Severing Your Own Thumb

and other funny things to do in an elevator

There was once, many years back into the dubious whirlpool of time, around the age of the dinosaurs and the internet, a strange device known as an “elevator”. It was an oft-feared, smallish box into which many people stepped at one place, only to step out at another, dazed and sodomized. It was a strange contraption, acclaimed for its mobility and speed yet infamous for the lack of personal space that it created. However, this did not deter people from getting onto it again and again, day after day. In fact, people hardly ever thought about what happened to them as they stepped into the cubic prison at all, except when the elevator was especially crowded or became stuck for some reason.

Nevertheless, from its inception, there were those who abused its power. The tiny comfort zones produced by the small available space seemed to facilitate these hooligans' strange antics, from which they derived some kind of perverse pleasure. They fed off of the confused expressions that appeared on the visages of the cruel victims of their nefarious schemes, and truly thrived on the awkward situations they created. These are the people that we would now refer to as 'prankish lads', but they were then unspoken of, for fear that they might spring up at the sound of their names. There was no sure way to predict the location at which they may have appeared next, causing no small amount of anxiety on the part of any poor soul forced to enter one of the fell boxes.

But perhaps there was some good in the souls of these monsters nonetheless. Most accounts of such a counterbalance have been lost in the annals of time. But there is one record, the documentation of the life of one Steven Tadwell Davis, known to his friends as STD, that could validate this point. This is his story, the lone account of the life of the greatest, yet perhaps most troubled, elevator prankster in history.

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Our story begins, surprisingly enough, in an elevator. A man has just entered on the seventh floor carrying a medium-sized parcel with roughly the shape of a large tumor, setting it down after he sees that the button corresponding with the floor on which he desires to be has been pressed. As the elevator progresses on its course upwards, he whistles to himself and fidgets nervously; there are three other people in the elevator, and he feels invaded. Suddenly, the doors open on the fourteenth floor, causing the occupants of the elevator to wince, knowing that none of them had desired to get off on this floor, meaning someone else is about to board. The opening doors reveal a man burdened with a stack of books. The man with the parcel, apparently in a humanitarian mood, moves to help the man about to get on, then realizes that he is carrying a parcel of his own. He looks around, and his eyes alight on a woman in the elevator.

“Would you hold this for a moment?” he asks, a strange and altogether uncalled-for gleam appearing in his eye.

“Sure...” she answers hesitantly, taking the basket from him, yet knowing that she definitely doesn't want to know what kind of things this sick freak stores in his basket.

The man then bursts out of the elevator, knocking over the man with the books and disappearing down the hall.

“What the-” the woman remarks, puzzled, then looks at the parcel in her arms. She reaches for the blanket covering its top in an effort to reveal what lies within, but is interrupted by the ringing of her cell phone. Seeing that her long-dead boyfriend is calling her, she answers the call, forgetting all about the parcel.

The other occupants of the elevator also ignore the presence of the small basket, too busy pretending not to care about the conversation of the woman to notice it.

As God, fate, or perhaps the author of the story would have it, all of them leave the elevator on their respective floors, leaving the parcel lying forsaken in its center. Inside, coincidentally, is the infant Davis, now abandoned by his father and left in the care of this dark and mysterious device, the elevator.

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That intro to his life may or may have not been entirely pointless, and I could possibly have summed it up in a sentence or two, but I don't care that much, so on with the story.

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Years later, at around the age of five, the young Davis experienced something altogether new to him, an event that would surely alter the course of his life. As he sat in his small, caved out hovel in the side of the elevator- no one had ever noticed it because no one looks around in elevators- he saw the usual people get onto the elevator, expressionless and anxious to get off.

He had never gotten much enjoyment out of his life in the elevator, because the elevator was never host to the most interesting conversations. The elevator itself wasn't very exciting either- it was a terrible conversationalist, always talking about itself or about professional soccer.

But then, he noticed something different. Two boys, a few years older than he, had stepped onto the elevator, giggling. This, he noted, was quite odd. He continued to watch them as the elevator progressed on its course, catching a glimpse of a round, pinkish device one of them was holding behind his back. The two continued to giggle. Suddenly, just as the elevator was reaching the seventh floor, one of them gave the device a firm squeeze, emitting a rather loud flatulent sound. All eyes in the elevator were then turned to the boy. At this point, he and his compatriot burst into laughter. Young Davis himself could hardly abstain from laughing. Who were these people, and why were they having fun in an elevator?

He thought about them for the rest of the day, wishing that more people like that would ride his elevator and give life to his dull existence.

The next day, sure enough, the two returned, this time carrying a shoebox. To the average bystander it would have seemed somewhat suspicious that the shoebox had air holes poked in its lid, but luckily there weren't any average bystanders nearby, considering there was no place from which to bystand. Davis watched on in fascination, eager to know what would happen next. This elevator was a particularly full one, he noticed, and there were twenty floors to go before anyone needed to get off. As the elevator reached the fifth floor, one of the boys opened the box's lid slightly and peered in.

“Uh oh,” he remarked, turning to his friend.

“What's wrong?” the other whispered.

“He's gone,” he whispered in reply, but slightly louder, turning his gaze to the floor.

“What? Where could he be?”

“Well, I'm sure I had him when I got on...” the first answered slowly.

Both of them turned around and began looking at the floor around people's feet. The people on the elevator seemed edgy. Young Davis was fixated on these two boys and their antics.

“If anyone sees our tarantula, let us know,” one of them said, getting on his knees to look around.

A feeling of dread descended upon the inhabitants of the elevator. A slight murmur began, and all of them nervously watched their feet and brushed their clothing upon any slight twinge in any part of their body.

“I think I'll take the stairs today,” one man announced, pressing the button for the fifteen floor. The doors opened on the fifteenth floor, and everyone exited, leaving the two boys giggling on the elevator. The plan had been carried out with surprising ease.

One of them high-fived the other. “That was quality acting,” he commended him.

“No, it was all you,” the other corrected. “I'm sure I had him when I got on...”

Both of them burst into laughter, slapping their knees, as well as each other's knees.

Davis snickered to himself, his eyes gleaming. He knew that he wanted to live his life like that.

---

From that day on, he was a new creation. He practiced the dark arts of the situational elevator comedy every day and every night, never allowing his creativity to lapse for a second. No one was safe from him; some said that he had the power to shift his form from any elevator in the world to any other instantaneously. He was the master of his craft, the artisan of this practice, shining as a beacon for all other pranksters to see.

However, he could never leave the safety of an elevator. All those years of being cooped up in the tiny box had caused some terrible change in his brain, causing him to dread the open, literally shivering, and occasionally going into massive seizures in which he thrashed about like a man possessed (most people found this just a little awkward), upon the sight of the vast, empty elevator lobbies commonly found on the ground floors of some buildings. Thus, many would consign him to the position of the “flawed genius,” struggling to survive while producing works that transcended his times.

But he didn't mind his imprisonment. He didn't feel any need or desire to be anywhere else in the world than in an elevator filled with people, waiting for the chance to pounce. And as for the human need for friends- he had built up quite a substantial list of connections throughout his many journeys. But something just didn't seem right with him.

The thought occurred to him one night after he had just pulled a small-scale prank in which he had pulled a stocking over his head and declared that the elevator was being held up, lifting a fake gun into the air, the result of which was the literal wetting of a man's pants in fear. In fact, the man had wet everyone else's pants as well- he had been storing quite a lot of fear within him. Even a man in Moscow woke up that morning with a wet bed, confused and ashamed as his wife scolded him.

Anyways, Mr. Davis was sitting alone in the elevator, the warm feelings (no pun intended) from the day's prank still lingering around him, when he realized he wanted more. There was something that he didn't have that he must have, something that he just couldn't reach while still in the tangles of the elevator. He had to pull a prank so enormous that he could become something greater, something larger than the elevator that contained him.

He decided that the best way to go about that was to cut off his own thumb. So he did. However, he soon realized that this had been a bad idea, since he was losing quite a good bit of blood. Strangely, he then noticed something shimmering inside his thumb-stub.

He reached in and pulled it out, revealing something amazing! It was far too much to handle; his frenzied mind could hardly function with the addition of this wondrous discovery!

But, as it turned out, he was only hallucinating. He then bled to death.

The End