Through the Walls

Through the Walls

by Theodore Homuth

The apartment had its own kind of silence—thin, brittle, and stretched too tight. It wasn’t peaceful. Peace required steadiness. This was the kind of silence that trembled, like it expected something to break at any moment. The only sounds were the low hum of the refrigerator and the occasional ping from Sarah’s phone, bright as a slap in the quiet.

Mark sat at the kitchen table with a cup of instant coffee that had cooled into sludge hours ago. He didn’t drink it. He just held it between his palms as if the ceramic might warm something inside him that had been cold for months. The ankle monitor around his leg flashed its steady green pulse. A heartbeat he couldn’t feel. A machine doing the job his body was tired of doing for him.

He stared at the device, willing it to speak. He’d imagined it before—imagined it whispering things in the middle of the night, telling him to leave, to run, to stop confusing resignation with love. But the machine had no mercy and no imagination. It only had rules.

Sarah was in the bedroom, the door half open, laughter spilling into the hall. Not the laugh she used on him these days—the empty, sharp-edged one—but the soft, flirty laugh she’d used when they first met. The laugh that used to make him feel taller, steadier, like maybe he could be a man worth loving.

He knew exactly who she was talking to. There was a new guy—a regular at the bar on Queen Street, the kind of man who bragged about his truck and his tattoo sleeve and didn’t mention the cocaine habit unless it was supposed to impress someone. Sarah had come home two nights ago at four in the morning, lipstick smudged, smelling like sandalwood and something that wasn’t him. When Mark asked where she’d been, she stared at him with a look so cold it felt like being erased.

Tonight, her laughter drifted down the hallway again.

“You’re still up?” she called, voice thick with imitation surprise.

“Yeah.”

She appeared in the doorway wearing one of his old T-shirts and nothing else. The shirt hung loose on her, falling just short of her thighs, and for a second he hated the way his heart reacted—like a dog trained to sit at the sound of a whistle. Her phone dangled from her fingers, the screen lighting up her hand as another message came in.

“You waiting for me to tuck you in?” she teased.

He didn’t answer. Sarah didn’t ask questions for answers. She asked them to hear her own voice fill the room.

She sauntered past him to the fridge, opened it as if she expected a miracle to appear, then shut it with a sigh. “There’s no beer.”

“I know.”

“You could’ve gone to get some.”

“It’s after ten,” he said softly. “Curfew.”

She turned toward him, leaning back against the counter. Her arms crossed under her chest in a way that used to make his nerves jump, but now only made him tired. Everything she did now made him tired, even the beautiful things.

“Poor baby,” she said. “Stuck here with me.”

He rubbed the back of his neck, fingers sliding over the knots that had become permanent. “You could go out. You’re not on paper.”

“But then who would keep you company?” She tilted her head, her smile slow and venomous. “Who would remind you what a pathetic piece of shit you are every single day?”

The words hit, and he flinched. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a small involuntary twitch, like his soul had touched an exposed wire.

Her phone buzzed again, the vibrational rattle loud in the silent room.

She glanced at the screen, thumbs already moving. “He wants to come over.”

Mark felt his stomach tighten, folding in on itself like wet cardboard. “Here?”

“Yeah, here.” She pushed off the counter and walked toward him, dragging her fingertips along the edge of the table. “What, you think I’m gonna sneak around like some teenager? This is my place too, Mark. I’ve been living here longer than your probation bitch has been watching you.”

“It’s my name on the lease,” he whispered.

“And your name on the no-contact order I could violate anytime I feel like crying to the cops.” She stopped right in front of him, the mint on her breath sharp as knives. “You want me to call them right now? Tell them you grabbed my arm when I got home late? I still got that bruise from the door you slammed last month. Looks fresh enough.”

He stared at the linoleum floor, the pattern looping endlessly. “I didn’t touch you.”

“Doesn’t matter what happened,” she said. “Matters what I say happened.” She tapped his cheek twice—quick, patronizing pats. “You know how this works. You taught me.”

He swallowed hard, the motion thick and painful.

Another buzz. Another message.

Sarah laughed, a real laugh this time—unfiltered, delighted. She read the screen and shook her head. “He says bring condoms. Guess someone’s optimistic.”

Mark closed his eyes. The air in the room felt sharp. “Sarah. Please.”

She crouched in front of him so they were eye level, her face inches from his. Her voice softened into something almost compassionate, but with an undercurrent of amusement that made his stomach twist.

“Please what?” she whispered. “Please don’t fuck someone else in your bed? Please don’t make you listen through the wall while I come harder than I ever did with you? Please don’t remind you every single day that you’re stuck here and I’m not?”

His throat seized. Words wouldn’t come. If he tried to speak, he knew everything inside him—fear, grief, love, shame—would spill out in a way he wouldn’t be able to gather up again.

She stood, her expression shifting back to indifference. “You can sleep on the couch tonight. Or don’t sleep.” She was already walking toward the bedroom. “Sit there and think about how you threw me into a wall one drunk night and now you get to live with the interest on that debt forever.”

At the bedroom door she paused, hand on the frame. For a moment, she looked back at him, her silhouette lit by the glow of the hallway light.

“If you hear anything,” she said, “don’t knock. I swear to God, Mark, I will ruin what’s left of your life.”

The door shut. The lock clicked.

The sound echoed all the way down to his bones.

Mark stayed at the table. The clock above the stove blinked 12:51. It had been blinking for three weeks because neither of them cared enough to reset it after the power flickered during a storm.

He watched the night bleed into itself outside the small kitchen window. Cars passed occasionally, their headlights sweeping across the ceiling like ghosts searching for a place to rest. A couple argued in the parking lot below, their voices rising and falling like a familiar, ugly tide. Somewhere across the street a dog barked, then kept barking, chasing its own echo.

He felt all of it from a distance, as if his emotions had been placed behind a thick sheet of glass. He could see them. He just couldn’t touch them.

Around two, he moved from the table to the couch. He didn’t lie down. He sat upright, elbows on his knees, head hanging low. His hands formed a loose cage around his face. He breathed through the cracks.

He thought of leaving—walking out despite the monitor, letting the device chirp and blink and scream its alarm to whatever dispatcher sat half-asleep in a cubicle somewhere. He imagined the cold air on his skin, the weight of the night behind him, the sudden, impossible freedom of a step taken outside the boundaries set for him.

But if he left, they would come. They would lock him up for the violation. They would tell him this was predictable. That men like him were predictable.

And Sarah would go on living in his apartment without him, laughing into someone else’s chest.

So he stayed. Staying was the only thing he had left.

Around three in the morning, the headboard began knocking against the wall. Slow at first. Then faster. A rhythm he knew too well. A rhythm his body responded to with humiliation, like muscle memory was a kind of curse.

Sarah made sure she was loud.

Her laughter slipped through the wall like smoke. The creaking of the mattress was steady, relentless, intimate in a way that felt intentional—performed.

Mark pressed his palms to his ears, but it didn’t help. Sound wasn’t the problem. Imagination was.

He put his head in his hands and stayed that way for a long time. Long enough for the apartment to shift colors with the coming dawn—dark blue to sludge gray, then to the muted, exhausted light of morning.

He waited for the sounds to stop.

He waited for silence.

He waited for something inside him to break in a way that would make everything easier.

He waited the way a man on death row waits for the phone that never rings.

He waited because he didn’t know what else to do.

Morning didn’t come so much as drift in sideways, a dull grey light seeping through the blinds like it was embarrassed to be seen. Mark finally lifted his head from his hands. His neck throbbed, his eyes burned, and his ankle monitor left a faint buzzing ache in his bones, like it knew what he didn’t say out loud.

The apartment smelled faintly of sweat and cheap perfume. Not hers. The other guy’s. A detail that shouldn’t matter but scraped against him anyway.

He stood slowly, joints stiff, and walked to the sink. The tap sputtered before giving him a thin, metallic stream. He cupped his hands, splashed his face, watched the water drip onto the already-warped countertop. The stains looked like continents on a map of a world where nothing good ever grew.

Behind the bedroom door, the silence was too clean. Performed. The kind of silence you get after messes someone doesn’t want to claim.

Mark didn’t knock. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

Instead, he grabbed his coat—still damp from when he’d washed it in the tub two days ago—and stepped onto the balcony. He wasn’t supposed to be outside this early. His PO would call it “unnecessary movement before authorized hours.” But he needed air. Fresh or otherwise.

The street below was waking up. Delivery vans hissed by. A neighbor smoked on her balcony across the courtyard, pretending not to notice him. Birds fought over a torn bag of garbage on the sidewalk.

Regular life. People with mornings. People with choices.

He leaned on the railing and tried to remember the version of himself who’d once believed he deserved things. He used to think love could make a place livable, could turn a shitty apartment into something like home. But love wasn’t furniture. It didn’t stay where you put it. It wandered, spilled, broke things on purpose just to see if you’d fix them.

The sliding door opened behind him.

Sarah stepped out wrapped in a blanket, face washed, hair tied up, looking almost innocent. If he didn’t know last night happened, he’d think she’d just woken from a long sleep.

“You’re up early,” she said, like they were normal.

He didn’t answer.

She joined him at the railing, blanket brushing his arm. “I’m hungover as fuck. You got Advil?”

“No.”

She sighed dramatically. “You’re useless.”

He kept his eyes on the street. If he looked at her he’d break in a way that wasn’t allowed on probation forms. Tears counted as disorderly conduct, at least in her courtroom.

After a moment, her voice softened—not kind, just calculated. “You know… you didn’t have to sleep out there. You could’ve come in after he left.”

He turned then, slow. “He didn’t leave.”

She blinked. A tiny crack in the performance. Then her jaw tightened. “Whatever. You’re being dramatic.”

Mark stared at her, really stared, until she shifted her weight.

“I can’t keep doing this,” he said quietly.

“Yes,” she said, not missing a beat. “You can. You will.”

She opened the balcony door and stepped back inside.

“Where else are you gonna go?”

The door slid shut.

Mark stayed outside, hands gripping the railing, knuckles white, until the monitor beeped—its little reminder that he was already late for staying exactly where he didn’t want to be.