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Thin walls. - Anji (100headbash) Jan. 25th 2025

[SUNDAY NOV 2018]

I’ve never paid much attention to the walls in this building.

Thin walls, people say, but walls are walls. They’re meant to separate spaces, lives, sounds. What difference does it make if you hear something through them? It’s just a noise. The kind of noise you get used to. A muffled argument on the other side. A door slammed. Shuffling footsteps. Nothing worth mentioning.

But lately, the noise next door has been… different. I can hear the voices, clearer now, sharper, more jagged. Nathan and Martha. Or maybe it’s just Nathan. You can always tell when it’s him.

His voice cuts through everything like a knife slicing the air between us. Not that he ever means to, but it’s how it is. The walls. They’re so thin you know? So thin. I don’t know why it never bothered me before, why it didn’t sink in, but it does now. It feels like I’m suffocating in here listening to it. Listening to them. And I’m caught in the middle.

Martha. I don’t even know her well, not really. Just an occasional wave in the hallway. Maybe a quick “hello” when we’re passing. But the walls will carry her frustration. Her anger. Her screams. Nathan, though, his voice has a particular edge. It’s colder. Always colder than hers.

It doesn’t make sense to me.

I wonder, does she want to leave him? Or is she just stuck? Does she even have a choice? Does anyone? I can feel myself pressing my palms to the walls sometimes, like if I just press harder, I can make the sound stop or push it away. But it doesn’t go away. It’s like the house just breathes it in and out with me, and all I can do is exist next to it, a quiet witness to their agony.

It’s 2 AM I think, when the first argument erupts, loud enough to fill my whole room, making my skin crawl. Martha’s voice is quiet at first—she’s trying to reason with him, but she never wins. Not against Nathan. He’s a hurricane in a room full of glass. I can hear the glass shattering in his words.

“You don’t understand. You never understand,” he shouts, his voice bellowing, not asking yet just demanding. She tries to talk, tries to calm him down, but it never works. He doesn’t listen. He doesn’t hear her. And she—Martha—she’s just… so quiet.

I tried to keep my comments to myself but all I am is an outsider of someone else’s lives. I should say something, though, I know I should mind my business and get out of it.

Before I could even leave a muffled thud can be heard. A pause. The sudden, sharp crack of something against the wall, then silence. I lean in, ear pressed to the cracked paint, hoping it’s nothing. Hoping it’s just the furniture shifting. But it’s not.

The shouting comes back, louder now, the crack becoming a rhythm in the night. It’s been this way for days now, maybe longer, but I haven’t counted.

Time doesn’t matter when the walls are so thin. They stretch out, long and narrow, and sometimes the walls feel closer together than they should. The arguments bleed through the plaster, the dust, the silence between one breath and the next. It’s exhausting.

[TUESDAY NOV 2018]

The days blur. I try to ignore it, but how could you? Every time I walk past their door, the echoes of their fights follow me. I see Martha in the hallway once, looking smaller than usual, her arms wrapped tight around herself. I catch her eyes and she looks away, but I say,

“Martha, hey. How you doing?” I don’t know why I ask. Maybe I just want to know if she’s real. If she’s more than just the voice in the walls.

She hesitates. It’s a second. Maybe less. Then she looks back at me, smiles—half-smiles—and says, “I’m fine. Just tired. You know how it is.”

She says it like a mantra. It’s always the same. Always the same words. Fine. Always fine. Her eyes tell a different story. Something’s wrong, I can see it. But I don’t say anything more. I don’t press it. What can I say? What good would it do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The walls wouldn’t hear me anyway.

Days go on. The shouting intensifies, gets sharper, faster. There’s more crashing now. Dishes breaking. Something heavy hitting the floor. I hear the kids crying. Their sobs are small, helpless. The walls feel thinner now. Maybe I’m imagining it, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the pressure. It doesn’t matter. All I know is that I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t just stay here listening to the madness. To the destruction.

[THURSDAY NOV 2018]

I can’t. I’m awake again. The arguing’s louder this time. I don’t know if it’s Nathan this time. Maybe it’s both of them. Maybe the kids too. The walls feel hot, like they’re closing in on me, and I can’t breathe. I can’t. It’s suffocating. I hear Martha’s voice rising, softer now, fragile, but still trying to hold on. And Nathan? Nathan’s a wave crashing on rocks, roaring over everything. The walls start to feel like they’re shaking. The apartment vibrates, the sounds of destruction now echoing like hollow thunder in the space between us.

I hear Martha yell something I can’t quite make out, but it sounds like “Don’t…” and then a sharp silence. Then—thud. Another thud. This time, something different. Something heavier. A cry from one of the kids. More shuffling. More anger. More slamming. The walls are screaming at me, vibrating with the force of what I can’t see. I think of knocking. Just knocking on their door. But I don’t. I can’t. What would I even say? What could I possibly say? I know what it would be: “I hear you.”

But it’s not that simple. Is it?

Martha’s sobbing now. It’s soft. It’s broken. And it’s in the walls too, right here with me, pressing in from all sides. I don’t know what to do with it. So I stay. I listen. I wait. For something to stop.

And then, in the stillness, after everything has collapsed into quiet, the sound of children’s cries fills the space. Loud. Loud enough to split the night in two. They don’t stop. I can’t think. I can’t think about the walls anymore, about what they mean. About what they hide. I don’t know why the walls are still standing. I don’t know how. I don’t know how long I can keep pretending they’re just walls.

[…]

I’m still awake, still listening. Watching the shadows stretch out across the floor. The clock ticks. But nothing matters. The walls are too thin and they know everything.

—————

The arguments had escalated, louder, more violent, more desperate. The cries of the children pierced the walls like a physical assault and I couldn’t pretend I didn’t hear it anymore. Not when it felt like I was being crushed under the weight of it. Not when I could no longer ignore what was happening next door.

The final straw came one night when the shouting turned into slamming—a door, a wall, furniture—something breaking. A voice yelling obscenities, followed by a thud, then silence. And the kids cries, mixed with the sounds of something far darker now, too muffled to make out yet clear enough to send a cold shiver down my spine.

I picked up my phone.

My hands trembled as I dialed. The words came out sharp, more urgent than I meant them to be. “There’s domestic violence. I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but I can hear kids crying, and it sounds like someone’s getting hurt.”

I didn’t say Nathan’s name, I didn’t have to. The dispatcher knew what I meant almost immediately. Did they knew about this before?

The sirens came loud and bright, cutting through the night air. I stayed inside, pressing my ear against the wall, listening.

I don’t know what I expected—maybe some miracle where it all ended peacefully—but it didn’t. There was shouting, more shouting, then the unmistakable sound of cuffs clicking into place. Nathan. I heard him protesting, his voice full of bluster, but the officers were relentless. They arrested him.

The kids’ cries were still there but softer now. They didn’t stop, but they faded into the background as the noise from the hallway—the shuffling of footsteps, the creak of the door—seemed to swallow them whole.

Minutes passed then the door opened, and there she was—Martha, standing in the hallway with her eyes wide, her hands trembling at her sides. She was staring at the floor, not looking at me, as if the weight of the world had collapsed on her shoulders. The image of her so fragile shook me more than I could admit.

Her shoulders jerked up when she saw me with a startled expression, and she met my eyes for the first time. The look in her eyes was raw, pained, so… Wmpty. She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached for the doorframe, her fingers scraping along the wood holding herself up, as though she was afraid to let go.

“I called the cops,” I said. “He’s gone. They’re taking him in.”

She nodded, but she didn’t speak. Just… nodded. And for a long time neither of us moved.

The days that followed were strange, suspended in a quiet haze. Martha didn’t talk much at first. The children were taken to stay with relatives, but she didn’t go with them. She stayed in the apartment wandering from room to room, as though the walls had become unfamiliar to her like she didn’t know where she belonged anymore.

I tried to help but it wasn’t simple. It wasn’t enough to just say, “You’re safe now.”

The trauma of it all was buried deep in her eyes in her every movement.

I could see the weight of the years on her even in the smallest gestures. Her hands still shook even when she tried to steady them.

She started therapy. Slowly, tentatively, I helped her find a routine. I drove her to appointments. Sometimes, I just sat with her, letting her talk if she wanted to. Letting her stay silent if she needed to.

It took time. It took more than time—it took trust. It took years.

…

Eventually the trembling stopped. The silence—that painful kind of silence, began to soften. She smiled again, though it was different.

Softer. Not the nervous, forced smile I used to see, but something more honest.

The way she held herself had changed too—stronger, more grounded, less fragile. The walls between us, the ones that had once separated us as strangers had come down. Not all at once, but piece by piece, as we both learned to trust each other again.

I think I should’ve called the cops sooner when I had the chance.

#Anji’s Short Stories #character lore #writing #storytelling #short story #domestic violent relationships #child abuse #tw abuse #fiction #writers on tumblr #psychological thriller #psychological fiction #abuse survivor #first person #original character

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