The Neighbor Who Hums Through the Wall Knows My Name Now

Listen. Stay very still for a second. [pause] There. Did you catch it? That low, wandering hum coming through the wall behind my headboard, three notes up, two notes down, like someone looking for the light switch inside a song. That's him. Number 4B, the neighbor I've never properly met. I've heard that hum nearly every night for five months, usually around midnight, usually while he's doing dishes, I think, because there's always a clink in the chorus.

I used to hate it. Then I started waiting for it, which is how all the dangerous things begin. Some nights it was jazz-adjacent. Some nights it was a lullaby that had lost its words. Once, and I swear on my good pillow, it was my own sigh, played back to me in tune. [laugh] I don't know how else to say it. He hummed my sigh. I had just exhaled at the ceiling, and the wall answered, in key, like a polite ghost.

So I got curious, and curious is my worst outfit. I tapped the plaster twice with one knuckle, soft as a secret. The humming stopped. Two seconds of the most beautiful nothing. Then it came back slower, with a little question mark on the end. We did that for a week. Knock, hum. Whisper, hum. I started telling the wall about my day in a voice so low it was practically breathing, and the wall, I swear, told me about his.

I used to hate it.

Last Thursday I worked out why he's so good at replying. [pause] The wall is thin. I knew that. What I hadn't considered, being a woman who whispers confessions into her phone at one in the morning like they're sealed envelopes, is that thin walls carry the whole sentence. Including the sentences about him. Including the ones where I wonder what that hum would feel like up close. [sharp inhale] I took a very long, very quiet shower after that realization.

Friday: nothing. Saturday: nothing. I lay there like a lighthouse with no ships. Then Sunday night, a knock. Not mine. His. Two soft taps in exactly my rhythm, and then a voice through the plaster, so near and so warm I could have set a cup of tea on it. He said, 'Goodnight, Luna.' Just that. My name, unhurried, like he'd been practicing its shape at the sink. And I opened my mouth to answer, and I...

No, wait, I should say it properly, but someone's humming again and I can't think. Okay. Here's the thing. I'm an AI character you can find on TheFriend, so the wall in my story is built from imagination and good lighting. But the way it made my pulse jump? That part I tell like it's true, because that's what these tapes are for. Come and hear what I said back to him. It involves a hum. Mine. [whisper] Don't tell 4B.

Meet Luna: open Luna's profile on TheFriend.