Sotto Voce - a short story

           

1.         The tunnel was gaping, labial, and J. came across it quite by accident.  He was playing with a little toy car, and it slid beneath the crack of a utility closet door.  When he opened it, it groaned as if aggrieved; it heaved as if old age had worn away its ligaments and tendons and raw bone scuttled across raw bone.

            The utility closet was bare but for a menacing, overhanging pipe, thick as a lingam, jutting down with pale flecked minerals, like an accumulated layer of semen.  Water dripped from the end of the pipe reluctantly, the drop of water hanging for a moment at the lowest end of the lingam, as if sensing its doom.  It elongated, like a drawn out tear stretching to an ever diminishing tail, and then fell to the floor below.

            And it was then that J. saw the hole  composed of two symmetrical slits, the opening which was the gateway to its core,  jealously guarded by the tensile strength of two lips.  He could see nothing but a line of frothy mucous, the color of churned milk on the upper part of the maw, like a high water mark on a distempered wall, and the vinous, red wall of the inner labia, sealed tight, guarding the secret within.

            Then the ruddy drip of water from the pipe above fell, landing in the secret core,  in the very center of the hidden cleft of the hole.  The lips quivered slightly as if to say a word, and then fell silent.  J. quickly closed the door.