Interior: a detective’s office.
Light is filtering in through half-shut blinds like warm cream, falling over a mahogany bookcase under the window and a mahogany desk in the middle of the room in long, liquid stripes. A pot-plant, singular, slightly wilted, sits sadly on the top of a second bookcase against the wall, beside the door to the room. The door has a frosted glass window which is similarly blinded; a second set of soft yellow stripes painted on the dark grey carpet floor. The room is empty, and even the hot air trapped inside is still. Only one thing moves: a limb of the pot-plant droops a tiny margin lower as it continues on its depressed, deflated descent.
And then the door opens.
The blinds explode outwards and terrify some spare sheets of paperwork off the desk. The pot-plant freezes. The room is interrogated under a splash of bright light as a figure stumbles into the room. It is Detective Jason Kashif Crawford.
His beige plaid pants have red dust ground into the knees, and a suspender strap is hanging off his shoulders. He paces to the end of his office, then walks over to his desk, shoving open some drawers and shuffling through them. His dark eyebrows furrow over his eyes as he scans the pages, his large, canine ears swivelling and twitching at every small sound through the holes in the sides of his stetson hat. He searches around rabidly for a moment, stopping only to brush his unkempt mop of hair out of his forehead. Then he stills completely.
The room falls silent. The only movement is of Jason's eyes, squinting at whatever thoughts are bouncing over the large bridge of his nose.
The pot plant wonders if it is safe to begin drooping again. Then Jason lurches suddenly, clearly remembering where the thing was looking for is. He slams open a drawer on the other side of the desk, grabs a notebook and pen, and charges out of the door, slamming it behind him.
‘Business as usual’, the pot plant thinks.
