They say a picture is worth a thousand words, we'll give you 500. Half a Picture.

She is speaking on the telephone. Her voice, the man on the other end of the line thinks, is like granite: hard, toneless, expressionless. The man on the other end of the line is a policeman. He sits behind a tall desk, and he likes how people approaching the desk need to look up at him, as if he is a judge, or a king. He never gets too full of himself though. What with his wife constantly bitching at him from whatever room she’s in, in the house. The room the she is in when she is speaking at him effects the content of her words, though not their nasal whine which speeds up and down like a police siren. “The damn light’s dripping”, she’ll yell at him through the telephone. One of these days, he’ll open up an encyclopedia and find out how a telephone works, how his wife’s enraged voice, travels through the telephone lines. How is it, he wonders idly, doodling on a pad of police paper as she loudly makes up a something wrong in the living room, dining room, kitchen, garage even, how is it that only her voice can be ferried across on the telephone, and not her cigarette smoke, and not her own very self. “Jesus,” the thought of her materializing here, in his place of work, amongst the rapists and thieves and people whose dogs have gone missing, fills him with a very bizarre feeling. He feels that she should be here, packed behind bars with other women who yell at their husbands. He would go and watch her, in her cell, and she would yell at him, and his face would remain neutral, he would be ever so calm. It wouldn’t be hate or gloating staring out of his face at hers; it would be justice.

The woman on the other end of the line waits patiently; she cannot know that the seargent on the other end of the line is daydreaming, his ears blissfully listening to the monotone voice that had been her. She is not ruffled by this, she merely waits, calmly. Her mind has been vacant for so many years, although occasionally her sense of humor will have dry remarks: this space for rent, it giggles to her. It seems to her, as her friends used to tell her, when she used to have friends, that something should be missing from her life. And then later, when her friends had despaired of her, of her silence and lips pressed firmly together and the spark that didn’t appear in her eyes, her brother had said: doesn’t it matter to you, that you exist? “Not really”, she hadn’t really looked at him when she’d answered, she’d looked out the window, to where a winter’s pale blue sky was waning, to where little white clouds frisked in and out of the window frame. Since then she hadn’t had a brother, except on holiday, bursting through her mailbox in the form of colorful greeting cards on recycled papers. Right now she is waiting for a police sergeant to get back to her, so she can tell him that someone is dangling a potato on string in front of her window, it must be someone from the roof. Her apartment is on the top floor, she will tell him, when he gets back from getting a coffee or wrestling a killer to the ground or whatever it is he is doing, and it wouldn’t bother her so much except for that someone had carved a face, a sad face, into the potato, and stuck a knife in one of the eyes. She will tell him, and she will mean it, that she isn’t scared; it’s just that the murdered potato is blocking her view of the sky; it’s just that she can’t go up on the roof, on her own.