Ok. I’ve been a bit pushed for time again and so we witness the somewhat dubious return of the Elevator or to be strictly accurate Elevator 2 – Tin Clouds. Err, hope you enjoy:

Elevator 2 – Tin Clouds
By Neil Beynon

At the edge of the world where the rainbow‘s end, there lies a Tinman who sought to rejoin the cloud.

Tinman walked many miles across the land, through good weather and bad. After the rain he feared he’d rust as Hakon had done in his folly: Tinmen should not go to sea and certainly should not try to find out what is at the bottom.

Yet the warm winds of the east dried Tinman before the water could bite too deep, his shadow grew long as he reached his goal.

A lady who gave her name as Sarah guarded the elevator to the cloud. She was waiting for a repair man to arrive, for the lift was broken. She could not give a time when it would be fixed.

Sarah had been five when she began waiting and the Tinman judged by her geometry she was now at least ten years older if not fifteen, she’d been waiting some time although she’d had occasional visitors along the way.

Dear Sarah,” said the Tinman, taking her hand. “When I was good my father would tell me of the cloud, and now I long to see it for myself. Do you have any idea how I might do this?”

“I cannot say,” she said. “This is the only way to the cloud I know of. What did they do when you were bad?”

When I was bad?” asked the Tinman. “I’ve never been bad.”

“Oh you haven’t lived,” she said.

Since they were waiting anyway Sarah showed him at length how to be bad. It’d been a few years since the last visitor.

The Tinman lay on the grass at the edge of the world gazing up at the sky with his silver eyes, shards of grass sticking to his still drying surface, Sarah sleeping beside him.

And the cloud seemed closer.

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