an unnoticed boy, Max, aged 10 wearing freshly pressed grey trousers, a blue shirt and a loosely tied tie stands in one corner. He is talking to an equally unnoticed girl of about twelve. Her name is Melody. They are playing a game, Melody calls “Front Page.” She is playing a reporter called Alice, interviewing the Prime Minister of Greenland, Sir Richard Finny, played by Max.
". . . Prime Minister, how long has it been since Greenland began selling the valuable fresh water from its glaciers?" Alice asks.
"The first President of Greenland started that, Alice, so I’d say for at least 15 years," says the PM.
The elevator doors open quietly. A voice says, "Hold the door. This is my floor." In a bit, the doors close and the elevator continues its silent assent.
"Sir Finny, do you own a company named ‘Blue Glacier Ice?'" Alice asks.
"Blue Glacier Ice?" Max asks. "Where'd that come from, Melody?"
"Don’t worry about it, Max. It’s only a game. And try to stay in character," Melody says.
"When is your mother coming for us Melody? I think we’ve been in here for at least an hour."
"Shush, Max. She’ll be here soon?"
"How soon . . . ?"
The doors open and five people squeeze onto the overloaded car. "Would someone push 6 please," an unidentifiable voice asks. "And 7, 8, and 10."
"It’s too hot in here," says Melody.
"Na, just too many people. You’re older. You should know that, Melody," says Max.
The elevator rises and discharges passengers on 7, 8, and 10. Then, descending, picks up new passengers on 6, 4, and 3, and finally on 1, where everyone, except the children, gets out.
Melody's mother, waiting to pick up her daughter and her friend, looks into the empty car and says, "Just like children."
A man carrying a large sign looking like a stick of chewing gum enters the empty elevator just as the doors are closing. He presses 10, slumps against the wall and thumps his sign against the floor. At the 10th floor the man exits with his sign and disappears into a door marked “ROOF."
About half an hour later the man returns, sans sign. He slumps against the wall again and wonders, what were those two kids up to looking out over the city skyline and down towards the busy streets. He continues with the elevator back to 1, where it stops with a thump and lets him out into an empty lobby. "Just a couple of kids," he says.
The next day’s headlines read, “GL PM ICES BLUE WATER DEAL”
and, below the fold, "MOTHER WORRIES – NO KIDDING, THEY JUST DISAPPEARED.”
End
Cheshire Universe by Jack Spies
Stillness everywhere.
Space, unborn, peeks out
From under scattered bits of emergent future.
The rustle of potential probabilities
Urges the queuing of moments.
Invisible, timeless orderings,
Shiftings, fittings, organizing possibilities,
Form the palimpsest of commencement.
And then without even winking,
A stream of moments disturbs this egalitarian, structureless dream.
Between the ticks and the tocks,
There in the salience of darkness;
In the prescience of the moment;
In the light yet to be
Are the words:
The cyphers from which to begin;
The codes from which the beginning will be guided;
The commandments from which now will be birthed;
The laws by which the future will be drawn into now's urgent, hungry mouth
And be lured into the vacuum of the past.
This plan – this illumination – fuels all,
Until streaming moments freeze and probabilities die;
Until space is reabsorbed;
Until memory itself becomes past.