Chapter 2
It felt like only a matter of days before Eliana could push the button to call me without standing on her tiptoes. Every morning she would run down the hallway of the fifth floor and push the button, which in her eyes was shiny and new. Then, she would laboriously open the gates and step in. Her summons felt so different from any other, so much so that I wished I could be on the fifth floor every morning, without paying any mind to the other occupants of the building. I only cared for Eliana.
As we rushed down the shaft she would bounce from one foot to the next, sometimes mumbling to herself her plans for the day. I found myself listening intently to her every word, hoping for a clue as to when she would return.
When the windows began to grow darker and the old man at the desk began to nod off, she would suddenly be hammering the invisible arrow again, demanding to be taken back to her apartment. Every evening, I did exactly as she told me, though I wished the ride could have been just a little bit longer.
There came a day when I realized something. Eliana was no longer a child. Her short bob of brown hair now hung down to the middle of her back. It was no longer decorated by bows and colorful hairclips, but hung loose and free in a tangled mess. Some days she would sit in the elevator combing through each strand with her fingers, and she would stare into the distorted reflection given off by my bars to try and catch some hint of how she looked. Her short stubby form had grown, though only in height. Each of her pale limbs grew thinner and thinner until I worried she might just disappear like a wisp of wind.
Then came the day her mother died. How forcefully she hit the button to call me, repeatedly pressing the plastic even after I had arrived. No longer did she have any trouble opening the gate, instead she flung it with so much force that it hid the end of its path and bounced back as if to close again. Eliana hurried inside and closed my door again, hurting me with the pain and anger behind the motion. And for the longest time she forgot to tell me which floor, and although I knew she wanted out, wanted to go to the lobby where she would run out to opaque glass windows and into the street, I was powerless to move.
Finally, she realized her mistake and began a series of insults directed to me, the stupid elevator. And her thin hand punched the general area of my command center that several of the buttons broke. But it was enough, and although I had to stop at each floor on the way down, I made it to the lobby. As I had expected, she immediately yanked open the gate and escaped into the grey fog outside. As some new passenger began to call my name, I slowly made my way back up to the third floor, realizing as I went that a few drops of Eliana’s blood were now dripping down my side where she had made her attack. How I wished that would be the only time I saw her cry, felt her blood drip down my smooth walls...
Eliana did not return that night. A few unknown men came to the apartments, and without speaking a word to the manager, they stepped up to me and asked to be taken to the fifth floor. Not one word was uttered until I came to a stop and one man dejectedly murmured, “Well, here we are.”
They came back carrying Eliana’s mother covered by a once white sheet. It did little to cover her bony silhouette, her grey skin, the smell that had already begun to waft from her decaying body. In all the years that Eliana had lived in the building, her mother had only ridden the elevator nine times. This was her tenth. It seemed hardly surprising that she was now lying limply on the floor with one hand poking out of its covering, looking already like the hand of a skeleton.
