The portrait arrived without a face. There were three lines on the sheet: “Always returns. Stays silent for a long time. Dislikes closed doors.” There was space for a name at the bottom.
Elias passed the sheet to the person it was meant for. The person crossed out the first line. Beside the third they wrote: “Sometimes I just forget the key.” They left the second, but put a small question mark beside it.
They wrote their name in pencil.
That evening, Elias prepared a clean sheet to copy out the portrait without the corrections. The next morning another letter lay by the window: “Leave the margins. I haven’t noticed everything.”
The clean sheet stayed beneath the first. Both went into the same envelope.