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Deployment

Kalen Rice

    Samuel carries a handful of toys onto the elevator with his daughter, Macy, who is wearing her favorite red jacket with the fur on the hood and carrying her favorite robot toy. They both are very happy and lively, as they are very close to each other. She looks at him while laughing and he laughs and gives her little high fives. He asks her if she had a fun night and she told him it was amazing.
    “Daddy, I’ll really miss seeing you so much,” she says, making the cold steel elevator seem even colder. He didn’t want to make her discouraged so he continued to make her laugh. He tells her, “No matter what you will always be my little princess.”
    They were nearing the fifteenth floor, where her grandmother lived and he looked at her holding onto the little red robot so tightly, remembering the day he brought it home to her last year on her birthday. She never left home without it and would never let it out of her sight, she even slept with it every night.
    He heard the ding of the elevator so distinctively and looked towards which floor they were at. Floor thirteen. He was two floors away and getting even more emotional about dropping his baby off. He couldn’t let her see this dismay, this agony in his mind, so he kept his happy face on and kept laughing with her. Another ding goes off. He couldn’t believe it, only one more floor and they would be there.
    He looks at her again, and he thinks about when she got the jacket she was wearing. Her mother picked the jacket out a few winters ago, making this jacket very important to Macy as it was all she had that could keep the memories alive.
    Last ding, floor fifteen. Here we go, Samuel and Macy step off the elevator.
    A few minutes later, Samuel re-enters the elevator. There was a strong look of sorrow on his face. The elevator was very cold, like an ice box, yet he was sweating profusely. He tugged at the collar on his beige jacket, because even through the sweat everything was so cold.
    The closer he got to the ground floor, the more distressed he got. He was so uncomfortable in the small, cramped elevator. He acted as if he was having a hard time breathing and feeling more and more claustrophobic. He looked into the smudged reflective doors of the elevator, the reflection of him showed all the tears running down his face. He couldn’t believe this had to happen, he was all that his baby girl had. Samuel was so sad, yet so strong at the same time, it was so incredible that a person going through what he had to could push himself through it so well.
    The elevator made it’s last ding; he had finally reached the ground floor. That was the longest fifteen floor ride he had ever been on, it felt to him like hours. Before he stepped out of the elevator, he looked up towards where Macy may be laughing with her grandmother, unaware of what was in his hands. He then looked to the roll of papers, reading only the biggest word on the sheet: DEPLOYMENT.

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