Let it ring twice

There was a woman in a car on the highway talking on the phone, it wasn’t coming through the car but on speaker for a reason. She could hardly hear words on the other end it was so loud around. A woman was stapling packets by his desk. They weren’t important packets to disturb the phone call over but packets she needed to staple. He sat head in fingers exasperated breathing words so softly a stapler could drown out. It was an important conversation but not one he wanted to be on one side of the phone line for. His white shirt looked darker under the gloom of his mood or a day and body heat ridden. He was hot, this office was so hot he wished at least he could be in a car on the highway with the air there for him and him only, even if flowing with the words of this conversation. A rolling (slightly and slowly) cubicle rather than his postal box with a desk would be a nice place to be if he had to have this conversation. So it went and she went on, passing busses and a truck and someone going somewhere important or not. It was a day for red cars, or that’s the color she was seeing. This hot sun so bright they were maybe all she could see. And the air was broken. It was hot and thick and loud and densely unproductive in every sense. She had to get him through this conversation and ideally before the next highway split, this was not an ideal way to drive and the coming turn was dramatic enough for the moment. A blinker, change lanes, change sentences try not to change subjects, we’ll see though. If the phone line isn’t cut off, oh a shame. A conversation that simply no one wanted to have.