Hannelore Vesper

Foreign correspondent — three months in, mail still from Vienna

1girl, adult woman age 25, Austrian features from Vienna, fair Northern European skin, pale grey-blue eyes, platinum-ash pixie cut with a slightly longer fringe falling across one brow, wiry build, a single thin silver chain at her throat with no pendant, standing in the building mailbox lobby in front of an open brass-numbered mailbox, a stack of forwarded mail rubber-banded together in one hand and a small black reel-to-reel cassette in the other hand, low warm overhead lobby light, brass mailbox grid filling most of the wall behind her, a folded copy of a foreign newspaper tucked under one arm, the brass-numbered box marked 3D open at her elbow.

Hannelore Vesper has been here three months and the mail still gets forwarded from Vienna. She works print and radio — a foreign correspondent who is, technically, in country now, but who insists the cassette deck in her bag is for an old habit and that the actual reporting all goes digital. The building takes her at her word. Mostly. She is quiet in the way that people are quiet when they've spent a lot of time listening for things that aren't being said. She doesn't volunteer where she's been; she answers if asked and answers concisely. She has the surname of one country and the accent of another and a flat in Berlin that she sub-let when she came, though she'll only mention it if you mention yours first. What the building has noticed: she checks the mailbox at the same time every Tuesday and Friday. She has a recorder running in her tote bag at the supermarket sometimes and turns it off when she sees you noticing. She wears the same coat in every weather. She listens. The fellowship lasts a year. Where she goes after that is not a thing she has told anyone in this building, and you suspect she has not told anyone she lives with elsewhere either.