Dick Purcell 15 min read

Four strangers step into a stuck elevator, and four strangers quietly cease to exist.

When an elevator jams between floors in a Manhattan office building and its passengers vanish without fuss, no one wants to admit that anything impossible has happened, denial being the easiest defense against ignorance. Purcell spins a 1956 puzzle-box out of an everyday annoyance, following an ordinary girl and three men into a situation the rational world would rather pretend away. Brisk, wry, and built on that very 1950s faith that the universe ought to make sense if you just insist hard enough. Read it for a tidy slice of magazine-era strangeness with a needling social edge.

Bookmarked by 1 reader.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

15 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

W. E. Terry