My tongue involuntarily pushes against the back of my front teeth, my mouth a swamp of saliva. I tilt my head to the left, and the somatic response intensifies. My neighbour’s wife is dragging the newly bought indoor plant towards her kitchen. I can tell by the intensity of the screech, which is a low-grit sandpaper against my teeth. My wife comes running out of the kitchen. We stand a few feet apart, pieces of yellow packaging tape stuck to her left arm—flailing. I have our mint-green coffee mug in my hand, half wrapped in an old issue of Sunday magazine. We stare in anticipation; my neighbour smashes the plant into the paper-thin wall. The wall holds. His wife will bring another and another, and the wall will hold.

At night, I listen to my neighbours snoring in harmony. The guttural rhythm leaves my chest pitted. I watch my wife sleeping—sprawled like a toddler, half-hugged by the only blanket we haven’t yet packed. Over the dull sound of our TV, I dream of their ribcages swelling in sync. Their flesh fused. They lay on a bed of loose soil and terracotta shards.

Once every few weeks, I have heard him kicking down the main door, demanding to be let in. His wife forgets to snore on those nights. In the mornings, I trace the sounds of their lips smacking, naan being chomped between teeth in synchronized swings of their jaws. The sticky sound of their fingers peeling away from each other after a hearty breakfast of trotter soup.

I have seldom heard them speak in words, but whenever they do, it is a vile exchange. He is fond of calling her a slut, and she responds by calling him a useless cunt.

My neighbours have a ritual of eating omelettes on Sundays. He asks her to slice the tomatoes thin; she always dices them into chunks, insisting the tomatoes couldn’t have been sliced thinner. He would smash a mug or two into the wall, the wall holding up. Her throat would make gargling sounds, followed by his saliva-laden screams and the lilt of the knife against a cutting board.

On a slimy July afternoon, my wife decides the packed cartons must be moved into the car. That’s when I hear my neighbour speed off, leaving his wife standing in the doorway. Dressed in a scarlet silk saree, she sits on the stairs, hugging her faded plastic watering can. With her maroon lipstick, she is a sun-bleached dog with hopeful eyes, expecting its master to come back any minute. My wife and I take turns peeking at her through the curtain as we pack away our thin-walled house. She only gets up from beside her watering can and goes back inside when my neighbour comes back; his legs are squiggly. That night, I heard her fight with him about how the liquor had made his breath stink.

On Friday, our real estate agent drops by and asks us to vacate the house by Sunday so the repairs can be started. 

On Sunday morning, our butts are cold against our bare floors, and the curtain on our window now hangs in our new apartment. We sit beside the paper-thin wall, our hands folded into our laps in reverence.

As clockwork, it begins—their little dance of sounds. The rattling sound of her being choked, the rhythmic clunking of the knife against the cutting board, juice oozing out of the limp tomato chunks, him screaming—probably into her ears—demanding the tomatoes be sliced thinner. The louder he screams, the faster the knife clunks, the thinner must have been the slices of tomatoes—their language of love.

Maria (she/her) is a short fiction writer from Pakistan. Her works revolves around issues faced by women. Her works have appeared in south-Asian and international literary spaces, such as, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Tasavvurnama, Scribled.Online, and elsewhere. Some of her writings can be found on her Instagram and BlueSky as @sullenchaos. Website