Wallace is a freelance writer and poet. In this essay, Wallace explores the way in which Mohamed El-Bisatie uses his description of the exterior setting to reveal his story's inner truth.

At first glance, it's tempting to think that almost nothing happens in Mohamed El-Bisatie's short story "A Conversation from the Third Floor," which first appeared in his 1994 collection A Last Glass of Tea and Other Stories. The plot is hardly complex: a woman, carrying a child, walks to the fence which surrounds a prison, asks for and is refused permission to enter, has a brief conversation with a man, who is forced to shout at her from the third floor, then departs. Even the characters themselves are arguably flat: readers are given almost no description of the woman, the man, and their history, and minor characters, like the policeman and the soldier, are so quickly drawn...