creative ramblings & reverie

Wednesday, November 15, 2023

Salve Porta

 


The wonderful online journal, The Plentitudes, has again honored me by publishing a story in their Fall issue, “The Clarity”—this, all about doors and what they signified to Emmy Salas.

 

Doorways were fraught.  Portals to the unfathomable place where absence dwells.  The loneliest, most haunted spaces in the world.  They swallowed people whole.  Emmy had lived with a phobia of doors—entamaphobia—much of her life, having watched too many of her loved ones vanish through what Rilke in one of his Sonnets to Orpheus called “the inconsolable open door.”

 

Other elements in this story, “Salve Porta,” include Mesa Verde and Aztec Ruins, Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House, Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, and a black Skye terrier, Pautiwa, named for one of the Hopi sky gods.




 



 

Images:

Aztec doorways, photographer unknown

Gates of Heaven, Bali, photographer unknown

Pisa light, Christie Cochrell


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