The Sentence by Elaine Chiew

They're at it again. The walls reverberate because they are thin. The shifting of the metal bed-legs across the wooden floor sounds like pig-screeches. Her cries - like a chicken being led to slaughter. The man makes no sound at all.
    They moved in three nights ago, and the smell of hot fries swirls through the cracks of my door and through the wall. That same night, I hear them assembling the metal-bed, his treads back and forth like the scuffle of mice along the drainboard in my kitchen. Soon after the bed is assembled, I hear her shout Hallelujah! Soon after the Hallelujah, the slaughter-dance begins. Such hot cries - it makes me set down my Harlequin romance as the parody it is, and go to the kitchen to retrieve a knife. I hold this against my throat in the dark, I hold it there, breathing and still as suspended vapor.
    They are at it every night. Then, they scuffle or wrestle on the floor. I hear her squelched laughter, the bulk of his body thudding along the boards, the rolling against my wall, and my bed is stationed just against it. I go to the kitchen and retrieve a glass. I hold it against the wall and hear everything. The nips, the whispers, the hot sounds of lips grinding teeth, muscle and skin rasping together, clothes shushing the floor in a conspiracy.
    The trickle of her pee, the flush of their water-pipes, the settle of their bed, their whispered "Love you"s, so offhand, like saying Hello, Good night, take care!
    And that's when I decide to break up with Darby McFadden. I don't have to give him any reason, but I know that sentence - they are at it again - it's a kind of sentence, a sentence that beguiles you, implying history, implying a future, implying a decision. They will always be at it. That kind of sentencing can drive you up the wall.
    I come back from work and hear the squeaks of bedsprings, the moans and yips and sighs and bumping. There's a funky metallic smell in my bedroom, next to theirs. It enrages me that they've turned their bedroom into a boudoir reeking of wet squirrel.
    The thing about breaking up with somebody is that you can't pussyfoot around. You can't hem and haw. At first Darby couldn't seem to accept what I'd just said, sitting across from me at a Thai place, a bowl of swimming lotus buds the median point between us. I watch him watch the shapes my lips make enunciating our break-up, and he scratches his buzzcut and tilts his head, to present me with the whorl of his ear. I notice there's some grit caught in the bottom rim.
    "What kind of person breaks up with you after eight years?" he says.
    "What kind of person never washes their ears?"
    He stares. "You didn't want to get married, remember? You said you weren't the kind to get commitment." I was upset that he could parrot back the words I'd used so long ago. "Get commitment" was a phrase I coined back then that I was proud of - getting commitment was like catching a disease. I'd forgotten I used to be proud of that.
    "I still don't." Not to you.
    "So what's the problem then?"
    I tell him about my noisome neighbors. How they can't stop jumping each other's bones. The smells infiltrating my apartment from theirs, like pungent ethnic cooking.
    "It's the smell of their sex grinding against each other," I say.
    Darby exhales. "Jesus!"
    "You can pick up your things whenever you want."
    "You're a real cold bitch," he says.
    "I can live with that."
    When I get home, carrying two Chinese take-out boxes containing our Thai leftovers, my neighbors are at it again. As well as Bolero, the strains of it melting like chocolate into the dense milkiness of my walls, thickening the air, condensing the moisture.
    I leap onto my bed and take down the picture on top of my bedstead - a black and white of a little boy kissing a girl, an umbrella fallen at their feet. I hammer on the walls with bare knuckles. "Stop that noise! You crazy ferrets! Do you think it's healthy what you're doing?"
    The sighs and ululations stop. There is pronounced silence from the other side. I press my ear to the wall. No whispers, no foot withdrawn, no giggle, nothing at all. One of them has pressed the Stop button on the CD. The suspended note of Bolero midstream is a ghost-echo in my ear. They are listening too.

About the author:
Elaine Chiew lives in London, England. Her work has most recently won First Prize in the Bridport International Short Story Competition, and also appeared in the following anthologies: See You Next Tuesday: The Second Coming(Better Non Sequitur Media), Best of the Web 2008 (Dzanc Books), Hobart (the Games Issue), Alimentum (Issue 6) and a number of online publications such as Wigleaf, Night Train, et. al. She blogs at www.elainepchiew.blogspot.com.