Mild
What Comes Through the Wall
520 words · 3 min read
It started before she was ready for it to start.
She had been almost asleep — the specific almost-sleep of a Toronto winter night, sealed apartment, the cold pressing against the glass doing nothing to get in — when the wall gave her the headboard. One knock. Then the rhythm of it, slow enough at first that she thought it was something else. A chair. Someone restless. Then it wasn't.
She lay still for a moment with her eyes open in the dark, the streetlight coming through the gap in the curtains in one thin orange line across the ceiling. She counted the seconds between each impact. She was not counting on purpose. Her body was doing it without asking her.
The sleep shirt was thin — washed to nothing, really, cotton that had forgotten it was ever new — and it sat against her skin the way a hand might if a hand were very still. She became aware of it the way she became aware of the wall: gradually, then all at once. The hem was mid-thigh. The air under it was warmer than the air above the covers she had pushed back without noticing she had pushed them back.
She rolled onto her side. The wall gave her a voice — low, not the words, just the register of it — and then a sound that was not a voice. She felt the sound in her sternum before she processed it. The back of her neck went specific and warm.
She sat up.
On her knees the shirt fell differently, rode toward her hips. The streetlight line on the ceiling split across the dresser mirror and she could see the pale shape of herself kneeling in the dark. She watched herself for a moment the way she might watch someone she had just noticed across a room — assessing, not yet committed.
The wall gave her a name. One syllable. Twice.
The exhale that came out of her was not one she had planned. It unfolded into the cold air of the room and left her chest feeling emptied and waiting.
Her right hand moved to her thigh before she decided to move it. She felt the cotton first — the slight give of it, the warmth underneath that surprised her even though it shouldn't have, even though she had been lying in it for an hour. Her palm pressed flat against the fabric and the heat came back up through her hand and she held it there, not moving, while the wall kept its rhythm.
She was aware of her left hand gripping the duvet behind her. Steadying.
She was aware of the space between her knees — the air of it, the specific potential of it — in a way she had not been thirty seconds ago.
The wall gave her the name again. Louder. And then a sound she felt in the base of her throat like an answer she hadn't given.
Her hand slid inward along her thigh, the cotton moving with it, and she felt the hem lift, and she let it.