Three or Four Holes

We can see what little we can see through three or four holes (it is uncertain whether one of the holes is a combination of two holes or just simply larger than the other two) that have been punctured in the wall. There is a woman breathing, two men pacing, a table, two paintings of faces, and one small bucket. For some reason each of these things is stained with a purple hue.

The holes are not terrific conveyors of sound, so when we press our ear up to one of them (even the largest of them – the potential double-hole) all we can make out are grunts and muffled hisses. Perhaps, though, that is how people in this room communicate.

Admiring the pacing men we think of men we’ve known who’ve paced. They all seem so small and far-off in our memory, unlike these men right here. We wonder why the woman isn’t pacing, and why the only thing that can be said of her is that she is breathing. The bucket intrigues us for a moment, but the futility of imagining what might be inside of it quickly turns to antipathy: we begin to hate the inscrutable bucket. The people in the paintings look like people we have known, as all strangers do.

One of the pacing men comes up and leans against the punctured wall. He has stopped pacing, and in so doing blocked our view of the room. Now it too, like the bucket, is frustratingly inscrutable.