Hysteron Proteron (his’-ter-on pro’-ter-on): Disorder of time. (What should be first, isn’t.).
The wall clock that was my great-grandfather’s goes “tok-tick,” not “tick-tok.” Otherwise, it keeps good time, but it was driving me nuts. I’d had it for a year and I wanted to burn it in the fireplace. I took it down off the wall and looked at it carefully, turning it over. It had an almost invisible little door on the back that was secured shut by what looked like a very small paper clip latch.
Suddenly, I could feel tapping coming from inside the clock. I pushed the latch up and the door flew open. A carved wooden bird shot out of the door and landed on the end of my nose. Although the clock was not a cuckoo clock, the bird perched on my nose was clearly a cuckoo bird straight from some Black Forest cuckoo clock factory.
As soon as I released the cuckoo bird from inside the clock, things got weird. The sun came up at night and went down in the morning! People got dressed instead of undressed! People backed up when they drove instead of going forward. People walked backwards in the grocery store, wrestling with their shopping carts and bumping into displays and knocking things over as soon as the stock boys had put them back up.
It was a disaster and it was all my fault. I walked backwards rapidly all the way home. I was going to remedy what I’d done, or die trying. I got home. When I opened the front door the little cuckoo, crying “cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo” flew at me and embedded itself in my eye. It hurt like hell, but I pulled the cuckoo bird out of my eye, and squeezing it tight, ran to the kitchen, stuffed it back into the clock and locked the little door.
I went to the emergency room and they couldn’t save my eye. But, I had saved the world! Everything is back to normal, except my clock still goes “tok-tick.” When people come over to visit, they tell me the clock sounds normal. That’s when they start looking like giant wooden cuckoo birds pecking around my apartment going “koocuck” to ridicule me. If they weren’t my friends, I’d kill them all with charcoal fire starter and a blowtorch.
Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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