Walls by Tim Fitts
Living in one of those fifteen-story domino type apartment buildings on the outskirts of
Cheongju, South Korea. When I went to bed at night, I could hear screams in the walls. All over
the apartment. I sometimes walked each floor, one end to the next, listening for reverberations
against the metal apartment doors, but nothing. No sound at all. Once back in bed, the screams
kicked up all over again. Men screaming, women screaming, children screaming, like a
collection of lost souls. I couldn’t tell if the screams resulted from shock, or were begging for
mercy, but the voices screamed with an urgency that was undeniable. I got out of bed one night
and took the elevator down to the security station, a glass box with a man in a uniform. The
guard asked why I was walking through the building. He spoke in broken English and pointed to
the CCTV monitor on the desk. I told the guard in Korean that I was trying to find the source of
people screaming.
“What?” The guard said. He told me you don’t hear the voices walking through the
building like that, demonstrating this with two fingers walking in the air. “Do this,” he said,
cupping his hand and placing his ear against the wall.
Tim Fitts is the author of two short story collections, Hypothermia (MadHat Press 2017), Go Home and Cry for Yourselves (Xavier Review Press 2017) and The Soju Club, which was published in Korea as a Korean translation. His short stories have appeared in journals such as Granta, The Gettysburg Review, The Baltimore Review, Shendoah, Bouleard, among many others. His new book is forthcoming with MadHat Press in 2025.
