Sotto Voce V

5.         J. assiduously avoided the utility closet.  He knew the world was inhabited by gnomes, detached, broken souls, fairies, malevolent and indistinct forms, and imagined that the hole, with is aperture as tight as a rosebud, was the seal which trapped these ill-humors in some terminal limbo.   

            Or maybe yet, he thought, it was a gateway to some plague strewn chamber.  The apartment block sat on the site of an old nunnery, when this part of the city was open country, and perhaps those black shrouded forms discarded their venally begotten offspring down this auspiciously placed shaft.  In there, a cascade of broken and porous bones; of fissured skulls; of pinky bones as small as a snail’s shell, and femurs as long as a broken piece of hay.

            So J. played as far away from the door as possible, near the washer and dryer and the hillock of unfolded laundry.  But the door rattled in its casement.  Something inside whispered words of false endearment to him, comforting words designed to dissemble his resistance