Seventh Floor

I have cleaned the Brandt Tower for six years, eleven at night until seven in the morning, and I know it better than I know my own apartment. So I knew, the night the seventh floor hallway was wrong. It is a simple hallway. Office doors on the left, windows on the right, a fire exit at the far end. I have pushed a cleaning cart down it some two thousand times. It takes ninety seconds to walk, and I have never once needed to count, because my body knows the length of it the way it knows the stairs. That night it took me a hundred and forty seconds. I told myself I was tired. I told myself I had walked slow. But my body does not lie about hallways, and my body said the fire exit at the end was further away than it had been the night before.