Brooklyn is both a specific domestic setting and the frame for a small, hard-won discovery: during several months there at age twenty-four, Cheryl Strayed / Sugar and Cheryl Strayed’s first husband hear a faint sound in their apartment walls, then tear open the closet ceiling and find two emaciated kittens. The episode unfolds amid isolation and uncertainty, making the building’s hidden spaces a literal source of a sound that the narrator initially understands through her own troubled inner life.

Apartment and daily life

Cheryl Strayed / Sugar recalls sharing an apartment with Cheryl Strayed’s first husband in a building that was mostly empty, despite containing many apartments. The reason for the vacancies was never clear to her. A bodega occupied the space below them; a couple above them had raging fights in the middle of the night. The building’s vertical arrangement offered both everyday proximity and a peculiar sense of vacancy: neighbors could be heard, but most of the apartments seemed unoccupied.

Their routines gave the apartment a different kind of emptiness. Cheryl Strayed / Sugar spent her days alone there, writing, while Cheryl Strayed’s first husband worked as an assistant to a rich friend. In the evenings, she worked as a waitress. The story gives these circumstances plainly rather than explaining what they meant to the couple; the contrast between solitary writing, paid work, and the building’s largely uninhabited interior supplies the scene’s material setting.

A sound inside the walls

One night, after she returned from work, Cheryl Strayed’s first husband asked whether she had heard anything strange behind the walls. He had heard something earlier and wondered whether she had heard it during the day. She had not. The following day, however, she heard a sound coming first from behind a wall and then from the ceiling. It seemed alternately close and distant before disappearing, and she could not identify its source.

The sound was faint enough to seem almost unreal, like a discreet baby’s cry. Its delicacy did not make it comforting: she describes it as awful, while also allowing that it might have been nothing or might have come from her. The uncertainty matters because she connects the sound to the expression of her own insides whenever she thought about her life, the need to change it, and how impossible that change seemed. Brooklyn’s walls thus become more than background architecture in the recollection: the hidden noise gives an audible form to an inward distress, without initially revealing whether the cause is external or internal.

That ambiguity persists after she tells her husband she has heard it too. He touches the wall, finds nothing there, and suggests they may be imagining things; she agrees. But agreement does not settle the matter. The sound keeps coming and going through December, difficult to define or reach. Its recurrence makes the building’s concealed spaces an increasingly tangible mystery, while the couple remains unable to locate or explain what they hear.

Christmas and New Year’s Day

Christmas finds the couple alone in Brooklyn. Cheryl Strayed’s first husband has received a bonus from his friend, and they spend some of it on tickets to Mozart’s The Magic Flute, sitting far back in the opera house. The evening offers an interval in the same month of inexplicable sounds, but the noise follows them in memory: on the subway ride home, Cheryl Strayed / Sugar says that she keeps hearing the sound behind the walls, and her husband tells her he hears it too. The shared perception changes the episode from a private suspicion into a mystery they are experiencing together.

On New Year’s Day, they wake at seven to a yowling. This time the sound is unmistakable and comes from the ceiling of their closet. Cheryl Strayed’s first husband immediately takes a hammer and uses its claw end to break into the plaster. Chalky chunks fall over their clothes as he removes almost the entire closet ceiling in less than ten minutes. They do not care that they are damaging the apartment; getting to the source of the sound has become more urgent. When the noise stops during the pounding and the ceiling is gone, they fall silent and look into the building’s dark interior.

The hidden occupants

For a moment, the opening seems to contain nothing. Then two kittens appear at its jagged edge and peer down at the couple. The explanation for the weeks of intermittent sound is no longer imaginary or inaccessible: the noise has led them to living creatures trapped or hidden in the building’s overhead space. Their appearance turns a search through plaster and darkness into an encounter with vulnerable animals.

The kittens are emaciated, visibly shaking, and covered in soot, spiderwebs, and black grease; their eyes appear enormous and bright. Their condition makes the discovery more than the resolution of an eerie sound. The building’s neglected, mostly empty interior has concealed two creatures in severe distress, and the couple’s decision to keep breaking through the ceiling has brought them into view. One kitten meows, and the other wails. The account ends with their voices now identifiable as the sound that had been passing through the apartment’s walls and ceiling.

Brooklyn’s narrative significance lies in this movement from uncertain hearing to direct encounter. At first the sound can be mistaken for an echo of the narrator’s own unease; the husband’s corroboration establishes that it is shared, and the opening in the closet ceiling finally reveals its source. The building’s hidden space gives the scene its suspense, while the kittens’ appearance shifts its emotional weight from fear and uncertainty to recognition of an immediate need. The episode remains closely tied to a particular apartment, a December of recurring noises, and the decisive New Year’s morning when the couple acts on what they hear.