Brakes

She tells anyone she knows
about the elevator special she once saw on PBS.

About how, if everyone selected their floors
before they got on, elevators could be thirty-three percent more efficient.

She shows them first hand, how the door close button
is a ruse to make riders feel more in control.

She abstains from sharing how the elevator structure
of the World Trade Centers contributed to hundreds of deaths.

The weight of the cables too much for one elevator.
Two, maybe three, stacked atop each other.
A lobby at the base of each, with the
panicked overflow of stairways, wall to wall.

Bone and blood into dust on impact.
Neither steel nor limb immune from the crippling.

No one wants to ponder their potential fates as one of the
twenty-seven elevator related deaths annually.

Especially as the doors are closing.

When they ask why she knows this amalgam of facts,
she mentions her fear of plummeting to death, and laughs.

Doubling back with some remark about insomnia and channel surfing.
All the while, she thinks of the difference between Otis Tufts and Elisha Otis.
About engines and brakes.
How, like her, one of them had something to lose.