STARS

She didn't believe in all that star-sign airy-fairy malarky. But she’d read her magazine cover to cover bar the stars and she still had ten minutes of her journey left to kill.  It was better than nothing. ‘Beware of something red, it could change your life’. Something red. Red. The bus? Not prepared to take any chances, she got off at the next stop and walked the rest of the way to work.

 Now that she was late she decided to take the lift up to her floor. Even though she worked on the seventh floor she never took the lift, not after seeing that film where all those people get trapped and…hold on, why had the lift suddenly stopped? She looked at the buttons. The number seven was no longer lit. She pushed it again. Nothing. Number 6. Nothing. Any button, any floor, just to get it moving. Nothing. There was only one button left to try.  She was about to push it but a sudden thought froze her finger mid-air. The emergency button was red. Images from the film flashed through her mind - the caged-in people, a sudden almighty jolt, a flash of white light, then the lift hurtling downwards into darkness.

But why on earth didn't you push the emergency button? Her boss had been furious, couldn't understand why she had stayed in the lift all morning without raising the alarm. Time-wasting, deliberate skiving, that’s what he’d called it. She’d felt too much of a fool to explain. Anyway it wouldn’t have mattered, it was just the excuse he’d needed. Someone had to go, the Credit Crunch had spoken.  How could she have been so stupid? She wished she’d never read her bloody stars. Read her stars. Of course, that was it, her stars…something read.