Gemotions

He stared at the numbers above the door. They hadn’t changed. The air conditioning had cut out, and a sheen of sweat already slicked Elias’s forehead. He’d barely made eye contact with Sarah, his coworker, since they’d entered the elevator.

His palms were damp, and he wiped them surreptitiously on his trousers. The silence was thick, broken only by the hum of the emergency lights. He imagined the cable snapping, the plummet, the crushing weight of the car. He tried to think of something else.

“So… how was your weekend?” he asked, the words sounding foreign in his own ears. He avoided looking at Sarah, the thought of his own mortality becoming so much more immediate.