Few of the words made any sense to him. They were just a jumble of black marks on the page, and eventually he gave up, dropped the book onto the floor, turned on his side and stared blankly at the back of the red leather sofa inches from his face. Unable to lie still, he turned on his back and shifted across the sofa so that his head was hanging off. From this vantage point he looked over at the stacks of books. For some reason, today, they had failed to work their magic on him. He looked up the rows and noticed that from this angle the amount of each row of books he could see got smaller and smaller as they stretched up to the top, and there all he could see was about an inch of book. He turned his head slightly to see a top row that was bound in a light-tan leather, and it occurred to him that each book top was like the knuckle of a vertebrae. He sat up, head reeling. He could see bones everywhere. He was living in a house of spines.
Abuse affects generation after generation, those who perpetrate it, those who are subject to it, and those who are tangentially exposed to it. Truth comes in many shades and, even if guilt shapes our lives, we often dare not be truthful even with ourselves creating, in the process, vulnerabilities which the unscrupulous exploit. There are, after all, no depths which greed hesitates to stoop to, and it is rarely called to account.