EXTRACT FOR
The Elevator
(Craig M. Sampson)

All his life Norm Adams had been what he considered one of the most logical and rational people around. He had come from a simple background with hard-working and loving parents who while not ever having had much financially, had always provided him with all that he had ever needed as he grew into adulthood...at least that was what he had always believed. Most of his childhood friends both in the neighborhood and those that he became close with from school were in a similar circumstance and the kids that were in an obviously higher social strata never made them feel inferior or that they were worth anything less.  They had perhaps not had the latest clothes or the most up-to-date running shoes that seemed to carry status among the masses, but how he had grown up and taken on what his parents had instilled in him...basic decency for others as well as what was right and wrong had served him well.

But with what Norm had been experiencing over the last few months he suddenly wondered if everything he had always felt comfortable with was actually not sufficient at the moment to explain what in the hell was going on. Norm had never bought into a lot of the New Age jargon and other fringe spirituality tenets that flourished all around him. Religion and spirituality had never been much of a concern in the Adams household when he was a kid and that was how Norm had lived his adult life as well. To Norm, you were born...you lived the best life you could with what you had been given and had learned over time...and then you died....period. As far as he was concerned all the talk of anything after that was just nonsense. 

However, as grounded and as rooted in the common sense values as he was, his current situation seemed something that neither of those long-standing traits could explain adequately. His rise in the Robertson Construction Company had been steady and constant as the owners relied on his absolute adherence to honesty and reliability to be their eyes and ears on the ground. It was perhaps not a glamorous and exciting life from the outside, Norm supposed, but for his personality and demeanor it had been perfect fit. But now as he wandered the familiar sites and surroundings that he had gotten to know intimately ever since he was a kid, everything felt oddly foreign...it all looked the same, but he felt as if he had been transported to a version of it that was not quite right.

What was going on and exactly how his life had come to the point at which he suddenly had found himself was a mystery. But tracing the path back to where it all had gone haywire was easy...it was that damn elevator in the new Porter high-rise project that had been nothing but problems since they had broken ground in 2018. Many times Norm had come across some serious issues as the construction had progressed that he had brought to the attention of the owners at Robertson, but none of his warnings or alerts had been taken seriously...there was just too much money at stake. And now he had slipped through what seemed like a modern update of Alice in Wonderland...without having stepped through a looking glass it was like he had come a  upon rabbit hole that he had been sucked into with no apparent means of escape. If only he could get one person...just one single person...to acknowledge his existence...