The Hole in the Floor

There’s a hole in the floor. I don’t know where it goes.

Let me explain. The first story of this apartment complex (charmingly labeled “-1”on the elevator keypad) is a parking garage. Along with all the requisite dust and strange smells, it has, about ten meters from the stairs, a hole in the floor.

It’s about as big around as the average fist, roughly round. And it’s just there. The temptation, of course, is to drop things into it and wait to hear when they hit bottom, but that might awaken whatever is sleeping down there, and we certainly don’t want that.

(The hole in the floor has apparently already pulled some long-forgotten childhood paranoia out of hibernation, along with a few fractured lines from a Shel Silverstein poem I didn’t know I’d remembered about sidewalks ending; who knows what else could be disturbed from slumber?)

I step very quietly when I walk by.