Isocolon (i-so-co’-lon): A series of similarly structured elements having the same length. A kind of parallelism.
My life was on the line. My happy future was in question. The odds were going against me. My life was a ditch and I was stuck in it.
How did I go from care-free Jerry to horror Harry? It was Lego.
My mother had given me a set of “Classic Building Bricks” for my 9th birthday. I didn’t even know what they were until she told me. When I picked up my first block I became giddy and almost fell down. My mother turned into a talking seal, clapping her flippers like she’d just seen a great performance of Chinese dish spinners.
We’re Selkies, dear. The Lego brings you close to your heritage, when you hold that particular Lego you can see me for what I am. Put the Lego in your pocket. Hold it in your hand when you want to meet me as a seal. We can go swimming and making lots of noise barking down by the docks. When you are 12, you can be a seal .
I went crazy, rolling around on the floor and screaming. My mother turned back into my mother, sat me on her lap and told me “this is your heritage, you must live with it—you must accept that you are part seal.” So, I embraced it. My seal life was exciting. I could swim like a bolt of lightening, catch fish and hang out by the dock, barking.
Then, Sanford Ram’s tour boat chopped my mother in half when it was coming into the dock. It did not have the required propeller guard. I was horrified, sad, and more than anything, angry.
As a human, I got a job on Ram’s boat selling soft drinks. My plan was to become such a fixture, that I could board the boat at will—nobody would suspect anything. Finally, the time came. I had my battery-powered drill and drilled a bunch of holes in the boat’s hull. It started to sink. I ran up on deck and jumped onto the dock. Sanford was running down the dock yelling. He stopped and stripped off his clothes and became a seal and slid off the dock.
He jumped back onto the dock, put on his clothes and became human again. He couldn’t save the boat. He said, “I don’t blame you son. I killed your mother. It was stupid negligence. A long time ago your mother was my wife. You are our son.”
“Where were you all these years when I needed a father? Floating around on your stupid tourist boat, and eventually killing my mother!” He said he was sorry, but that didn’t calm my rage. I pulled out my fillet knife, pinched his cheek, and cut a piece off it. It made a profusely bleeding circle.
Somebody called an ambulance. The cut healed into a round scar. He never told anybody that it was me who scuttled his boat. I still hate him with a fury. Some days I want to harpoon him and push him off the dock. But I know that’s the highway to prison.
Now, I live with my aunt. I keep my “special” Lego on the bookshelf over my bed. I met a Selkie girl two weeks ago. We get along really well in both of our guises. Yesterday we played “High Seas Tag” and had a great time. Tomorrow we’re swimming out to the edge of the harbor to go shark taunting.
Maybe things are better than I thought they were, but eventually, I’m afraid I’m going to have to kill my father.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu)
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