Schuylkill Valley Journal Online

Moments prior, he had been on his way to the thirteenth floor of his ex-girlfriend’s apartment building, to pick up some of the things he’d left there during their breakup several weeks prior. Suddenly, the little box of the elevator had come to a shuddering stop somewhere between floors 8 and 9.

Great, he’d thought. Just perfect. Trapped in an elevator in Manhattan on a Tuesday morning in his old building, the building of the woman he’d loved, the woman he hadn’t stopped loving when she’d grown distant over the summer and started smelling like a gym class, or even when he’d come home early on a Thursday and found her in bed with her son’s PSAT tutor. Simon was a lanky lacrosse player on honor roll. He was almost homecoming king. He was everything that Llewellyn had never been, and he was freshly 18.

Because Llewellyn loved Marlowe, he hadn’t told the police, or Simon’s parents, or the school principal. When he walked in on the couple, he’d stared for a moment, and then walked over to her closet and picked up as many of her shoes as he could carry. It was like an armful of strange animals, variously leathery, rubbery, red, black, shiny, sharp-heeled, tangled in laces.

He walked through the apartment with the solemnity of a pallbearer, to the sunny window in their living room, and then, lovingly, he cradled each shoe for a moment to his chest before chucking it out the window into the back alley.

And then Marlowe was at his arm, begging him either to stay or to stop, he couldn’t hear which. And then he was putting his things into a trash bag while the teenager who’d been in bed with his wife scrambled to locate underwear. And then he was slamming the door behind him, and then he was calling his brother and his wife, asking if he could sleep on their couch for a little bit, just until he figured out what was next. And then there was the couch, awkward conversations with friends, coming into work unshaven, being called into his boss’s office and told to pull it together, his sister-in-law getting sick of him sleeping in the living room, a beige room in a shitty hotel.

And now there was the elevator. After the jolting stop, it was perfectly still. Llewellyn felt afraid to take a step, to call out, even to breathe. He hoped it was a mistake, and the elevator would start again on its own, but after a moment, he reached out a shaking finger and pressed the “open doors” button. Nothing happened. Heart pounding, he pushed the button with the little alarm bell printed on it. True to the sign’s promise, a red light started blinking steadily. Llewellyn breathed. An inconvenience, nothing more.

Help was on the way. Someone would be coming soon, and he would embarrassedly explain that he hadn’t done anything, that the thing had just crapped out on him. And then he would go to Marlowe and get his vitamins and his second-favorite tie and the crystal drinking glasses he’d taken from his mother’s apartment after she died. He tried to decide if he’d tell Marlowe about the elevator or not, if he could tell it in a way that made him seem brave.

But then, the floor dropped out from under him. It wasn’t a free-fall, really - probably not even a foot, maybe six or eight inches, but it was enough to send him to his knees, crouched and clutching the scratched metal hand railing. Near to the ground, he really looked at the elevator car for the first time. The floor was gross green-brown carpeting, with a dark stain in one corner and grit stuck in the matted weave. There were no mirrors, just the railing and off-white walls. In a way he couldn’t put his finger on, it reminded him of the hotel room he’d been staying in for the last weeks: not just bland and ugly, but designed to be bland and ugly. A place made for passing through. It wasn’t any kind of place to die in, he thought, even though the tight four walls brought to mind the claustrophobia of a coffin. He braced himself for another fall and thought again about Marlowe, what she would say when they fished his mangled corpse out of a hole in the ground created by the falling elevator.

As he looked at the ugly box and it didn’t look back at him, things were still again for a moment, but then—miracle of miracles—the automatic doors creaked open, sliding back. Through the now-open face of the elevator, Llewellyn could see that he was still between floors—-at about eye level, what must have been the floor of the ninth story started, but everything below that was the concrete wall of the elevator shaft. It was too high to safely climb up to the floor, but if someone walked by, they’d notice he was stuck.

And then he was there. Four padded feet that stopped right in front of Llewellyn’s eyes, and then a furry, curious face staring back at him. The cat slipped under the narrow gap between the roof of the elevator and the ninth floor, and neatly jumped into the box, unfazed by the hundred-foot drop between the elevator’s opening and the walls of the shaft.

It wasn’t one of those fluffy cats with dinner plate eyes, the kind that gets adopted in five seconds by a family on sheer adorability. This cat was mostly orange, with a paunchy white belly and slightly uncanny yellow eyes. A metal tag hanging from his collar read Toby.

The red light blinked once more and stopped. Toby, looking straight at it, blinked, and meowed. And then, if you can believe it, he raised one paw and pointed at the red light—just pointed at it. Unbidden, the elevator started to rise, inching up until it was level with the ninth floor.

You might read this and think that if you were there, you would have known that the two were unconnected. A man, a bum elevator, and a passing cat collide, like the set-up to a bad joke, each with not-very-much to do with the other. Men think and elevators break and cats meow and they all blink, and we live and die by the whims of old buildings. But with Toby’s knowing gaze on him, Llewellyn knew better.

He realized then that the last thing in the world he wanted to do was to see Marlowe again. What a fucking creep—making it with a teenager she paid to help her son. He hadn’t even liked the tie that much, he’d only started taking the vitamins because of her nagging, and he didn’t have anywhere to keep those crystal glasses from his mother anyway.

So he picked up Toby and held him like a baby, and they took the stairs.

Cradling the cat, who seemed heavy for his size, Llewellyn walked dazedly through the lobby, with its glossy, gold-flecked floors. The doorman, Aldo, recognized him and did a little two-finger salute, but Llewellyn just stared back at him. “Elevator’s broken,” he said, and walked into the sunlight.

Ruby Rorty is a scholar moonlighting as a journalist moonlighting as a poet in Chicago, IL. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in hex, EcoTheo, and the Schuylkill Valley Journal, among others. Find her on Twitter @RortyRuby and on Instagram on @ruby.rorty.