Period

Period: The periodic sentence, characterized by the suspension of the completion of sense until its end. This has been more possible and favored in Greek and Latin, languages already favoring the end position for the verb, but has been approximated in uninflected languages such as English. [This figure may also engender surprise or suspense–consequences of what Kenneth Burke views as ‘appeals’ of information.

Because of the openness, trust, common ground, and money, we were friends. I was a little ashamed of the money part. Normally, it wouldn’t be a part of friendship, but we were both in the laundry business, and I don’t mean washing clothes. Instead, we filtered truckloads of cash from bad to good. We own a chain of burger joints, two amusement parks, a bar, and 25 apple orchards. The apple orchards are the best. It is easy to blend dirty cash into the orchards’ harvest: there’s no way to track apples— they grow on trees! We “sell” thousands, and that’s that. Our investors collect their cash and we collect a percentage.

If you ever considered being a successful criminal, money laundering is the way to go. Just think, somebody gives you pile of illegally obtained cash! You stack it up in a storage locker and slowly shove it into your legitimate business, that turns it out at the other end as clean as can be. The only downside is if somebody not connected finds out what you’re doing, you have to kill them. So far, we’ve killed four people. The hardest was my daughter’s fourth grade teacher, Bonnie. I was having an affair with her.

I had to go to the storage locker one afternoon. I told Bonnie to stay in the car. Instead, after I got into the storage locker, she jumped out of the car and peeked inside. She saw about $1,000,000 in cash piled against the wall and asked me “where the hell” it came from. I told her I didn’t know, that I was as surprised as she was— a pretty feeble attempt at lying. The next day we went for a walk along Devil’s Gorge. I pushed Bonnie off a cliff. It was sad. If only she had stayed in the car.

Oh well, now I had to find a new girlfriend. There was a pole dancer at one of our “laundromats” that seemed like she liked me—she stared at me when she climbed the pole as part of her routine. I hoped she would get along with my daughter. I was going to give her a try. Maybe we’d fall in love.

Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu). Bracketed text inserted by Gorgias.

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