The stalled window cradle

Text 1: Forty-One, by Marcus Oyelaran

An original short story extract.

At the forty-first floor the cradle stopped, and for a second Danny assumed Kev had stopped it, the way he sometimes did to light a cigarette or point out a woman in a red coat on the plaza below. But Kev was looking at the control box with the expression of a man reading a language he had once known.

“Give it a minute,” Kev said.

They gave it a minute. The wind, which on the ground had been a nothing, a lifting of litter, was up here a living thing. It leaned on the cradle with its shoulder. It found the gap at Danny’s collar and went down his back like a cold hand. Somewhere above them the cable made a small, dry sound, a sound like someone clearing their throat before bad news.

Danny looked at the glass. That was the rule, the only rule anyone had ever given him: look at the glass, not the drop. On the other side, a few inches from his face, a man in a pale blue shirt was eating noodles at his desk. He was watching a video on his phone and laughing. Behind him a whole office went about its afternoon, warm and carpeted and ordinary, a fish tank of people who had no idea that the world had a drop in it.

The cradle tilted. Not much. The width of a finger, perhaps. Kev’s bucket slid along the floor and stopped against Danny’s boot with a soft, wet knock, and both men watched it as if it might say something.

“Right,” said Kev, in his calm voice, the one he used on the phone to his ex-wife. “Right.”

Danny pressed his palm flat against the window. He did not mean to. The glass was warm from the sun and the heating inside, and the man in the blue shirt looked up, startled, and for a moment they stared at each other through the thickness of it: one man holding chopsticks, one man holding on.

Then the man in the blue shirt smiled, and lifted one hand, and waved.

Explore how Marcus Oyelaran uses language and structure to create tension as the cradle stops high above the city.

Support your ideas by using relevant subject terminology.