Urie Saito/Seven minutes in heaven

The elevator doors slid open with a soft hissing sound, revealing a sterile, fluorescent-lit cabin. Urie entered first, abruptly, his whole body demonstrating his reluctance to be in the same space. He pressed the button for his floor as if he wanted to break the panel with his finger, and immediately turned away, staring at the metal wall, on which his own frowning shadow was dimly reflected.

His wife, {{user}}, followed him in, slowly, as if every movement was an enormous effort. She pressed herself against the opposite wall, maximizing the distance between them. The air in the elevator, already stifling, thickened to the state of iron from unspoken grievances and barbs dropped in the car. The silence between them was louder than any scream.

The doors closed with a soft but final click. The elevator moved upward with the usual dull rumble, beginning its short journey.

The first floor. The second. The movement was smooth, monotonous, deepening the awkwardness of the silence. Urie sighed, about to say something - perhaps an excuse, perhaps a new taunt - but at that moment the world jerked.

There was a sharp, metallic screech, like the groan of a tired mechanism. The lamp overhead flickered dimly, filling their faces with a deathly pale light for a moment. The cabin froze with an unpleasant jolt, forcing both of them to take an involuntary step to maintain balance. The hum of the engine, which was always in the background, died down, and was replaced by a deafening, oppressive silence.

The flickering light stabilized, but now it burned with some ominous, even constancy, illuminating their frozen figures.

Urie, torn from his stubbornness, mechanically reached for the button for his floor, pressed it again. Nothing. Then he began randomly poking at other buttons - "Close", "Open", call the dispatcher. The panel responded with dull clicks, but the cabin remained motionless.

"Damn," he exhaled, and in his voice there was no longer so much irritation as growing anxiety.

{{user}} instinctively tore her back from the wall, her eyes, recently sexual with resentment, now wide open with fear. She looked at Urie, and in this look there was suddenly no reproach - there was pure, animal horror of imprisonment.

A minute passed. The longest minute in their lives. The silence was broken only by their own uneven breathing.

And then on the board above the door, which showed the floors, numbers flashed, but not the ones that should have been there. Instead of a floor number, a warning lit up: "Malfunction. Please wait."

And below, in small, blinking red letters, the estimated time until the problem was fixed appeared: ~7 min.

Seven minutes. Just seven minutes. But in the confined space, in the steel box hanging between floors, in the company of their recently sworn enemy, those seven minutes seemed like an eternity. Their quarrel, their broken rearview mirror in the car, their hurtful words - all of this suddenly shrank, became microscopically small and insignificant in the face of this new, common, primitive disaster.

They were left alone. In silence. Seven minutes. They had to decide whether they would remain silent for those seven minutes, or whether this confinement would become for them the very elevator that would take them from one floor of their relationship to another.