A Kind Gesture

Her hands were freezing. So was her nose... and her general face area... and any place that was sweaty was also cold because of the bicycle ride. Cold and good and cold. The sun was setting but it wasn't pretty yet- It was the "pre-sunset-sunset sort of half-orange-mostly-grayish" color. For the first time in (perhaps) ever the air was coming into her lungs with supreme ease.

Apartment building doors often require a key, and hers did, which she produced. It was a glass door, and as she began to unlock it her eyes (with the help of peripheral vision) absorbed a human getting into the elevator on the other side of the door. The human was a woman and it was wearing cotton stretchy pants wherein tiny fibers cried for help and tried to run from the fatty tree stumps they clothed, otherwise referred to as "legs" in the human culture. Below a limp lion's mane of extensively color-treated hair there should have been a neck, but instead a baby blue top somehow divided her massive carriage into 5 layered rolls of flesh.

The elevator had arrived to level L. The fat human woman was getting in. She turned around. She saw the cold bicyclist slowly opening the door.

Here is the truth: the cold bicyclist had a runny nose.

She also had been strategically opening the door slowly with every intention of missing the elevator and carrying her bicycle up the stairs.

But then something happened and this is what it is:

The woman pushed the button which makes the elevator door abruptly reverse its direction and it opened and it was a kind gesture and the cold bicyclist had just gotten her bicycle through the apartment building door and she was now positively devastated.

"Oh! Thank you, that was nice." (She was entering the elevator in this moment, distraught and sniffling from the runny nose.)

"I'm on 3."

The bicycle was awkward, which it would have been even in the largest and loneliest of elevators, but now it was sharing with a cow and a fluorescent light and two red buttons and the cold bicyclist, whom it pressed against.

Here is the next thing that happened:

The bicycle drunkenly lost its footing and the front wheel turned which caused it to roll sideways (toward the cold bicyclist) and thus its rear wheel rolled in front of the closing elevator door, which in turn caused the same abrupt reversal which the woman had previously activated on purpose.

Here is what the cow lady said:

"Woops."

Here is what the cold bicyclist said:

"Ope, sorry," and she moved the drunk bicycle.

The door closed successfully. And then something happened inside the cold bicyclist. The elevator was rising to level 1 now where the apartment building stored its livestock. The whir of electricity and magnets and fairy dust and all the things that make elevators ascend was pressurizing her existence -GAH!

"Do you have children?" the cold bicyclist blurted out. (But not in a panicked way, just in a "this-came-out-and-I-meant-it-please-don't-crush-me-you're-big!" sort of way.)

"No."

At this moment the cold bicyclist realized the human woman fatty was wearing sunglasses. What the-? Strange. Also, she realized why she asked the question about having children, and this is why: because the way the sunglasses weird-but-nice-elevator-holder-fat-fat had said "woops" induced a series of mental images and feelings (some were not even her own) related to treatment of children.

Spilled milk: "woops."

Ball hit over neighbor's fence: "woops."

Stalled car when learning to drive: "woops."

Bicycle tire intercepts elevator door...

Level 1 had arrived, which meant they had arrived at level 1. The door was still closed. Woops? Woops!

"That's something my mom would have said."

The door opened and the human woman shuffled past the bicycle in silence. (Except for the sound of her cotton fibers screaming for help.) Maybe the cold bicyclist ought to have taken the stairs and ignored the woman's act of holding the door... but then she wouldn't have had that experience... and wouldn't have heard the way the woman said "woops" and wouldn't have thought about or felt anything about it. And what is the point of anything if it doesn't happen?

Anyways... what kind of person wears sunglasses in an elevator...

AV