What’s Outside

Alone in a room sit three women. One with a more than disgruntled look on her face. The two presumably content women chat amongst themselves, quietly and without letting a single detail grace the disgruntled woman’s ears. The room is dusty and cold, and each word between the two chatting women creates new spiraling dust clouds that propagate throughout the room. At one end of the room, there is a small window, single pane, which is letting in one orange sunbeam just brightly enough to not warrant that a candle be lit. The disgruntled woman pays no attention to the chatting ladies and stares blankly through the window. She is slightly put off by the asymmetry of the window’s shudders and thinks to herself how if this were her home she would have a new set made immediately. The chatting women continue their conversation, becoming ever more emotional and loud as they continue. They have begun to notice the third woman’s seemingly displeased state and take it as motivation to talk even louder and more enthusiastically as if to spite her for her perceived annoyance at them. All the while, they maintain a low enough tone so that she may not glean an ounce of context from what she hears. She works hard to ignore them, but as each minute passes and the day wains, she becomes more obviously unsettled and unhappy. Eventually, the two chatting women get up from their seats and leave the room, deciding to go outside and get some air. The unhappy woman watches them through the window as they roam the property and enjoy the afternoon sun and breeze, her face unchanging except to become more pitiful and hopeless. She watches the window more intently now. Scanning the horizon, taking in every detail of the bucolic scene in front of her, the two chatty women in their summer dresses and all. One of the chatting women falls. She does not get up. The woman at the window doesn’t shudder. She does not question the fall. The second woman begins to run. She runs like she has probably never run in her life, ugly and uncoordinated. The woman at the window is again not fazed. A minuscule smirk appearing on her face. The woman at the window locks the door.

Screaming bloody murder, the woman who ran outside bangs on the door to the room she had sat chatting in only a few minutes before, with no response. The door is shut firm. As the sun sets, the woman still outside and who had run to the window earlier returns to it. The two women, one outside and hopeless, one inside and calm, stare at each other face to face. The woman sitting inside by the window has had enough of this pitiful scene and closes the shutters, returning to a book she had been reading before the other ladies had begun to gossip.