The Cheshire (Part I)
The elevator’s doors were the strangest I’d ever seen- covered in blue fur with a jagged purple stripe across the middle. I reached out, hesitantly, to touch them, wondering what door fur felt like. As my fingertips were tantalizingly close, the doors slid open, revealing an empty, normal looking, elevator: three walls with hand rails and wooden paneling, a carpeted floor, and a ceiling with florescent lights.
I sighed in relief and stepped inside. I had been afraid that perhaps the inside would have been viscera or something. Absently, I tried to press the button for the third floor- and missed.
Instead of a double column of buttons for every floor, there was a grid of them that protruded from the panel that were in constant motion. New ones appeared as if by magic and others disappeared into nothingness, leaving behind a blank space. The buttons weren’t simply retracting- they were vanishing entirely as if they were never there.
As I studied the controls, a chime dinged and the doors began to slide shut.