Harboured Resentment
By Mary Senier
The neighbours are having a party again. I can’t tolerate the underwater thrum of bawdy laughter and bad dance music beating through the walls. I’ve complained to the landlord on three separate occasions, but the news of my chronic insomnia and aversion to social behaviour seems only to spur these bastards on. Heavy, bitter hatred settles like a black cloud in the pit of my stomach at the sounds of drunken friendship and later, casual sex. There is a unique humiliation found in hearing the room adjacent to mine compose its own shit symphony of screeching bedsprings, thumping headboard and shaky vocals. Fortunately, I am saved from the shame of the chorus by my phone screen’s welcome flare. Ten minutes.
Fleeing the flat with a coat flung over pyjamas and an insolent slam of the shared front door, I feel instantly lighter. The blackness in my gut seems funnelled from my lips in a sharp sigh of relief, settling instead over my surroundings as the quavering image of a town at night plants itself in my vision. Someone has chalked a hopscotch over concrete and a smudging wind scatters squares like stardust. A hotchpotch string of houses hang like paper dolls in unkept gardens, their precarious structures of primary colours reminiscent of a child’s wax crayon. Aberystwyth is pocket-sized, an envelope of urban living opening on the wide grey scroll of the sea; walking anywhere here is an exercise of minutes and the streets soon pave way to the riverbank’s river of grass. The marina’s wet black shape yawns into being; a shadowy suggestion of herself.
I take a beat to appreciate the bony boats straggling gummy darkness like rotten, lingering teeth; the lapping of ripples slipping their silver through rigging knots softly slapping the dock; and the distant scream of geese hitching their feathers upriver. This is my peaceful place. A glance at my phone sees the word here gleam like salvation—but I can’t see him. He must be on the other side. I retrace my steps, hurrying along the stone hump of the little bridge with its old-fashioned lampposts, cranium bulbs swimming like anglerfish out of the gloom. On the dock, the startled shade of a cat melts into the sanctuary of a yacht’s blue shape. I breathe deep. A sweetness on the breeze betrays a figure smoking weed below the wavering belly of a hull’s silhouette; his grey hood cupping the absence of a face that sparks into existence every time he takes a drag and is dragged back into darkness with each murky exhale. My heart quickens as we exchange alrights and a twenty in my fist trades places with a sliver of plastic in his. He doesn’t stick around, fading fast into the distance, swallowed by a nook of night.
Rolling is easy enough, and I don’t see the point in relocating without a soul in sight to care. Allowing myself the calm of lying back on cool damp planks—left hand drifting lazily in the gullet of briny water gargled between dock and boat, right hand lifting the joint to and from my lips with comparable laziness—I wonder if boats ever hate their neighbours. Do they find themselves groaning at the incessance of next door’s creaking bows? Or envying the love gifted their neighbours by their captains—that kind of care and attention a tragically alien concept? Probably not. I’m painfully aware I don’t want to go home. When one joint ends, I roll another and keep on in this way until the stars swim above me, bobbing like ships on an opaque sea. I imagine my own face illuminating intermittently like the flicking of a light switch, a cat’s eye momentarily ignited by a wash of amber headlights. Maybe I’ll float here indefinitely. Suspended over water. Serene in salty gloam.
Mary Senier (she/her) is a writer from the Black Country and an Assistant Editor for Sledgehammer Lit. Her work can be found in Ample Remains, The Madrigal, The Alchemy Spoon and various other mags and journals. She is on Twitter @MarySenier.